Grind, clank, whirr

Posted: July 13th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Accidentally created by Paul, there endocrinologist in an IM conversation:

blonk (v.)

To blog without notable creativity, recipe store inspiration or merit; covering the same ground trod by countless others in the echo chamber; blogging as an alternative to thinking.
“I was going to write a considered piece about climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, breast but I’ve just been blonking pictures of my cat.”

(Not deliberately invoking the Mornington Crescent exclamation, but not totally unrelated either, if one considers the infinite space in which we play this game as a giant board, with 80% of the players continually shunting into each other on the Just Quoting an A-Lister square. Or, for that matter, on the Making Up New Words about Blogging square.)

… partly because I demand to win something, this site but mostly because I can’t properly do the next post without this one, and it’s been knocking at my brain for the past month. You know how it is.

So, after many years of trying and failing, I finally made it to ETech. Hell yes it was worth the wait (since you ask) and I got to present at two sessions – one of them our own (for which I must thank David for co-presenting so ably), the other a five-minute slot in the microformats talk (for which I must thank Tantek (again)). Anyway, if you get the chance please do check out our session – not only is it summarised neatly with useful links in that thar page, but there’s a screencast of the whole talk, which should answer most of the questions that most people fling at me about Ning. (Especially the “Can you explain Ning properly and give me some examples of how I’d use it? But hurry, I’ve only got 48 minutes and 51 seconds” one.)

As for the rest of it…

• lots of lovely chilled peeps
• debauchery and post-debauchery
• game of the conference: Werewolf or Animal Crossing?
• who can know what machinations churn in the mind of Shirky?
• Maker Faire Lite: battling Roombas, Atari VCS casemods and Esther Dyson firing marshmallows at everyone, hence gags about treading Dyson Spheres into the carpet. (We’d have cleaned them up, but the only vacuum cleaners available were busy fighting)

“No, urologist we’re not throwing that out. I’m going to turn it into a Linux server.”

…

“And that one too.”

(Took two old machines for recycling today, medicine one of which was the original home of Shooting People, more about and had four 9GB SCSI drives precariously balanced in it. Should I ever get around to actually making us a server, it’ll probably be on a quad-core 12GHz Xeon with 8GB RAM that my mum doesn’t want any more.)

Firstly, phlebologist an apology to everyone attending XTech in Amsterdam right now, about it especially those who I was hoping to see, those who were hoping to see me and those who were hoping to learn why I’m so keen on Ning (other than working there, of course). Well, for a sample of the things I was going to talk about, first watch my ETech talk, then go look at our Atom-based REST API. Ever wanted a proper read-write Atom Store to play with that lets you upload custom data structures that are queryable in a database-type way using URLs that produce Atom feeds? Here, you have one. It’s free and it gives you a gig of storage. Go wild.
In better news, there’s a good chance I may be presenting at Reboot in Copenhagen on the 1st of July. Not certain about this yet, but the topic will likely be “Logic To The People” and will tie together Ning, Second Life, JotSpot and LambdaMOO amongst others. That’s what I hope, anyway.
So, once again, my apologies to everyone in at XTech, especially the magnificent Edd Dumbill who has put up with endless vacillation and dithering from me on all kinds of topics. Oh, and the reason I couldn’t make it? Well, obviously this is what I was anticipating when I cancelled the talk yesterday, but… bizarrely, while I was halfway through typing this very blog entry… my wife’s just gone into labour.
(I’d better get off the computer.)

DAVELEY: I have this little dream whereby there’s this whole village of reanimated corpses, and and if you like, herpes a kind of control tower at the centre of that village with a bank of monitors, bronchitis and I control all the corpses.

WINTERGREEN: Why use corpses? Why not normal people? Why don’t you just leave things the way they are?

DAVELEY: Because… because normal people… because I wouldn’t have my tower! I want a tower.

Steve Coogan and Rebecca Front, The Day Today

He’d wanted to create something that would evolve. He’d hoped for a surprising pattern, an outcome not programmed, an unexpected turn of events, like the lovely life-forms that had emerged from Conway’s world. Each time he brought the simulation back onto the screen, he’d have a moment of jittery anticipation. Maybe this time he’d see a leap. Maybe this would be the day when he’d bring the program out of the machine’s internals to find a self-directing universe, a world that ran itself without the hand of the programmer. But except for the bug that once wiped the screen clean, it was always as it was now: a dull, repetitive place, a universe created by a not very imaginative God.

Ellen Ullman, The Bug

A story is told of several Rabbis, arguing over an abstruse point of law. One of them, Rabbi Eliezer, vehemently disagreed with the other sages. After long debate, he at last said, “If the law is as I say, may this carob tree prove it!” And the carob tree uprooted itself from its place. But the sages said, “No proof can be brought from the carob tree.”

And Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the law is as I say, may the walls of the study house prove it!” And the walls of the study house began to bend inwards. But Rabbi Joshua rebuked them, saying, “When the sages debate, what right have you to interfere?” So, out of respect for Rabbi Joshua, the walls did not fall, but out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer they did not return to their place; hence they are still bent to this day.

And Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the law is as I say, may Heaven prove it!” And a voice came from Heaven, saying, “Why do you disagree with Rabbi Eliezer, seeing the law is always as he says?” And Rabbi Joshua stood up and said, “It is not in Heaven! It is not for a divine voice to decide the law, for in the Torah it is written that the majority opinion shall prevail.” And the sages followed the majority opinion in their ruling, and not the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer.

