The Information Superhighwayman

Over the last few months an increasing number of people have told me to go to Google Maps and to plan a route from somewhere in England to somewhere in the US. What happens, is that within the detailed directions given by Google you are told to swim 3,400 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. This is funny. Google have spoken.

For various reasons, it annoyed me at the time but I behaved and kept myself quiet. Unfortunatey, as usual, the trigger for me ranting was a story about it appearing on my Wireless today.

The point is that Google Maps tries to put itself across as a serious route planning system. I assume the “Swim across the Atlantic” thing was either genuinely put in by some wit of a programmer (yes, I did restrain myself from adding a prefix to a word in that sentence) or more likely, it was designed by the Church of Googleology’s Viral Marketing Team to appear that way so that people would talk about it.

Ok, well let’s play this game and have a look at it, shall we? I will go to http://maps.google.com/ and I will select “Get Directions”. I think today I will go from “Cambridge, UK” to “Maryland, US” (I want a cookie, ok?). It tells me that I will have to drive 4,211 miles (about 29 days 13 hours).

The route is roughly: Cambridge to Folkestone, then on a train ferry to Calais (France). From there I do some weird little circular tour of Northern France before reaching Google’s humourous:

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean (3,462 mi) Entering United States (Massachusetts)

Ok, assuming I do that – I get into the US in Boston and then wriggle south by road until I get to Maryland.

… Where do I start? Ok, well how about the initial part of the route – Assuming I am going to make a long swim, I would prefer to head from Cambridge, south-west across the country to Northern Cornwall and then start swimming. What’s all this nonesense with taking me into France, and then putting my swim start 150 miles east of where I want to be? And why did it let me take a ferry into France, but not take a boat over the Atlantic to the US?

Assuming I am going to do the swim, then why does it detour me north to Boston when I may as well swim directly into Delaware and then take a nice little hop by land to my Maryland Cookie shop?

There is also the rather obvious point that nobody has ever done a 3,400 mile plus swim across the Atlantic and even if they were going to, it would be rather impractical. I can hear people muttering “You are taking this too seriously” and you are right, I am but see… There are other routes that are actually possible, and Google Maps hasn’t showed them to me; they’d rather have a silly little viral marketing opportunity than have the program give out a correct result.

Back to Google maps, let’s plan a route from “Cambridge, UK” to “Anchorage, AK” (Alaska). Same old wriggle into France, same old swim to Boston and a long land journey across the US and Canada, into Alaska and to Anchorage. 8,335 miles in all. That’s just plain odd.

Ok, how about “Cambridge, UK” to somewhere in Russia? Google Maps isn’t very hot on Russia so we may as well just go for Moscow. Now look! A change of tack here and it is looking a little more promising. Once more we get a ferry into France (I’d have taken the tunnel, but I won’t argue on this small point but it does mean that in theory, it is a walkable route). The route then takes us through Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Belarus and finally into Russia. We then stroll merrily by land into Moscow for a well earned Vodka and Pierogi lunch. Who needs cookies!

So sit with me a while, sipping our vodkas and let’s have a look at a map of the world. Take a look at that huge great bloody land-mass to the east of Moscow. The land-mass that goes all the way to the Bering Straight, a 90km stretch of water that separates the far east point of Russia from the far west point of the United States. If your atlas is good it may mention that the 90km stretch is quite often frozen so you could actually walk over it. In fact in 2006, a couple of people did ( link ). Even if there is no walking path, a 90km swim is going to be a lot easier than a 5,630km swim, in the sense that it would actually be possible. If you are actually interested then this page has lots of advice on making the crossing. I found the page using Google Search, it was pretty much at the top of the list.

See my point here now? You can get from Cambridge, England to Maryland, USA on foot. Every stretch has been done but Google Maps would rather trade accuracy and quality of information for a cheap viral marketing gag.

Obviously, the Church of Googleology believe in a flat earth and so it is decreed, will users of Google Maps.

