LOCOG force Mount Olympus to change its name

Note: Inspired by articles in the Spectator and in the Financial Times.

It has been reported today that the organisers of the 2012 London Olympics are forcing the Pantheon at Mount Olympus to change the name of their home and to cease referring to themselves as "Olympians".

"We feel the name 'Olympus' is likely to cause confusion," said a spokesperson for the legal team at LOCOG, "and that they are using a variation of the good Olympic name to profit from tourism. They are clearly in breach of Article 3, paragraph 1(b) of the Olympic Symbol etc. (Protection) Act 1995.

"Furthermore, by referring to themselves as 'Olympians' they give the misleading impression that they were legitimate athletes at a prior Olympiad, but the records show this simply isn't true."

Asked whether he felt an ancient Greek mountain was within the LOCOG's jurisdiction he gave a tight-lipped smile and told me the Olympics were a timeless, worldwide phenomenon.

The news did not go down well at Mount Olympus.

"They're doing WHAT‽" Thundered Zeus. "They should know better than to whip up a storm with me" he warned, twirling a lightning bolt menacingly.

Poseidon was a little more measured in his response. "This is earth-shattering news" he said.

"For the first time in over a century, I won't be blessing the victors" said Nike.

Even the usually lovely Aphrodite was livid. "They've got too far," she raged. "It was one thing to force me and my Adonis to delay our wedding because we mentioned 'rings', but this..." her voice cracked holding back tears, "they might as well evict us."

More on this as it breaks.

Feminism and "Men's Rights Activism"

I aspire to be a feminist, but cannot fairly say that I am one. There are people who believe in feminism and there are actual feminists, and I'm no Rebecca Watson, though I admire her work greatly.

This is largely because I really have no starting point to try to comprehend challenges that women face. I was born to this world to well-off, white, upper-middle class parents. Every bit of discrimination society has historically practised works out in my favour. As much as I want to support feminism I really don't know how I can contribute beyond calling out sexism where I see it and not being sexist.

And then this happened. While Jimmy Zinn is a real flake, MRA (Men's Rights Activism) exists. What this approximately says is that gender imbalance now favours women over men and we need to push back.

Somewhat surprisingly, it believes many of the demands of MRA can be met as feminism achieves its goals.

All their arguments play on the same trick - they have enough familiar truth in them that they sound believable, and have reasonable sounding conclusions. The problem is that their conclusions are based on the assumption of a bias against men that doesn't exist. This makes the arguments quite persuasive - I really believed a few of them for a while before seeing how much there is left to do for feminism.

Arguments for MRA fall into a few categories, I'm going to try to tackle one at a time.

Women abusing their spouses isn't taken seriously
The plausible truth: While there is clearly truth behind this, and TVTropes list many examples from media. There is a mainstream perception that a woman beating up a man is funny. There was even an episode of Friends about it, largely playing it for laughs.*

While it seems that society is getting better about this, the problem is that men who admit to being abused by their spouse are seen as weak for not standing up to their weak little wives.

Ah. There's your problem! Until society is comfortable with men and women being equal partners in a relationship, this isn't going to go away. Until society starts treating women as human beings who are just as capable and worthy of respect as men this isn't going to go away.

If you want abused husbands to be taken seriously, support feminism.

Also related: The groin attack, played for laughs. (Not sure when I stand on this. In a slapstick environment I do tend to find this very funny.)


Women control the dating scene / a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
This sounds counter-intuitive as men are expected to make the first move, but many do see this as putting women in control. Even in the very open world of online dating, where women can make as many first moves as they like and no-one can know or judge them for it, OKCupid still has to compare the success of women's profiles in terms of "number of new contacts per month" (average 7.5), with men using "replies per first message sent" (average 0.6). Men are putting themselves forward for the women to pick and choose, apparently.

So maybe the dating scene is a woman's world. Sit back, wait for the cute guy to nervously make his approach. Maybe toy with him for a bit. That's what they do in the films, right? What if he doesn't approach? Could I approach him? But I wouldn't want everyone to know I did, because ...

And now MRA falls down.

In making the first move, the woman indicates she is sexually available, and seeking and someone out there will try to slutshame her for it. Either that or she'll find that men she never expressed interest in suddenly act as though they are entitled to her, because she was outwardly available. What. The. Fuck?! Men are expected are to be sexually available, but its still taboo for a woman to do so.

The only way  this will ever be balanced is if we stop treating women who are sexually available as second-class people. Support feminism.


* Season 5, Episode 15: The One With the Girl Who Hits Joey

Formula One - a quarter of the way in

We are now five races into one of the most exciting Formula One seasons in memory.

For the first time in a very long time have we had five different drivers win the first five races, and for the first time in even longer have those drivers all been from different teams.

Before the start of the season I tried to guess the relative strengths of the teams. It appears I may have underestimated Mercedes and Lotus somewhat, and overestimated Red Bull.

I hold that McLaren have a car capable of dominating, but are having problems finding the right balance for it, and keep making mistakes. This hurts me as a McLaren fan, but at least it makes the racing fun!