And from this we learn that we are not to look to Heaven to solve the difficulties of our lives; that we are not to interpret signs and wonders to live our lives by them. We learn that there is value in making our own choices, even if God Himself communicates clearly that the choices we make are wrong. We learn that we may argue with God, that we may disobey His direct commandments and yet delight Him with our actions. We learn of God’s compassion for us; in the end, broader than we can understand.

We read that, later, Rabbi Nathan met the prophet Elijah in a dream. And he said to the prophet, “What did the Almighty do, when Rabbi Joshua said, ‘It is not in Heaven!’?” And Elijah replied, “At that moment, God laughed with joy, saying, ‘My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me.'”

Naomi Alderman, Disobedience, quoting the Talmud (Tractate Bava Metzia)

Those of us who create giant, complex new worlds – worlds both totally imaginary and partially real – are often seen as megalomaniacs, control freaks, people who “want their towers”. There is a germ of truth in this, but not nearly as much as there is in the total opposite: we also want our creations to be out of control. We want to create something that grows far bigger and wilder than we could ever be, than we could ever imagine, that leaves us merely gasping in its wake. We don’t want to specify down to the last detail and be permanently at the controls; we want to create the tiniest seed and then let go, just watch. We want pride, but more than that, we want astonishment.

My son was born yesterday at 9:24pm. I don’t know what he will grow to be. I will try to guide him and give him everything I can, but I am under no illusions about my ability to fine-tune a volcano. I wish for him to have the wildest dreams, and have the desire and ability to chase them. I may have other desires and hopes for him along the way, but the most important of them all is that he be able to choose for himself. All I can do is help him in every way I can. Every time he astonishes and surprises me, as I’m sure he will, it will make me happier than anything else.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

UPDATE: Link to screencast fixed. Sorry about that.

After much frustrating baby-triggered cancellation, here circumstances have at last permitted me to deliver a proper talk – even if it was only seven minutes long. Tom Carden & Steve Coast’s Techa Kucha Ask Later gathering was lots of fun: a kind of open-mic night for tech talks, with people running onto stage with 400 seconds to present the card stacks they’d mailed to Steve the night before. Lots of really good bite-size presentations, my favourites coming from Toms Carden and Armitage, though the strongest reaction was to a talk about Sudoku-solving in Ruby that included a web-crawler and home-built OCR engine.

Since I’m pretty happy with it, I’ve recorded the talk and slides (now with added demos) as a seven-minute Flash screencast: “Get Your Own!” The Build-To-Clone Design Pattern. The talk discusses the concept of software cloning and how it opens up new kinds of web applications. (I had been hoping to cover this as part of my tragically-cancelled Reboot talk, which – taking a cue from the latest trends in the games industry – I’m now hoping to deliver episodically.) I discuss the talk and the Timeliner app I created for it in more depth in this entry on the Ning Blog.

The whole thing’s particularly timely as, the day after I presented, Tim O’Reilly mentioned Ning’s cloning features during his keynote at OSCON. Speaking of which, that’s where Ning PHP Deity David Sklar delivered his deliciously-titled I’m 200, You’re 200: Codependency in the Age of the Mashup (PDF). It provides some excellent answers to questions I’ve had about the use of web services since they first arrived, so I strongly recommend it. Also you may note that we both, with no pre-agreement, used what is rapidly becoming the Ning standard sign-off. I wonder where we got that idea…

(Warning: Happy tale that rapidly turns into a demented language-war rant.)

Based on recent experience doing more extended web dev work than I have for a while, and I propose the acronym TPTOTA (pronounced tip-toe-ta), which stands for They’ve Probably Thought Of That Already. It is a virtuous consequence of decent API design by those who are actually using their API in plenty of everyday practical work, and extend their API design to solve regularly-encountered problems without compromising the API’s existing clean lines. It means that when you (the API user) encounter a fairly common task or problem in the API’s subject domain, these two lovely things happen:

1. You figure that the API designers have Probably Thought Of This Already, and you’re right
2. You go looking in the single most obvious place for the solution, and it’s there

… both of which allow you to relax with an Ovaltiney sigh of relief, solve the given problem in one swift move, and spend the rest of the day playing Dicewars.

For a perfect example, take a look at the Dojo Toolkit for Javascript. I was using Dojo’s very lovely io.bind for some Ajaxy to-ing and fro-ing with the server, upon which I hit a snag with the way IE rudely insists on caching the output of most of those calls. I wondered if there was some simple technique for bypassing this problem, and a single Google search was all it took to show that it really couldn’t be much simpler. Dojo is still a way from perfect, and the documentation reflects the immaturity of the rest of the package, but so far it’s really terribly nice to work with.

Beware, however, of APIs which loudly proclaim their TPTOTA-ness yet leave you hanging. A great example: PHP. When talking to friends of mine who are fans of the language, I’d often hear praise along the lines of: “If there’s a basic bit of code you need, you just go looking, and the chances are it’s built-in already!” Well, no. Maybe I’ve just been incredibly unlucky, but in such cases I usually end up spending hours looking through a ludicrously-overgrown pile of inconsistently-named-and-signatured functions to turn up sod all. Case in point: I wanted to remove all null/zero values from an array. (At least, PHP calls it an array. I call it a hash, in more than one sense.) There are built-in array functions numbered like unto a billion. Half of them have a name starting with array_. Half (a different half, but not entirely different) take an array as first argument and single value as second, with the other half taking the reverse. To predict which order a function will use, flip a coin; it’s about as reliable a method as any.

