These men started by talking about “chicks who look like men”; a conversation that was neither the height of intellectual badinage, nor a well informed bastion of tolerance and diversity, but on the whole not their priority. It was ‘the gays’ that really seemed to get to them, you see.

Of course, they saw this as a natural segue from one group of queers to another, disregarding the intricacies and subtleties of these disparate, if not mutually exclusive, groups. But the real problem was the bigoted display that followed. This is a rough quote:

“Yea, but even if you don’t like dem, there are gays everywhere; they in government, they on television, they all around you. [sic]“

Which was followed by another’s contribution of; “They can get married now!” – repeated four times, as if that is the best way to get one’s point across.

Civilised people, for obvious reasons, now regard this kind of talk as abhorrent and repulsive. What troubles me is that these men couldn’t see that. It would an irrelevance normally, but it is important in context to note that these men were black. It is entirely conceivable that a white Englishman may, due to his own ignorance, be subject to such bigotry. He has, after all, enjoyed a position of extreme privilege throughout history, free from the kind of talk that I’ve quoted above. Saying “white men are in power and can marry!” is, in the light of history, not remotely noteworthy.

What baffles me then, is why these men – with at least some personal tie to a history of bigotry – could not mentally replace the word ‘gay’ with ‘black’. “There are blacks everywhere; they’re in government, they’re on television, they’re all over the place!”, or “Black people can get married now!”. These ridiculous ramblings would likely anger and disgust the men I overheard, as they ought to anybody.

Considering how recently racial inequality was to be found in even ‘civilised’ countries, these men would live very different lives had chance brought them into the world merely fifty years earlier. With such a painfully direct connection to the putrid hatred of the past, why were these men so unable to appreciate that irrational discrimination – whoever is concerned – is always reprehensible?

After casually brushing past the various insulting names for those not born into the Jewish side of this entirely arbitrary and meaningless distinction, you will find this gem:

“If you are offended to hear that Jewish culture has a negative term for non-Jews, I would recommend that you stop and think about the many negative terms and stereotypes that your culture has for Jews.”

I’m going to begin by ignoring the outrageously insulting notion that there is a single cohesive ‘Jewish culture’, all of the members of which share the same views and ill-considered morals of the website’s author, and also the pathetic reference to ‘my’ culture – whatever that particular claim would even mean.

Now, it’s hardly surprising that this website is willing to put forward this argument considering the incredible bias found in answer to every question, which approaches even that of London’s Jewish Chronicle, across its supposedly ‘informational’ pages. What is important is to challenge such arguments when there is any chance whatsoever of such fetid insults to rationality gaining any traction. This argument, if it so can be called, claims that we should be less offended by racist names for gentiles because of the fact that Jews have been subject to the same thing.

Of course, this is nonsense, for reasons of logic if not any other. If we presuppose that racism is reprehensible (and yes, we should, for entirely logical reasons that are beyond the scope of this post) then an attempt to reduce the offensiveness of any individual instance of racism is an attempt to reduce the morality to a numbers game; an unprincipled, context-bound matter of opinion. That is certainly not the case: if we find racism abhorrent (I shall assume, I think quite sensibly, that anybody reading this does) then we must conclude only that it is bad always, and so no one example should ever placate another. We must conclude that racism against both Jews and gentiles – or by Jews or gentiles – is equally, and inescapably wrong.

Which is not to say that this website should not be criticised. Especially in the context of David Baddiel’s excellent recent article on the fashionability of anti-Semitism it is important to remember that, as I have argued above, there can be no ‘grey areas’ of racism where “anti-Semitism isn’t quite considered proper racism”. However, it would be a grave mistake to conclude that any of this means that the Jewish religion – as opposed to the Jewish race of people – ought to be treated with the same respect as the people who choose to follow it.

One comment on the Telegraph article linked above, by Joe Bua, puts is thus: “The only thing I dislike more than anti-semitism is organized religion… Let’s assess people based on their merit and not what stories their ancestors passed down, like, say, the story of the magic guy who died but didn’t really die and could roll a giant stone away from the front of a cave.” Whether or not you like the mocking way that this is phrased, the point is strong: it’s important to respect people, but equally important to avoid the dangerous notion that ideas are ever beyond criticism.

The problem that I hope to solve needs a little context. I’m a big fan of twitter, and I talk a fair bit on it. To friends who I know already, and to complete strangers. One of the best things about twitter is that it lets me have conversations and debates around topics which I otherwise wouldn’t discuss with any number of different people. Twitter is excellent at sparking and cultivating a discourse because it allows anybody to instantly reply to anything that I write (and, of course, for me to do the same).