I finally got around to dragging all of the photos from my mobile phone last night, and found this little shot that I took in a tacky tourist shop in Berlin.

Can I just say… amazing! But then I guess every Revolutionary needs their own lip-balm.

I am not a fan of Ernesto so I don’t think I will be wearing his lip balm. The only thing that amuses me is that it is being sold in what was formerly East Berlin, and his various dodgy causes won’t benifit even slightly by any sales of this, nor do they from the wonderfully Capitalist use of his image on just about anything that will take it.

I don’t like regurgitation in weblogs, so I will simply paste a couple of links:

http://lorry.org/Weblog/che-standard.html

and:

http://www.washblade.com/2005/11-25/view/columns/che-cult.cfm

Actually, thinking about it – I may be wrong. Ernesto Guevara may well have been quite the fan of the capital of Capitalism that is modern America; they are, after all, both huge fans of concentration camps in Cuba.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
We’ll watch them carefully, inside our golden doors.
And should they stray, or think aloud,
Thoughts deemed extreme, rebellious or untrue.
So onto Cuba, they will go.
To keep this young land, pure and clean.

(Apologies Ms. Lazarus for not keeping it as a Sonnet)

Once more in this fine and free country of ours, the Lords are debating the passing of the new Mental Health Bill. Sensibly they have thrown it out every time it has been before them but Parliament keep throwing it back. This Bill will allow people with various forms of mental illness to be detained, indefinitely, whether they have committed any crimes or not. Ministers say this will protect the public from these nutters.

This bill seems mostly to be backed by the families of some people who have been killed by psychopaths and other people who would be covered by this act. They stand there on the TV saying how good it will be but deep beneath this emotional tinsel these people are still asking for people who have committed no serious crime (and likely as not never will) to be able to be locked up until they are dead.

I wonder what would happen if this were a couple of hundred years ago – Would they be on the Clockwork TV network saying “My son was eaten by a big black man, these people are dangerous and should be locked away in case they eat somebody else’s children too!”

There is a side issue here that a high percentage of judges and politicians are psychopaths anyway, more so in fact than are black. Maybe the politicians are just trying to remove the competition?

Those of you who know me should know that one of my fascinations is the phenomenon of Groupthink (or “Folie a Deux”) and one of my professions was working out how to steal things more effectively. I have been avoiding ranting about this topic for a while but it rather amazes me that the press are just starting to realise that all is not well in this nation of British Shopkeepers.

When I first heard that the British Government were pushing this Chip and Pin idea; I seriously had to check tha it wasn’t April the first. For those people lucky enough not to be in the UK, Chip and Pin is a new way of paying for things with a Credit or Debit Card.

British payment cards have a little chip in them at one side, effectively making them into a smart card. They also have the magnetic and signature strip on the back so that they can be used abroad or used in cash machines without chip readers. When you pay with one of these, you either give it to the person at the till, or pop it into the little card reading machine yourself, wait for it to confirm the amount and then type in your 4 digit PIN to complete the purchase. This should ring some alarm bells already simply on the basis of casual theft. Anyone standing close to you when you are hassled in a shop queue and not being at all careful (as presumably you would be at a cash machine) can see you type your PIN and then thump you a few yards up the street, nick your cards and clean your account out at the closest cash machine.

This is a little dirty for the likes of a weblog like this but it’s not something that should be ignored just for that reason. Saying that this isn’t where the real issue lies. The real issue lies in the fact that the cards still have the magnetic strip and don’t use a different PIN for the smartcard and the strip. Financially, it is not very viable to clone a smartcard at the moment; it’s possible but until it becomes more useful (that would be when identity cards come into force) the risk is still low. On the other hand, it is pathetically easy to copy a magnetic strip. When you give your card to somebody before you type the PIN into a machine, you don’t know what they are doing with it. Have they swiped it and copied the strip? Is the “Chip and Pin” machine recording your number? Is there a camera in the roof monitoring what you type on the keypad? All it takes is one swipe of your magnetic strip by a shop assistant, a waiter, a petrol attendant or a well equipped prostitute and a knowledge of your PIN and your details could be sent to across the world within seconds, your stripe details written to another card and your bank account cleared before you have even left the shop. Personally I find it quite annoying when the country’s biggest supermarket (that’d be Tesco) has their staff take your card off you and swipe it behind the counter rather than let you slide it into the card reader like most other shops do. At least when I physically put the card into the machine myself I know that it can’t be reading the magnetic stripe. Tesco are just asking for staff fraud to happen. In fact, any checkout employees reading this who want to buy a 3 track magnetic card reader/writer, I am doing a good deal on them.