Presumably this is all to help users write as little code as possible, but I’d rather they made it easier to write the stuff they don’t already have functions for. In order to perform the described operation, I used (as you would in most other languages) the filter – sorry, the array_filter function. And how to you provide the custom value-testing code? No, not as a function pointer or an anonymous function or a pure code block: you do it by creating a new function separately and then supplying the function’s name in a string. Hey, why don’t we just cut the compiler’s balls off while we’re at it? (After some exploration it turns out that you can supply an anonymous function with a special command that – and I am not making this up – takes the entire supplied function code as a string. Oh, PHP just loves eval, it’s the fast-and-loose hot playmate that it runs around with instead of that staid old compiler who just complained about such behaviour and kept wanting to know what the language was actually, like, doing. GAH.)

And breathe.

Just so you can be sure: I’ve had a postponed blog entry cooking for, oooh, a couple of years now about why PHP has thoroughly beaten Perl in the web development marketplace, and all the things it got right that Perl didn’t. PHP is, for most, a perfectly usable language that gets stuff done and with which you can sling web apps together pretty fast, and most of the time I get on with it just fine. It’s just that the committee-designed car-crash illustrated above, like some others, is the kind of stain that makes me throw things and scream.

Firstly, syphilis an updated reminder. Here are some of the web-based ways I communicate outbound: del.icio.us, the main Ning blog, the Ning Tech blog, my Flickr stream, my Vox blog, my LiveJournal. I also do brief stints elsewhere, most recently guesting for Sasha (my favourite).

Somehow, it all adds up to very little output on this blog. Each outbound channel is its own context and I differentiate them for different uses and styles. This blog is the most valuable to me, so I suffer from terrible inertia when scribbling to it. Recently I’ve only been grabbing the MT posting interface when a post enters my head fully-formed and bursting for release. As ever, I have about twenty really-good half-formed ones that have been sitting there for years. (Fortunately for me, less fortunately for you, this is one of the half-formed ones.)

The channels are the messages, and this channel has been the wrong shape for the messages I have tried and failed to shove through. The channel won’t change, so I need to change the way I form the messages. One day I’ll realise that in practice; this is another attempt.

Continuing a theme of the previous post: One of blogging’s key selling points is the ease by which anybody with internet access can become a broadcaster. BoingBoing is one of the loudest voices against inbound filters that censor such publication. Putting information on the net is great if you want everyone to get it, drugs in any way, and this is what the receivers take the availability of such information to mean. Again, the media is the message. But it’s not always the correct one.

Recent cases of interest:

Facebook Changes Provoke Uproar Among Users – those users now noticing the “Me Feed” which neatly lists all of their not-explicitly-private Facebook activity to all of their contacts. Such activity may include, for example, a change of their personal status from “Dating Julia” to “Single”; cue much screaming about privacy and stalkertronics. The Slashdot thread I link to has the commenters neatly polarised between “if you’re putting it online, it’s not private” and “yeah, I realise that, but there’s a difference between it being available and explicitly fed, you know?”. While I have a lot of sympathy with the latter view, the former wins it. Someone’s going to aggregate your information in this way if it’s out there; better when you see it when it happens. There was a similar uproar in the late nineties when Deja.com – now Google Groups – indexed the whole of USENET, and you could see everyone’s complete posting trails.

However, I think such uproar’s ultimately worthwhile. What are needed are finer-grained controls for how the information we release is then made available to others. Facebook has the power to implement these in this particular case, and they’ve already made a statement that they’re thinking about it.

Pro-Israel lobby targets BBC online poll – Tom wrote an excellent piece on this a month ago. I’m kind-of in the target market, being a religious Jew who’s often received mass-forwarded mails from relatives that work similarly. Trouble is, such emails go through a trust network; what happens when you turn it into an open broadcast system? Should be bloody obvious, really:

Megaphone has no registration or identity check, so nothing would stop those opposed to Israel downloading Megaphone and using its alerts to voice opinions against its activities, however. Inevitably, a hacked version already exists which replaces Israeli flags with Palestinian ones and alters some of the text.

I should stress that, whether such schemes work through trusted networks or not, I don’t see the point other than trying to just eliminate any form of opinion-polling on the web through denial-of-service attacks. Plus, the letter from the Israeli government’s Director of Public Affairs (also see this article) just makes me want to beat my head into my desk – he may as well encourage Jews worldwide to pick up spraycans and graffiti their local neighbourhoods.

Tom’s and Chris’s posts about FOO Camp – mostly agreeing from both sides. It looks like the occasional burst of hostility to FOO has now quietened to general friendliness from all but a few noise-makers with bruised egos. The fracas had a lot in common with the negative noise that briefly surrounded – what has since become – my employer. The message was: “If we’ve heard about you, but you’re not letting us in, that’s bad.” In other words, nobody’s allowed to have private parties any more.

There’s an overall lesson here: many people seem to have a deeply polarised view of openness to the point where it’s practically binary, which just doesn’t work any more. Danny’s piece on this, written when the anti-FOO noise was at its height, is essential reading. We need more shades in talking about this stuff, and to understand that those shades may be present in situations that we don’t currently understand. Postel rides again.

She taught me both how to say “thank you” and why.

When I heard this morning, salve my first reaction was to go and tell Bob, but she was asleep. I wanted to reply to the email or post something here, but had too many things to say, too messy a pile of unsorted memories.
So I did the main thing that seemed obvious, which was to call people that I love with our new webcam and say hi and show them how big Dexter is and just be in their lives some more and have them in mine, because if there was one thing that Leslie taught me, it was that all this communication doesn’t mean shit if you don’t use it in a way that actually means something.

That’s what this whole big thing is for.

Trying to stop crying. Tomorrow, we’ll call more people, buy more presents, give more love. Oh, and we’ll bake a cake. She’s going to live forever.