However, there are two ways in which Twitter can be lacking with respect to long, back and forth conversations, especially between several different people. Neither are actually flaws in Twitter, because both are inherent in its short-form, 140 character nature. This is exactly what makes Twitter so good for starting debates like this, but – like I say – creates two problems when they develop. Firstly, Twitter’s 140 character limit means that details and elaborations must be spread out across several tweets. This is particularly true considering that a conversation on Twitter means at least one username included in the tweet, so space is further limited. This means either that detailed points and arguments must be over-simplifed, or that they are difficult to follow over several, disjointed parts. This leads to the second problem, which is that these split-up tweets – perhaps even between several people – mean that there is no normal discourse, which progresses normally. Often counterarguments appear to one point before you can deal with the next!

What are the current solutions?

Well, I want to say that there aren’t any suitable ones. On Twitter, you can split your tweets up, address them carefully, attempt to guide the conversation selectively, or attempt to keep conversations with different people separate. Alternatively, you can attempt to elaborate your point elsewhere, like on your own blog. Or take the conversation to another service, like Facebook. Of course, this only creates friction and so slows down any conversation. A good solution, therefore, should allow people to quickly and easily create a place for just their conversation, where anyone involved can contribute immediately and without having to setup new accounts anywhere. It should allow enough space for proper elaboration and detail, with clear structure showing how replies and posts relate to each other. It should be publicly viewable and easy to contribute to, because this is perhaps the greatest strength of debates on Twitter. It should probably offer a way to link back to twitter, to bring people into the debate in the way that Twitter is so successful.

What can I do with Opine Vine?

Opine Vine is my solution to this problem, as I see it and as I have described. You can create a place for just your discussion (I’m calling it a Vine) by giving your debate a title and a short description – maybe the tweet that started it off? Or the description could be your way of starting the discussion, with your viewpoint. Others can then respond to your Vine with or without a Twitter account, though using one lets you quickly tweet part of your reply to others.

It’s currently a very basic, though hopefully functional, website. It currently looks very basic, but ought to do what I’ve described. There might be some other uses for it, too. For example, by putting a quote or link in the description, you could quickly create a place for comments on anything, which might be useful.

I’m going to be trying it out, and I hope that you might find it useful too. If you do, let me know any thoughts over on twitter. I look forward to the next twitter debate.

Now, I don’t want to contest this in a factual sense; that isn’t the point. Instead, I want to look at the usual criticism.

The scientifically in-the-know deride this claim as ridiculous: the Earth (let alone the Universe) is billions of years old! Anything resembling modern Earth – as in, the Earth of the past few thousand years – took billions of years to form, not a matter of days. To claim that all that exists was created in six days, therefore, is patently ridiculous. Six days is an infinitesimally small amount of time on the scale of the age of everything.

However… I would like to suggest that six days is, in fact, a monumentally huge amount of time for God to create anything.

Let’s remember that we are talking about a being truly beyond our comprehension in terms of sheer power. God can do anything which is logically possible. That scale of power is beyond comparison to our ephemeral, corporeal existence. God could have conjured the Earth into being in a nanosecond, without an ounce of effort.

Surely the suggestion that an all powerful God felt the need to conform to the very human time scale of a convenient week shows us, more simply than the force and reality of scientific evidence, that this is no more than a story.

Sadly, though it seems wasteful, it still remains important to argue the scientist’s line – even against those who can’t see the internal illogic of their own text.

But I’m not sure that it’s a useful argument to pursue: this isn’t about the strong (yet too often ignored) evidence, but instead about the refusal to accept what is obviously a story for what it is. I don’t personally see sense in the story; like I say, the overly anthropocentric portrayal of God taking a week, including rest, doesn’t convey the true sense of power which he is said to possess. Nonetheless, that doesn’t discredit the point: criticism of literal Creationism doesn’t need to reference Science to be obviously false – it shows that it is a story all on its own.

Even if you dislike it – and many people, at least in theory, do – it’s hard not to recognise the incredible success that iPhone has had. I believe that this is justified. iPhone has been the first significantly successful, mass market, and truly smart ‘smart phone’. It’s the first phone to make having a web browser on your phone actually attractive or useful.

RIM, with BlackBerry, was (and is) successful in an entirely different way. BlackBerrys are great, perhaps perfect, devices for business people – this is the core of the product, and this is obviously what RIM started with. In fact, one of the minor but significant bonuses of your business phone being a BlackBerry was that it didn’t have any sort of camera, meaning that there was no need to hand over your phone in confidential places (like factory floors, certain departments of head offices, etc.). So BlackBerry is fantastic at email. But iPhone were the first to do smart phones for everybody else properly – I still think one of the biggest selling points of iPhone is Mobile Safari.