It seems Ferrari are starting to come back. The test after four races seems to have been a turning point, as the have looked far more feisty in the car since then. Well, Fernando Alonso has, anyway. The second Ferrari driver, Felipe Massa, just hasn't been the same since returning from injury. While he probably deserved a World Championship (particularly in 2008) he isn't driving well enough for it. I'm sure if he doesn't improve soon Ferrari will be looking for someone to replace him.

In the midfield, Williams have stood out as much stronger than I thought they were, as shown by their win in Spain. Don't be fooled by Sauber's second place finish in Malaysia - the wet conditions flattered their car. They won't be challenging for wins in dry races.

At the back the difficulty the slow three teams are having is becoming more and more evident. I hope they can close up to the midfield, but at the moment they are really aren't contributing to the sport and exist more as a side-show race. I really hope they can get the advances they need, but it will take something special. Don't expect to see all three of these teams still around in a few years time.

In summary, F1 in 2012 is turning out great. Who's going to win this weekend in Monaco? Don't ask me. I've no idea. For once.


The Monaco Grand Prix qualifying and race can be watched live on the BBC.

Occam-Pi - a review

Apologies for a lengthy absence. After a term of easy work-load the past month or so has been very heavy, and I haven't had time to think much about my Musings. I anticipate this will continue for another couple of months, until I hand my dissertation in.

While there has been a lot of work, that's not to say there hasn't been fun: one of the more enjoyable things I've done this month is learn some Occam-Pi.

Occam-Pi: A brief history
For those of you who don't know what Occam-Pi is, and I'm guessing that's most of you, it is a programming language that mixes the Occam language with Pi calculus.

The Occam language was designed to run on transputers. Transputers are like computers, but run many processors independently of each other (i.e. no shared memory, like multi-core computers) and instead talk to each other using defined data channels.

Occam-Pi has a compiler that allows it to be run on modern computers using threading to simulate having lots of independent processors. It doesn't work perfectly, but it runs well enough.

The review
Occam-Pi makes writing parallel programs very easy. The compiler can sometimes feel very strict, but that is a necessity of writing error-free concurrent programs. The unique nature of this language makes it wonderfully fun to write in, and actually very powerful as a tool to write multi-threaded programs. By enforcing a strict use of data channels it helps you think about multi-threaded programming in a way that other languages don't.

That is not to say the language is perfect, however. There are many minor annoyances about the syntax, which would probably get ironed out with more development.

The most difficult thing about the language is the total lack of debugging facilities and documentation, and the terseness of the error messages. When an Occam program fails a typical error message would be something along the lines of "Error at C:\[path]\occam_program.occ:123. Program failed, state = e, eflags 00000001".

The first bit tells you which line failed, and what line number. That's useful information, but not always accurate, and sometimes totally baffling. The "failed state = e" (or sometimes, = E) doesn't have anything anywhere telling you what that means, and the "eflags" presumably mean something, but I have no idea where to find that information.

So often when a program crashes, I want to be able to see the exact state of the program at the time of the crash - which processes are running, what the values of all the variables are, what is going on at the time. I can't get this information without rigging every process I'm interested in to talk to the screen, but this act is likely to fundamentally alter the way the program runs anyway.

Some of the niceties of other languages are also missing. For example, I can't define my own data types. (Well, I sort of can, but not neatly and they don't get enforced by the compiler). If I want an integer value with a byte tagged onto it, I can define a data protocol to send that pair through communication channels, but I can't use that protocol directly, and always have to decompose it back to an integer and a byte.

There are other things that would be lovely to have. For example, trying to receive on a channel where the sending process has finished will crash the program. That sounds fair enough, but I may be giving that channel a new process which will send down it. More frustratingly, this is true when the receive is part of an ALT statement, which can be used to listen to multiple channels, and act according to which one sends first. Any "dead" channels will not be sent down, but will still crash the program. (Worse, the error line points at the line with the ALT on it, not the line with the channel that failed, so you can't even tell which process had finished...) Much nicer behaviour here would be to simply ignore the channels that won't ever receive, or are shut, and listen to the channels that are still open.

Program flow is defined by indentation. This is the reason I stopped programming in Python, and it hasn't grown on me. Brackets are a far more intuitive way to indicate flow, and it's always easy to see which parts of the program belong where. The main arguments against brackets is that they clutter the screen, and make source code look uglier, as well as allow programmers to write obfuscated programs. Both poor arguments - bad programmers write obfuscated programs and you shouldn't use them; "ugliness" is debatable, and a poor reason to obfuscate the flow of the program.

There are other things, too, that would make Occam-Pi easier to program in. Currently, all IF statements are required to have at least one condition true. This often means appending "TRUE \\ SKIP" to IF statements. If an IF statement has no true conditions, it causes a crash. (True, ignore this sentence.) This is unnecessarily verbose, as the compiler can easily catch this error. Where the crash is desired writing "TRUE \\ STOP" at the end of the IF statement induces a crash.

Also, multiline comments don't exist. I know this doesn't sound like much, but sometimes I want to comment out entire sections at a time to experiment. With only single line comments, this is painful.