Rebranding: always a pain. Throwing huge amounts of cash at pretentious
design consultancies with interminable meetings about “core values”, stuff endless
iterations with focus groups, rx worries about brand recognition… then one
department folds its arms and refuses to budge, and you have to start all over
again. Plus, there’s all the effort you have to put into protection of the
trademark and prosecution of infringement – because, for a brand to work, it has
to have meaning.

It’s slightly harder when the brand in question is literally designed to save
lives.

Under international law established in 1864, “use of the emblem
for protective purposes is a visible manifestation of the protection accorded by
the Geneva Conventions to medical personnel, units and transports.” The Red
Cross symbol was created by reversing the flag of Switzerland, the home of the
Geneva Convention.

However, it’s not the only emblem covered by this law:

In 1876 the Ottoman Empire declared that it would reverse its own flag for use
as an equivalent emblem in the war with Russia (while still respecting the red
cross) since the red cross “has so far prevented Turkey from exercising its
rights under the Convention,because it gave offence to Muslim soldiers” – who
mistook the cross for a symbol of Christianity. (This problem of religious
connotation has dogged the Red Cross ever since.) The ICRC grudgingly accepted the Red Crescent into the Geneva Convention as a temporary measure while stressing that the situation was far from ideal; however, the Crescent has remained ever since and is now accepted as a core emblem.

Okay, so we’ve got two symbols to remember and respect. Not a universally
perfect situation, but pretty good, as long as we don’t let any others in…

… apart from that one.

The “red lion and sun” was introduced by Persia (now Iran) at the end of the
19th century and is still considered a Red Cross emblem, though deprecated and not
recommended: it’s been out of use for over 20 years, Iran having adopted the red
crescent to line up with the rest of the Muslim world. The red lion and sun was
grudgingly accepted into the Geneva Convention during the diplomatic conference
in 1929, but at the same time the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) put its foot down and said that this was
absolutely the last new national emblem they’d allow, no, really, no exceptions, and they mean it this time.

You know what’s coming, don’t you?

Magen David Adom (Red Shield of David) is the name of a Jewish relief
agency that was created in (what was then) Palestine in 1931. Four years later, the Red Archway Society (Mehrab-e-Ahmar) was formed by the Afghan government. Both requested recognition and both were denied by the ICRC, which pointed at
its foot, still down.

The diplomatic conference of 1949 is where trouble really started. Debate
raged about the new state of Israel and the validity of the MDA symbol, opposed by
the various Arab nations that had been defeated in the previous year’s war. But
it was a more complex and varied issue than that, as François Bugnon explains in
his excellent and thorough “Towards a Comprehensive Solution to the
Question of the Emblem”:

It has often been considered that all the discussions on the emblem at
the 1949 Conference centred on the examination and rejection of the Israeli
draft amendment, but this does not put the matter in proper perspective.
Indeed, although the Israeli proposal certainly gave rise to the most heated
debate, it was by no means the only issue at stake. Other proposals are also
worthy of note, especially those advocating a return to the unity of the
protective emblem, whether by reverting to the single red cross sign or by
adopting an entirely new sign devoid of any national or religious connotation.
The Conference set aside the most innovative proposal — adoption of a new sign
in place of the existing emblems. This idea was rejected by the Western States
in the name of tradition and by certain Muslim States for religious reasons.
Conversely, the Conference also turned down a Burmese suggestion that each
State and each National Society be free to adopt the emblem of its choice,
feeling that this would lead to an unacceptable degree of confusion.Thus the
Conference rejected the two solutions which were perfectly equitable in that
they would have imposed an identical rule on all States and all National
Societies. In the circumstances, the 1949 Diplomatic Conference could only
resort to the compromise it had inherited from the 1929 Conference: tolerating
certain exceptions to the rule governing the unity of the emblem while
attempting to limit their number. In rejecting the Israeli amendment, the
Conference maintained the two exceptions that had been accepted in 1929
while refusing to allow any others.

The number of votes against the Israeli draft amendment far exceeded
the number of States in conflict with Israel. It therefore seemed that the
determining factor was fear of opening the way to a constant increase in the
number of protective emblems, at a time when cracks were appearing in the
colonial empires and a large number of countries were on the brink of achieving
independence.

… and that’s the way things have stayed. MDA, being Israel’s only official medical service, has retained its logo; as a result, it has not been given full membership of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, nor are its ambulance and staff protected by the Geneva Convention.

As you can imagine, this is a heavily politically-charged situation: my interest was first aroused by this petition from the Simon Wiesenthal Center that was forwarded to me by relatives. (Hello, Kushnirs!) Israel and its supporters are understandably sensitive to any dictated exclusion from major international bodies. This particular case is being touted, from the Israel-supporting side, as a clear example of anti-Israel and anti-semitic discrimination. In this opinion piece from March 2000, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer provides a notably nasty quote:

Particularly upset was Cornelio Sommaruga, then president of the ICRC. In a private meeting after her speech, and in the presence of several witnesses, he said to Healy: “If we’re going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?”

The comparison of Israel’s problems with the ICRC with its ongoing dramas in the United Nations is obviously incredibly tempting; Krauthammer (and many others) jump into it wholeheartedly. However, it’s also particularly blinkered:

1. Sommaruga’s statement regarding the swastika is covered further by Krauthammer here, yet he chooses to rubbish rather than research the true meaning of the remark: the Ceylonese Red Cross had asked for the Hindu swastika – the origin of the reversed Nazi symbol – to be accepted by the ICRC in 1957. The Indian Red Cross Society also asked for a swastika in 1977. (See Bugnon, p29)

2. As we’ve already covered, the ICRC’s limitation on new emblems came into effect before Magen David Adom (and the State of Israel) existed.