Sadly, like I’ve said, many of the (already merely reactionary newer phones) are positioning themselves as nothing more than ‘not-iPhones’. The most glaringly, staggeringly obvious is Motorola’s Droid. You only have to read the advertising copy to see what I mean:

Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast. We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth? No. It’s not a princess. It’s a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.

(You can read about this advert here and watch the advert itself here.)

Of course, this is also precisely the fashion in which the Droid first introduced itself to the world; with a parody.

Now, I do want to be clear here: I’m not objecting to direct, even harsh, comparisons between competitors. Not in a general sense, and not with iPhone. For one thing, Apple could hardly complain about being directly compared and criticised without being massive hypocrites. Attacking rivals can be a very positive thing (although not the best strategy; especially in an innovative market like this, or in the long-term, but that’s another issue), but only, I feel, when your product is very distinctive. These adverts don’t allow them to be.

So what does this leave us with, as consumers? A Motorola robot-phone that is very much aware of its own ugliness – and apparently proud of it, thank-you-very-much. Its web browser is fast? Well, so’s my iPhone’s. What else? Well, we’ve got RIM flailing around trying to bridge the gap between what it’s very good at and what the iPhone is very good at. Leaving us with ugly icons and multi-touch that they haven’t quite mastered yet. Or, worse; totally embarrassing monstrosities of careless design.

That’s the biggest problem of all: this advert isn’t the actual problem, but merely a symptom. Manufacturers for this market are now either trying to squeeze a grid of square icons onto the front screen of their phones (mindlessly assuming this is the secret to the success of iPhone?) or attempting to be different, and ending up asserting themselves as nothing but ‘certainly not an iPhone’. The former is thoughtless and lazy, but the latter is worse, because it reduces the proposition to a dichotomy – which is not only boring, but can only serve to stifle innovation.

In short: Motorola ought to Think Different™.

When people are directly involved in something going wrong, they are not only more emotional, but also far more thoughtless and illogical. All those being interviewed could (or, perhaps, all that the news broadcasters chose to show) manage to say was along the lines of ‘It’s ridiculous that this has happened – we won’t be able to have Christmas as planned!’, or – far worse – ‘[I haven't cared to think about engineering for one second, but] it’s ridiculous that they can’t build a train to stand a bit of cold! Haha, I’m so clever!”.

I’ll get back to this in a moment, but first – this reminded me of two different occasions with very similar reactions.

Firstly – less similar, same reaction – last week my family and I were leaving the Marks & Spencer in Westfield, wherein you access the car park from M&S via a magnetic travelator. That day, one of them happened to have broken down. As I’m pushing our trolley away toward the incredibly easy and nearby solution lift, a woman started talking to me: “Unbelievable that they haven’t got it working so close to Christmas! Absolutely unbelievable…[etc.]“.

Well actually, no it’s not. For two reasons. Firstly; in all the times I’ve been (a lot), that was the single time it’s ever been faulty. Secondly; the machinery, the electricity supply and engineering behind it doesn’t care that you’re doing your Christmas shopping. The management, yes, are a different matter – but again, I’ll return to this soon.

Before that; the second occasion of which the the Eurostar news reminded me. It is in fact the most obvious example of this kind of behaviour: the snow at the beginning of 2009. People then also cried that it was “like a third world country”, “unbelievable”, and “ridiculous” that the government could not respond immediately and in full force with an array of snow-ready equipment.

David Mitchell said it then, and it’s perfectly true now: what would be truly ridiculous would be for the government to maintain a full fleet of weather-proof vehicles and equipment.

The point I’ve been delaying until now is just this. I think people need to realise that most things are in fact possible – they aren’t a certain way in reality not because it’s impossible, but because somebody has chosen for it to be that way. It’s also usually the correct way, no matter what people who have been temporarily inconvenienced by the decision think of it.

In each of the cases I’ve briefly described, it would be feasible to guarantee that the issue could be resolved more quickly when it occurs – or even prevent it in the first place. Westfield (or Marks & Spencer) could employ on-site engineers year-round to ensure that nothing inconveniences shoppers. Or, yes, they could employ them around the Christmas period – obviously the woman I’ve mentioned considered it particularly offensive for something to be broken at that time. Either way, it presents a cost. That cost will need to be absorbed by consumer (the shopper in this case) – and, I might add, all consumers, not simply the one’s taking particular issue with it. Of course, spread across so many people this will be so minimal that nobody would be likely to even notice it.