To sum up: Occam-Pi is a very interesting language with an easy learning curve at first. However, more difficult programs become much, much more difficult then they need to, especially with the lack of debugging tools making it almost impossible to track down errors apart from the most trivial.

Professional Wrestling is an ART

Last week was Wrestlemania 28, the biggest professional wrestling event of the year, and I followed it on Twitter.

The day afterwards, a tweet was forwarded to me: "Awww...it's so sweet to see grown adults on Twitter tweeting about #Wrestlemania as if it wasn't a scripted event between athletic actors."

Maybe I'm wrong about the intent here, but this is clearly patronising and belittling to fans to professional wrestling and I'd like to make a defence of wrestling as an artform by taking this tweet apart word by word as it perpetuates a few myths about wrestling fans I'd love to see the back of.

(To the author of the tweet: this isn't a personal attack. You just had an easy target made of you when this was forwarded to me.)

1. "...grown adults..." - professional wrestling is aimed at adults

It can be aimed at children as well, and WWE strives to make sure all its programming is suitable for children (PG rated). This meant on a storyline level, as well as banning deliberate blood. However, there is still much there for adult fans

 The Rock's return last year, building up to his match last Sunday, was aimed at adults who were teenagers during The Rock's height, and recent storylines involving CM Punk's anti-authoritarian attitudes, and storyline power struggles are likely to go over the head of kids. They're there for the adults.

The storytelling aspects of the in-ring work - like Shaun Michaels facial expressions during Triple H vs. The Undertaker - are likely to go over the heads of the children who just want to see cool moves. But they're there for the adults who like it.

2. "...as if it wasn't a scripted event..." - kayfabe is long dead

It was back in the 90's that WWE publicly announced that professional wrestling is fake, the storylines scripted, the outcomes pre-determined. Everyone knows, and this isn't news to anyone. Guess what else is scripted: Friends; Eastenders; Wall-E; all the Rocky Films and any time you go to see a Shakespeare play you are watching a scripted event. If we didn't want to watch scripted events, we'd go watch UFC.

For many fans the script is a good thing. We see stories build up and get resolved in satisfying climaxes, and it allows for spectacle that would never possible in a competitive sport. No-one in their right mind would ever attempt a shooting star press (see below) in a real match.

The script allows higher stakes, higher tension, higher drama than real sport. While the quality of the scripts hasn't always been great there have been some wonderfully worked stories too: Ric Flair's retirement match with Shaun Michael's was wonderfully worked. Shawn didn't want to put his old friend down, but Ric Flair insisted that Shawn had to give his all, which Shaun did, after telling Ric "I'm sorry, I love you" right before finishing the match. Or CM Punk getting (storyline) fired, only allowed to do his contracted match for the WWE Title (the most prestigious title belt in the company). CM Punk promised to win the match and leave the company with the title, and the CEO of the company tried to screw the end of the match to ensure that didn't happen. If you want to find out what happened, and the aftermath, go watch Money In The Bank 2011 (WWE).

So there's variable storyline qualities, but the company are doing close to six hours of airtime per week. That's a lot more than Eastenders (2 hours), with a larger cast of characters, performed live, and having to react to situations on the fly if someone gets injured, or tests positive for drugs. And they don't have a tradition of employing experienced writers, although that's starting to change.

3. "...between athletic actors" - ...ok, I agree with this one

That is what professional wrestling is. Acting with a high level of athleticism, much like ballet, and with long drawn out storylines, much like soaps (and unlike ballet). 

For the past year I've been training to do this because it's simply more fun than other way I've found of staying in shape, and - behind the pantomime personas, the people who do it a respectable, responsible people who want to entertain an audience.

Is that really so worthy of scorn?

(Just because it's really amusing, one of WWE's scariest characters - The Undertaker - does a pillow fight on live TV).

Oppression is a human thing

Human history is filled with some human societies oppressing less powerful groups.

It's a problem that, sadly, probably isn't going to go away easily. In the USA Rick Santorum is running a presidential campaign that often seems entirely based on oppressing women and gay people.

But why do humans do this?

In Santorum's case, he claims to be protecting the moral fibre of society as defined by the Catholic Church and has gone so far as to claim those who vote against him are not truly Catholic. He's entirely wrong about this. In fact Washington Post writer, Lisa Miller, cuts right to the heart of the matter when she says "Santorum observes the teachings of his church selectively". That is to say - he picks which matters are important to him and uses his faith to justify those views.

I can't really say on where the need to oppress comes from. It may come from a mental image based on tribes, and spotting outsiders trying to infiltrate the tribe (evolutionary psychology is not without criticism, though); it may come from a desire to feel powerful by exercising that power over others; it may be that people want to "fight back" at perceived changes to society.

In any case, some people will be strongly motivated enough by these principles to run for power and if enough people agree with them, they get to make oppressive ideas policy.

The point I want to make here, though, is that justifications such as "the moral fibre of society", or "my religious views" almost always come afterwards. We are affected by our culture, and justify later.

A short delay

My usual weekend update will come tomorrow. It's a trickier topic to tackle than I anticipated.