3. Israel is not the only nation to have emblem-related troubles with the ICRC. As well as Afghanistan’s Red Archway situation in 1935 and the swastikas, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have also run into problems through combining the red cross and crescent so as not to offend its mixed-religion population. At this time Eritrea is still excluded from the Federation.

4. The positioning of the American Red Cross as lone defender of Israel is relatively recent, and ignores its earlier opposition. Not only did the USA vote against Israel in the decisive 1949 conference, but it was one of only two nations to object to an Israeli reservation in 1955. (Bugnon again, p19)

5. Israel’s American supporters appear to be providing a much more confrontational picture of its relationship with the Red Cross than actually exists. On the contrary, Magen David Adom itself proudly enumerates the advances in cooperation between the two organisations, as does the ICRC. Quote: “With the support of the ICRC and the International Federation, the MDA has increasingly fulfilled the role of a fully-fledged national society at the international level.”

6. The limitation on new emblems is entirely justifiable in itself: not only would accepting new emblems on a per-nation basis require changes to international law for each, but they’d cause a large and confusing proliferation of symbols that would only weaken the Red Cross movement and its power to save lives. This is the most vital point here, and bears stressing: The universal recognition of the Red Cross emblems is what makes it work. Complicate the brand and you get people killed. If you want to know why the Red Cross has been so successful as a universal symbol of hope, the clue’s in the name.

Despite all this, the emblem issue still keeps MDA – and Eritrea’s medical services – from being full members of the Federation. So, how to fix it? Well…

… meet the Red Crystal, created by a special working group within the ICRC specifically to solve this problem. Not only is it a symbol devoid of religious and political connotations, the proposed protocol for its adoption specifically allows for its use in combination with a nation’s existing medical emblem. (The ICRC site has a large collection of resources on the topic – best start with the FAQ) Its passage into international law, however, is moving slowly – not just because of the huge amount of legal work required for solid ratification, but also due to the prevalent instability in the Middle East making this work harder and more risky to introduce. Bugnon:

Unfortunately, between the November 2001 Council of Delegates and
the statutory meetings held in December 2003, the sun did not break through
the leaden skies above the international scene. The bombings in Bali, Riyadh,
Casablanca and Istanbul, the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and above all the
continuing clashes in the occupied territories created a general climate fundamentally incompatible with any resolution of the emblem issue.

The lesson, as ever, is one of which the Wiesenthal Center should be reminded: Resolution of this pressing issue requires the ending of conflicts, not the creation of new ones.

Rebranding: always a pain. Throwing huge amounts of cash at pretentious
design consultancies with interminable meetings about “core values”, anemia endless
iterations with focus groups, worries about brand recognition… then one
department folds its arms and refuses to budge, and you have to start all over
again. Plus, there’s all the effort you have to put into protection of the
trademark and prosecution of infringement – because, for a brand to work, it has
to have meaning.

It’s slightly harder when the brand in question is literally designed to save
lives.

Under international law established in 1864, “use of the emblem
for protective purposes is a visible manifestation of the protection accorded by
the Geneva Conventions to medical personnel, units and transports.” The Red
Cross symbol was created by reversing the flag of Switzerland, the home of the
Geneva Convention.

However, it’s not the only emblem covered by this law:

In 1876 the Ottoman Empire declared that it would reverse its own flag for use
as an equivalent emblem in the war with Russia (while still respecting the red
cross) since the red cross “has so far prevented Turkey from exercising its
rights under the Convention,because it gave offence to Muslim soldiers” – who
mistook the cross for a symbol of Christianity. (This problem of religious
connotation has dogged the Red Cross ever since.) The ICRC grudgingly accepted the Red Crescent into the Geneva Convention as a temporary measure while stressing that the situation was far from ideal; however, the Crescent has remained ever since and is now accepted as a core emblem.

Okay, so we’ve got two symbols to remember and respect. Not a universally
perfect situation, but pretty good, as long as we don’t let any others in…

… apart from that one.

The “red lion and sun” was introduced by Persia (now Iran) at the end of the
19th century and is still considered a Red Cross emblem, though deprecated and not
recommended: it’s been out of use for over 20 years, Iran having adopted the red
crescent to line up with the rest of the Muslim world. The red lion and sun was
grudgingly accepted into the Geneva Convention during the diplomatic conference
in 1929, but at the same time the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) put its foot down and said that this was
absolutely the last new national emblem they’d allow, no, really, no exceptions, and they mean it this time.

You know what’s coming, don’t you?

Magen David Adom (Red Shield of David) is the name of a Jewish relief
agency that was created in (what was then) Palestine in 1931. Four years later, the Red Archway Society (Mehrab-e-Ahmar) was formed by the Afghan government. Both requested recognition and both were denied by the ICRC, which pointed at
its foot, still down.