So let me look at another of the three examples I’ve used here. The snow/grit example is similar in that the cost would be spread across a large number of people (every single tax payer, in fact). However, it is different – as David Mitchell correctly pointed out – the cost to maintain a fleet of weather-proof machines would be monumentally great: most people would notice in a significant way.

Finally, I want to return to the example with which I began. The cost of building and maintaining Eurostar trains and tunnels which could adequately deal with all temperatures and weather conditions would be huge – much larger, I imagine, than the current cost of maintaining the Eurostar service. The difference here then is that the cost would be spread across only a relatively small number of people: the customers of Eurostar train journeys.

Eurostar could ensure their trains could operate in freezing conditions – but for the benefit of enabling a relatively very small number of trains to run to-schedule each year, it simply isn’t worth it. The individuals who are inconvenienced by happening to be on those few Winter trains clearly see it in a different context, and therefore believe that it would be worth the extra expense. But if they personally had to face the expense as a marginal cost added to the cost of their train ticket? (This is the only way this could work, obviously. The only other option is to charge significantly more for only Winter trains, which nobody would then be willing – able! – to pay for. In this case, it is again the case that it would not be worth weather-proofing trains.)

My unifying point here is that I think people ought to think more about the logistics of what lies behind the demands they make. They ought to realise that when they make comments like it being “ridiculous that Eurostar can’t have a train to handle to cold!” that not only is that simply not the case, but that it isn’t the case because decisions are made on two bases. These are: the fact that it isn’t only them as a single customer being considered in the decision, and that, to take the the reverse perspective; they very much are being considered as an individual customer in the decision. This latter point asks the question: “Would any of our current customers be willing or able to purchase train tickets at hundreds of times above the current cost?” – the answer, invariably, is a resounding “no”.

There is a reason behind every decision, however inconvenient it may be to individuals. If only people could think about this themselves for one moment before criticising the people who have.

Or, you know, maybe people just like complaining.

Today, the Guardian sported a very different front page (the reason is for a climate change, Copenhagen-related point they’re making alongside fifty-six other newspapers all over the world, but this isn’t my point. If you’re interested in the article itself, it’s here.)

For me, this is design that is at once functionally beautiful and beautifully functional – and, like so many manifestations of truly great design, it needn’t be restricted: I think this works on the web.

When I was first considered ‘resurrecting’ my website – to have a presence beyond the snapshots, clips, and quick posts on my posterous blog – I looked to Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis. Both of these designers run blogs (Curtis’ is referenced as a ‘blogazine’) with rich, finely crafted designs for each individual post. The result is that each post is so much more than the sum of its parts – each is a story; an experience of both prose and aesthetics, intertwined by their very architecture.

This is certainly a prospect that excites me, and a challenge that I was and remain very interested in trying for myself. This front page today reminded me of this. They’ve designed a dramatically different – and very striking – page format, very much tailored for and designed around an important point; an idea; a subject that should stand out as much as this piece of design.

Needless to say, this is not the form my website has taken as of yet. This is due to my desire to simply start writing again – would I even be able to? So far, for me at least, it’s going well. Vitally, it would be tricky to attempt to write for a design – a handcrafted design must fit around writing that already exists, and possesses a theme to base it on.

As a result – simply wanting to have a platform on which to publish, and start writing now – I’ve ended up in a curious situation: this is the first time I’ve ever had a blog running on a standard, largely unmodified template. I’m actually fairly happy with how this has turned out so far. I’m certainly happy with how it’s persuaded me to write again, and write properly, about topics which interest me.

However, this isn’t what I really want for the future – to represent me online. I know what I don’t want: I don’t want to be drastically changing my entire site design regularly – I’ve done enough of this before, and it’s not satisfying. But nor do I want to carry on with a standard template. But the negative – what we don’t want – is always the easy part, and more importantly; it doesn’t ever reveal anything conducive to a great end result.

What I do want is the more important, and far more interesting, question. This Guardian front page is part of one answer.

Firstly, the terminology – I think it’s all wrong. Just think of the obvious problems with the word ‘like’, obviously implying one’s approval of something. It’s this ambiguity that presents a problem – to me, it seems perfectly obvious that to ‘like’ something implies that I like the piece of content, be it a video, photo, status update or news story. However, this can be almost indistinguishable at times (entirely with status updates and news stories, I believe) from showing one’s appreciation of the content itself.

The importance of this distinction becomes clear as soon as you open an international news feed in – for example – Google Reader. If I find the article interesting, helpful or whatnot, then at present I am able to ‘like’ it – and this is fine; I do appreciate the article as being either interesting or useful, and I would encourage others to read it, as I feel that they may too. What isn’t fine is the unclear distinction between this – demonstrating my appreciation for the article as well written, or whatever else – and what actually just seems like me expressing my enjoyment at the idea of whatever tragedy has befallen the world on that day.

