Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Imagine you want to criticise a political institution but it’s too difficult to find any examples of bad things that institution is responsible for. One thing you might do, if you were intellectually dishonest, is imagine a make-believe future where that institution does all the things you are afraid it might do, and then imagine terrible outcomes caused by these actions. If you are not limited by reality, it can be very easy to construct nightmare scenarios that everyone can agree would be bad, and you can pin the blame on anyone or anything you like in your scenario. If you don’t like being disagreed with then this method of arguing has the added advantage that it is impossible to rebut, as your opponent would have to state what is really going to happen in the future. I am not the first person to realise that it is unfair to argue against a position using an imaginary future, in fact this has a name: the straw man fallacy. Unfortunately no one has told the TaxPayers’ Alliance this, or if someone did, they didn’t listen. Instead, the TPA have produced a series of “arguments” against the EU based on a future, fictional EU and how bad it is, and a future, fictional UK that leaves the EU and how good it is. I normally like to deal in facts, but it’s difficult to argue directly against a straw man with facts, so I thought I’d present an opposing straw man, with my own view of what the EU, and the UK outside of it, could look like in the future.

Every now and then I find my mind gets caught on some seemingly trivial observation, and I end up following a chain of thought tangential to the one I was originally on, until I arrive at somewhere quite unexpected. Whereas people in former times may have been unable to travel too far down these intellectual rabbit holes, we now live in a world where Google and Wikipedia have made us seemingly omniscient, and hypertext in particular allows us to jump from one idea to the next, wherever our curiosity takes us. The secondary limit, I suppose, would be the ability to process all of this information that we amass while browsing the Web. As a programmer, though, there are certain options for information processing which are open to me but would not be readily available to non-programmers, and even if what I do with the processed information isn’t particularly ground-breaking, it can at least be the subject of a new blog post. As the title of this post suggests, my most recent such endeavour involved looking at Linux application names, and dictionary words, and below I explain what I found and how I found it.