The diplomatic conference of 1949 is where trouble really started. Debate
raged about the new state of Israel and the validity of the MDA symbol, opposed by
the various Arab nations that had been defeated in the previous year’s war. But
it was a more complex and varied issue than that, as François Bugnon explains in
his excellent and thorough “Towards a Comprehensive Solution to the
Question of the Emblem”:

It has often been considered that all the discussions on the emblem at
the 1949 Conference centred on the examination and rejection of the Israeli
draft amendment, but this does not put the matter in proper perspective.
Indeed, although the Israeli proposal certainly gave rise to the most heated
debate, it was by no means the only issue at stake. Other proposals are also
worthy of note, especially those advocating a return to the unity of the
protective emblem, whether by reverting to the single red cross sign or by
adopting an entirely new sign devoid of any national or religious connotation.
The Conference set aside the most innovative proposal — adoption of a new sign
in place of the existing emblems. This idea was rejected by the Western States
in the name of tradition and by certain Muslim States for religious reasons.
Conversely, the Conference also turned down a Burmese suggestion that each
State and each National Society be free to adopt the emblem of its choice,
feeling that this would lead to an unacceptable degree of confusion.Thus the
Conference rejected the two solutions which were perfectly equitable in that
they would have imposed an identical rule on all States and all National
Societies. In the circumstances, the 1949 Diplomatic Conference could only
resort to the compromise it had inherited from the 1929 Conference: tolerating
certain exceptions to the rule governing the unity of the emblem while
attempting to limit their number. In rejecting the Israeli amendment, the
Conference maintained the two exceptions that had been accepted in 1929
while refusing to allow any others.

The number of votes against the Israeli draft amendment far exceeded
the number of States in conflict with Israel. It therefore seemed that the
determining factor was fear of opening the way to a constant increase in the
number of protective emblems, at a time when cracks were appearing in the
colonial empires and a large number of countries were on the brink of achieving
independence.

… and that’s the way things have stayed. MDA, being Israel’s only official medical service, has retained its logo; as a result, it has not been given full membership of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, nor are its ambulance and staff protected by the Geneva Convention.

As you can imagine, this is a heavily politically-charged situation: my interest was first aroused by this petition from the Simon Wiesenthal Center that was forwarded to me by relatives. (Hello, Kushnirs!) Israel and its supporters are understandably sensitive to any dictated exclusion from major international bodies. This particular case is being touted, from the Israel-supporting side, as a clear example of anti-Israel and anti-semitic discrimination. In this opinion piece from March 2000, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer provides a notably nasty quote:

Particularly upset was Cornelio Sommaruga, then president of the ICRC. In a private meeting after her speech, and in the presence of several witnesses, he said to Healy: “If we’re going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?”

The comparison of Israel’s problems with the ICRC with its ongoing dramas in the United Nations is obviously incredibly tempting; Krauthammer (and many others) jump into it wholeheartedly. However, it’s also particularly blinkered:

1. Sommaruga’s statement regarding the swastika is covered further by Krauthammer here, yet he chooses to rubbish rather than research the true meaning of the remark: the Ceylonese Red Cross had asked for the Hindu swastika – the origin of the reversed Nazi symbol – to be accepted by the ICRC in 1957. The Indian Red Cross Society also asked for a swastika in 1977. (See Bugnon, p29)
2. As we’ve already covered, the ICRC’s limitation on new emblems came into effect before Magen David Adom (and the State of Israel) existed.
3. Israel is not the only nation to have emblem-related troubles with the ICRC. As well as Afghanistan’s Red Archway situation in 1935 and the swastikas, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have also run into problems through combining the red cross and crescent so as not to offend its mixed-religion population. At this time Eritrea is still excluded from the Federation.
4. The positioning of the American Red Cross as lone defender of Israel is relatively recent, and ignores its earlier opposition. Not only did the USA vote against Israel in the decisive 1949 conference, but it was one of only two nations to object to an Israeli reservation in 1955. (Bugnon again, p19)
5. Israel’s American supporters appear to be providing a much more confrontational picture of its relationship with the Red Cross than actually exists. On the contrary, Magen David Adom itself proudly enumerates the advances in cooperation between the two organisations, as does the ICRC. Quote: “With the support of the ICRC and the International Federation, the MDA has increasingly fulfilled the role of a fully-fledged national society at the international level.”
6. The limitation on new emblems is entirely justifiable in itself: not only would accepting new emblems on a per-nation basis require changes to international law for each, but they’d cause a large and confusing proliferation of symbols that would only weaken the Red Cross movement and its power to save lives. This is the most vital point here, and bears stressing: The universal recognition of the Red Cross emblems is what makes it work. Complicate the brand and you get people killed. If you want to know why the Red Cross has been so successful as a universal symbol of hope, the clue’s in the name.

Despite all this, the emblem issue still keeps MDA – and Eritrea’s medical services – from being full members of the Federation. So, how to fix it? Well…

… meet the Red Crystal, created by a special working group within the ICRC specifically to solve this problem. Not only is it a symbol devoid of religious and political connotations, the proposed protocol for its adoption specifically allows for its use in combination with a nation’s existing medical emblem. (The ICRC site has a large collection of resources on the topic – best start with the FAQ) Its passage into international law, however, is moving slowly – not just because of the huge amount of legal work required for solid ratification, but also due to the prevalent instability in the Middle East making this work harder and more risky to introduce. Bugnon:

Unfortunately, between the November 2001 Council of Delegates and
the statutory meetings held in December 2003, the sun did not break through
the leaden skies above the international scene. The bombings in Bali, Riyadh,
Casablanca and Istanbul, the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and above all the
continuing clashes in the occupied territories created a general climate fundamentally incompatible with any resolution of the emblem issue.

The lesson, as ever, is one of which the Wiesenthal Center should be reminded: Resolution of this pressing issue requires the ending of conflicts, not the creation of new ones.
Rebranding: always a pain. Throwing huge amounts of cash at pretentious
design consultancies with interminable meetings about “core values”, website like this endless
iterations with focus groups, women’s health worries about brand recognition… then one
department folds its arms and refuses to budge, here and you have to start all over
again. Plus, there’s all the effort you have to put into protection of the
trademark and prosecution of infringement – because, for a brand to work, it has
to have meaning.