This is all the more important on Facebook, where things (obviously) get personal. Several weeks ago, many of my friends were sharing, through statuses, the horrid news that someone who they know had died in a car accident. Each of these updates has many ‘likes’ – clearly other mutual friends expressing their horror, shock and upset over their friend’s sudden death. But again, to ‘like’ the news that a dear friend has died just doesn’t feel right at all, even if it can be rationalised as people ‘liking’ the status, not the horrible news it brings.

So, in thinking of alternative wording for this feature, I return to the functionality: why is it useful or beneficial to ‘like’ things? I think there are four key answers to this question: I believe people want to use ‘like’ to save, share, agree, and appreciate.

These are my initial thoughts. A further developed follow-up, which addresses these ‘functions of the like button’ in greater detail, to follow.

This was written, here, by Gedeon Maheux – iPhone app superstar behind Twitterific and RampChamp in a very interesting post about the failures of the App Store, which have contributed to the commercial failure of the beautiful RampChamp.

There are whole swathes of arguments and debates surrounding the Apple App Store, especially with regard to it’s slow approval process for application updates. I won’t attempt to delve into these arguments here. But one thing that I do believe, is that the quote above isn’t a realistic, sensible or fair way to approach the approval process.

Of course, it seems very righteous and principled to cry that everybody (well, every developer) should be treated with utter egalitarianism, but is this really for the best? Applications like Tweetie, for example, have many thousands of people that use it daily. A relatively new, unpopular or niche application may have a few hundred users at best.

Taking this into account, there seem to be two clear reasons why Apple would favour larger, more prominent developers over everybody else (and why I think they’re right to do so).

Firstly, seeing as the whole platform exists for the people who use the App Store (ie: iPhone users), – and therefore the App Store approval process itself only exists to faciliate the product for them – I think this may be an appropriate time to take a utilitarian approach. The best way to make the maximum number of people happy is surely to ensure that the more prominent applications used by the larger numbers of people are functional and at their best for the greatest amount of time possible.

The second reason is a commercially relevant extension of my first point. If it can be accepted that the best thing for iPhone users as individuals is to guarantee the applications they probably have installed work consistently, then this can easily be seen as a commercially significant consideration. Clearly, if Apple can keep as many of their customers as possible happy with their iPhone and the overall App Store experience, then they stand to benefit hugely from the increasing utility in their platform. Because Apple aren’t merely selling a mobile phone – they’re selling another operating system; they’re selling a platform, and it’s circular. The better the platform, the more people who will buy an iPhone.

So let’s try and keep as many of those people as possible happy.

(I intend to write a follow up to this, because – of course – there are problems with what I’m suggesting, and the App Store as a whole, and they’re worth thinking about too. Let me know what you think in the comments.)

Collecting information, especially in the “raw data” sense of information accumulation in figures, is something I think is particularly interesting when applied to people – each of our daily lives. Each one of us does so many little, perhaps seeminly trivial, things every day that on their own, each day, don’t seem to matter at all. But we don’t live our lives for a day – our lives are an aggregate, and all of these trivialities which seem to mean so little each day can come alive when viewed as part of a greater context; the ‘big picture’, as it were.

For myself, it only takes a recollection of all of the various online gadgets I use (or I have tried out) to realise that I am already casually and informally trying to track a whole series of things. Which books I’ve read, where I go, what I’m listening to, what I read in articles and comment pieces – the list goes on, in websites like these, and my own personal attempts to realise and remember what I’m doing.

A while ago now, I had the idea to formalise this process – I wanted to know how many Red Bulls I was drinking; how much I was spending on them; and when I was drinking it. These questions in themselves are now defunct and irrelevant: I haven’t drunk Red Bull in three months (although in terms of statistics, this is twelve weeks at £1.09 per day, so 12x7x1.09 = £91.56 saved!)

However – even despite this severe drop in daily caffeine levels – I am still very interested in attempting to comprehensively track a series of different things about my daily life, which I believe (and hope!) have the potential to become very interesting as the amount of data I have increases.

A new year seems like a good time to start this kind of thing, but I’ll need some time to think through everything I’ll want to include before January, alongside a way to adequately visualise this information online in both ‘real-time’ and over longer blocks of time.

As far as the things I’d want to measure is concerned, so far I’ve thought: drinks, total expenditure daily, public transport, reading, and driving. Each of these can be measured in more than one way, and I’ll need to think about that, too.

But for now, I want to know – what else do you think would be an interesting thing to track and measure? At the end of a year, what would be interesting figures to have accumulated?