It seems obvious that for this to be classed as an advance in security is just idiotic but then that is a fundamental of Groupthink. Next time how about just sticking a photograph on the card? it’d be easier and cheaper. TV shows like “The Real Hustle” have been showing you how to rip people off for the last year with this and international gangs (should I be emotive and say GANGS PROBABLY LINKED TO ORGANISED CRIME AND TERRORIST ORGANISATIONS?) have been stealing hundreds of millions using this nice and easy free cash machine for quite a while now. It’s only in the last couple of weeks that it seems to have hit the news.

As far as I can see, the government decided that the country should all have Chip and Pin from February the 14th, 2006. Supposedly it is possible to demand a card that doesn’t have a chip; I will have to remember to do this sometime. It’s be nice to have seen any of their reasonings and to find out who their security consultants were so that we could all stand around and throw peanuts at them. Frankly and speaking from a professional point of view here, they must all either have been fucking morons with no understanding of anything at all or just out of their head on the Crade-A cocaine they’d bought with the money the government threw at them for their advice.

Feel free to ignore this, I just wanted somewhere to babble and this seemed as good a place as any. If it makes any grammatical sense at all I will be amazed.

In case you missed it, it’s the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in England. This has caused lots of debate; one of the main ones is about whether we should say sorry and pay compensation for the slave trade. I have been watching this with interest especially every time it gets compared to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

I was initially tempted to point a finger at the British and complain bitterly at us for becoming a nation of apologists – For what? For being the first country to actually abolish slavery? For being the good guys here? For having a country where people could at that time stand up in Parliament and say “Look, this isn’t right, we need to do something about it”. The more I think about it though, the more I admire the British for the general opinion that we shouldn’t apologise. Historically we see something is wrong, we fix it and then we move on. Want some examples here? We killed over half a million native Aborigines in Australia in about 120 years; we killed 300,000 of the ethnic Kikuyu in Kenya and tortured hundreds of thousands more; we caused the near extinction of most of the tribes of Native Americans in the US and Canada. In the late 1800′s British policy in India caused the death of between 12 and 29 MILLION Indians and not content with that, we did pretty much the same thing again in Bengal during WW2 killing another 3-5 million. We mustn’t forget of course that 200 million blacks died as a result of the slave trade though not all of those were caused by the British – Just most of them.

Trust me, when it comes to Genocide, the Germans are utter amateurs.

The late half of the last century seems to be obsessed with guilt for history and I am tempted to put forward a theory that most of the hassles we have at the moment in the world are caused by this. Israel is getting away (very literally) with murder simply because nobody dares to say anything against them for fear of being accused of being anti-Semitic. In writing this, I will be accused of being anti-Semitic and a closet Nazi. I am not, I have no issues with Jews at all but I have huge issues with the Israeli home policy. Incidentally, why would I be accused of being a Nazi? The Jews have been massacred many times by many people… In 1270 King Edward the 1st decided that Jews were a threat to England and ordered that all Jews wear a yellow star to identify them in public. After imprisoning or executing all the Jewish heads of household the Jews were finally banished from England from 1290 until 1655 when Cromwell let them back. Sound familiar? As God’s chosen ones, the Jewish people were told to “not fit in” so they are used to persecution from all over the place. It’s not an accident that Israeli Politics labels anyone who doesn’t agree with them these days as a Nazi though.