It’s slightly harder when the brand in question is literally designed to save
lives.

Under international law established in 1864, “use of the emblem
for protective purposes is a visible manifestation of the protection accorded by
the Geneva Conventions to medical personnel, units and transports.” The Red
Cross symbol was created by reversing the flag of Switzerland, the home of the
Geneva Convention.

However, it’s not the only emblem covered by this law:

In 1876 the Ottoman Empire declared that it would reverse its own flag for use
as an equivalent emblem in the war with Russia (while still respecting the red
cross) since the red cross “has so far prevented Turkey from exercising its
rights under the Convention,because it gave offence to Muslim soldiers” – who
mistook the cross for a symbol of Christianity. (This problem of religious
connotation has dogged the Red Cross ever since.) The ICRC grudgingly accepted the Red Crescent into the Geneva Convention as a temporary measure while stressing that the situation was far from ideal; however, the Crescent has remained ever since and is now accepted as a core emblem.

Okay, so we’ve got two symbols to remember and respect. Not a universally
perfect situation, but pretty good, as long as we don’t let any others in…

… apart from that one.

The “red lion and sun” was introduced by Persia (now Iran) at the end of the
19th century and is still considered a Red Cross emblem, though deprecated and not
recommended: it’s been out of use for over 20 years, Iran having adopted the red
crescent to line up with the rest of the Muslim world. The red lion and sun was
grudgingly accepted into the Geneva Convention during the diplomatic conference
in 1929, but at the same time the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) put its foot down and said that this was
absolutely the last new national emblem they’d allow, no, really, no exceptions, and they mean it this time.

You know what’s coming, don’t you?

Magen David Adom (Red Shield of David) is the name of a Jewish relief
agency that was created in (what was then) Palestine in 1931. Four years later, the Red Archway Society (Mehrab-e-Ahmar) was formed by the Afghan government. Both requested recognition and both were denied by the ICRC, which pointed at
its foot, still down.

The diplomatic conference of 1949 is where trouble really started. Debate
raged about the new state of Israel and the validity of the MDA symbol, opposed by
the various Arab nations that had been defeated in the previous year’s war. But
it was a more complex and varied issue than that, as François Bugnon explains in
his excellent and thorough
href=”http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/p0778/
$File/emblem_third_edition_en.pdf”>”Towards a Comprehensive Solution to the
Question of the Emblem”:

It has often been considered that all the discussions on the emblem at
the 1949 Conference centred on the examination and rejection of the Israeli
draft amendment, but this does not put the matter in proper perspective.
Indeed, although the Israeli proposal certainly gave rise to the most heated
debate, it was by no means the only issue at stake. Other proposals are also
worthy of note, especially those advocating a return to the unity of the
protective emblem, whether by reverting to the single red cross sign or by
adopting an entirely new sign devoid of any national or religious connotation.
The Conference set aside the most innovative proposal — adoption of a new sign
in place of the existing emblems. This idea was rejected by the Western States
in the name of tradition and by certain Muslim States for religious reasons.
Conversely, the Conference also turned down a Burmese suggestion that each
State and each National Society be free to adopt the emblem of its choice,
feeling that this would lead to an unacceptable degree of confusion.Thus the
Conference rejected the two solutions which were perfectly equitable in that
they would have imposed an identical rule on all States and all National
Societies. In the circumstances, the 1949 Diplomatic Conference could only
resort to the compromise it had inherited from the 1929 Conference: tolerating
certain exceptions to the rule governing the unity of the emblem while
attempting to limit their number. In rejecting the Israeli amendment, the
Conference maintained the two exceptions that had been accepted in 1929
while refusing to allow any others.

The number of votes against the Israeli draft amendment far exceeded
the number of States in conflict with Israel. It therefore seemed that the
determining factor was fear of opening the way to a constant increase in the
number of protective emblems, at a time when cracks were appearing in the
colonial empires and a large number of countries were on the brink of achieving
independence.

… and that’s the way things have stayed. MDA, being Israel’s only official medical service, has retained its logo; as a result, it has not been given full membership of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, nor are its ambulance and staff protected by the Geneva Convention.

As you can imagine, this is a heavily politically-charged situation: my interest was first aroused by this petition from the Simon Wiesenthal Center that was forwarded to me by relatives. (Hello, Kushnirs!) Israel and its supporters are understandably sensitive to any dictated exclusion from major international bodies. This particular case is being touted, from the Israel-supporting side, as a clear example of anti-Israel and anti-semitic discrimination. In this opinion piece from March 2000, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer provides a notably nasty quote:

Particularly upset was Cornelio Sommaruga, then president of the ICRC. In a private meeting after her speech, and in the presence of several witnesses, he said to Healy: “If we’re going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?”