Central Europe doesn’t seem to be able to let the Jewish Holocaust go. Germany seems to be racked in complete guilt even now about the whole thing. Why? As far as most Germans involved in WW2 were concerned, they were provoked and cleverly manipulated and led into a war in which they sometimes fought brilliantly but eventually lost. The British were very quick to forgive the Germans, I have never seen a single serviceman who has had a grudge against the Germans; the war ended, the Jewish Holocaust was exposed and the world as a whole, including the German people, was repulsed and shocked. It’s over, the people who were responsible for it were rounded up and arrested and tried and hanged or imprisoned. Brits don’t blame modern Germans for all the deaths we suffered, all the cities we lost and the fact the Empire was finally bankrupt and destroyed. Hell I will be silently happy the day that a German has the balls to suggest, without arrogance or guilt, that if Hitler hadn’t stopped his forces at France and decided not to invade England at that time, they’d have occupied us and we’d not have been fighting the rest of the war from England. It’d be an interesting argument, but Germans aren’t allowed to have any historical pride in their own armed forces, most of whom weren’t Nazis at all. It’s weird because after World War 1, German Soldiers did keep that pride, they wore their WW1 Iron Crosses for many years after, some Jews were saved because they had won Iron Crosses in WW1 – The huge majority of German combatants weren’t Nazis, they were just soldiers, like most of the rest of the poor sods killed in combat during that war.

The fact they lost and the fact the Jewish Holocaust came into the open and dragged a whole heap of guilt into Europe and America was the difference here. There seems to be an assumption that the UK and the US were all nice to the Jews at that time. The British had a good reason not to be. Even during WW2, Jews were still fighting the British in Palestine – but the US? The St Louis, a ship with 950 Jewish refugees was turned away from America in 1939 by the Roosevelt government and sent back to Europe. European countries took them in but most then died in the camps anyway when their new countries were occupied. Henry Ford and many prominent Americans were quite openly and publicly anti-Semitic by the start of WW2. The Red Cross admits now that it knew about the Holocaust but didn’t disclose it so that it could maintain its neutrality. There is no black and white here, just a lot of grey but still, Germany seems to get all of the blame.

I am not sure whether to blame Germany for this continued guilt. As a country under permanent “occupation” for the last half century or more maybe it’s been hard to forget the past but one day someone has to draw a line under it all and Germany needs to move on. The Finns, Italians and Hungarians don’t seem to have problems. Do most people under 30 or 40 even know what side they were on in WW2? If it helps, I don’t have a clue what side they were on in WW1. Whilst this guilt exists, it’s impossible to look at the Israel situation without it getting in the way. The Arabs don’t have much concept of this Euroguilt and I would guess they just don’t understand why Western Europe and the US always seem to cringe every time Israel starts to yell. How many years will this carry on for? How many more walls will they build, towns they will bomb, human rights they will jackboot all over before someone has the balls to tell them to stop?

Recently the Germans announced that they would use their presidency of the EU to attempt to criminalise the use of the Swastika within Europe. This is amazing on two levels, firstly in that 50 years on they still seem to want to atone for something and add more and more fleas to their hair-shirt stock and secondly that once more Germany, under the banner of the Swastika, is trying to impose their will on millions of other people. European Hindu groups have used the Swastika as a religious symbol for about 5,000 years and it’s a popular symbol in many religions. It’s fair to say that this decision was taken through stupidity or naivety rather than malice and thankfully, they have now decided it was an ill thought out plan and cancelled it but still – Aaargh!

Back to the original subject of compensation for slavery; there have also been many supposedly clever people saying “Why don’t the Vikings apologise for invading us 900 years ago?” – Apart from anything this annoys me because for a start it was more than 900 years ago and secondly the major Viking invasion was as a result of us, the English, committing genocide on the orders of King Ethelred and killing all the Danes in England on November the 13th, 1002. We’ve forgotten that particular holocaust on our part; thankfully; but it’s another one to add to the already long list of British Genocides.