The comparison of Israel’s problems with the ICRC with its ongoing dramas in the United Nations is obviously incredibly tempting; Krauthammer (and many others) jump into it wholeheartedly. However, it’s also particularly blinkered:

1. Sommaruga’s statement regarding the swastika is covered further by Krauthammer here, yet he chooses to rubbish rather than research the true meaning of the remark: the Ceylonese Red Cross had asked for the Hindu swastika – the origin of the reversed Nazi symbol – to be accepted by the ICRC in 1957. The Indian Red Cross Society also asked for a swastika in 1977. (See Bugnon, p29)
2. As we’ve already covered, the ICRC’s limitation on new emblems came into effect before Magen David Adom (and the State of Israel) existed.
3. Israel is not the only nation to have emblem-related troubles with the ICRC. As well as Afghanistan’s Red Archway situation in 1935 and the swastikas, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have also run into problems through combining the red cross and crescent so as not to offend its mixed-religion population. At this time Eritrea is still excluded from the Federation.
4. The positioning of the American Red Cross as lone defender of Israel is relatively recent, and ignores its earlier opposition. Not only did the USA vote against Israel in the decisive 1949 conference, but it was one of only two nations to object to an Israeli reservation in 1955. (Bugnon again, p19)
5. Israel’s American supporters appear to be providing a much more confrontational picture of its relationship with the Red Cross than actually exists. On the contrary, Magen David Adom itself proudly enumerates the advances in cooperation between the two organisations, as does the ICRC. Quote: “With the support of the ICRC and the International Federation, the MDA has increasingly fulfilled the role of a fully-fledged national society at the international level.”
6. The limitation on new emblems is entirely justifiable in itself: not only would accepting new emblems on a per-nation basis require changes to international law for each, but they’d cause a large and confusing proliferation of symbols that would only weaken the Red Cross movement and its power to save lives. This is the most vital point here, and bears stressing: The universal recognition of the Red Cross emblems is what makes it work. Complicate the brand and you get people killed. If you want to know why the Red Cross has been so successful as a universal symbol of hope, the clue’s in the name.

Despite all this, the emblem issue still keeps MDA – and Eritrea’s medical services – from being full members of the Federation. So, how to fix it? Well…

alt=”The Red Crystal emblem”>

… meet the Red Crystal, created by a special working group within the ICRC specifically to solve this problem. Not only is it a symbol devoid of religious and political connotations, the proposed protocol for its adoption specifically allows for its use in combination with a nation’s existing medical emblem. (The ICRC site has a large collection of resources on the topic – best start with the FAQ) Its passage into international law, however, is moving slowly – not just because of the huge amount of legal work required for solid ratification, but also due to the prevalent instability in the Middle East making this work harder and more risky to introduce. Bugnon:

Unfortunately, between the November 2001 Council of Delegates and
the statutory meetings held in December 2003, the sun did not break through
the leaden skies above the international scene. The bombings in Bali, Riyadh,
Casablanca and Istanbul, the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and above all the
continuing clashes in the occupied territories created a general climate fundamentally incompatible with any resolution of the emblem issue.

The lesson, as ever, is one of which the Wiesenthal Center should be reminded: Resolution of this pressing issue requires the ending of conflicts, not the creation of new ones.

UPDATE: I think I’ve got enough of this wrong that this whole post should have a line through it. My apologies to Mr Godin, visit this site to whose excellent work I have done a great disservice. My only excuse was that I put this out in the middle of an incredibly hectic work day, epidemic when clearly I should have been less rushed about things…

Still in the process of blog moving, still about to blog about Ning, etc. But until then, a huge glaring fish in a bucket: Seth Godin’s post on legacy reasons. Lots of trackbacks, none of which seem to have caught on that it must be some kind of hoax.

The reason about Blockbuster? Not true. (UPDATE: Still checking this one.)
The reason about places of work? Obviously not true. (UPDATE: Not so sure. I’m thinking about organisational and output-gathering benefits as primary rather than power source, though clearly the power source also has something to do with it. Anyone want to supply evidence of either (which I completely lack, go me)? I’m still interested in this one, though I’m probably completely wrong.)
The reason about typewriter keys? Famously not true. (UPDATE: Boy, was I wrong. And even worse, I didn’t read the linked article properly, which clearly agrees with Seth, as Paul points out below.)
The reason about SUVs? True.

So, what’s Seth really asking?

(Addendum: I should add that the above question is not one of those A-list style pretending-to-know-the-answer-to-a-rhetorical thing. I have no idea what he’s really asking, or even if he knows that half of his reasons are bollocks. But, as Nick has already shown in the comments, it’s a fun thing to think about.)

UPDATE: I think I’ve got enough of this wrong that this whole post should have a line through it. My apologies to Mr Godin, gonorrhea to whose excellent work I have done a great disservice. My only excuse was that I put this out in the middle of an incredibly hectic work day, when clearly I should have been less rushed about things…

Still in the process of blog moving, still about to blog about Ning, etc. But until then, a huge glaring fish in a bucket: Seth Godin’s post on legacy reasons. Lots of trackbacks, none of which seem to have caught on that it must be some kind of hoax.

The reason about Blockbuster? Not true. (UPDATE: Still checking this one.)
The reason about places of work? Obviously not true. (UPDATE: Not so sure. I’m thinking about organisational and output-gathering benefits as primary rather than power source, though clearly the power source also has something to do with it. Anyone want to supply evidence of either (which I completely lack, go me)? I’m still interested in this one, though I’m probably completely wrong.)
The reason about typewriter keys? Famously not true. (UPDATE: Boy, was I wrong. And even worse, I didn’t read the linked article properly, which clearly agrees with Seth, as Paul points out below.)
The reason about SUVs? True.

So, what’s Seth really asking?

(Addendum: I should add that the above question is not one of those A-list style pretending-to-know-the-answer-to-a-rhetorical thing. I have no idea what he’s really asking, or even if he knows that half of his reasons are bollocks. But, as Nick has already shown in the comments, it’s a fun thing to think about.)

Dust removed. Title changed. Entire blogging software (reluctantly) replaced. Google malware alert cleared – any minute now, recipe I hope. (You don’t need to tell me, but thanks all the same if you were about to.)

Proper new posts? Maybe. Let’s just get this old machine working first, and hope that fate isn’t tempted to rip any more foundations out from under it before something actually happens.

Oh! Hello!

---