A frequently given piece of advice for writers is to avoid long sentences. It’s one of the pieces of advice that I have always completely disregarded, as being obviously wrong: the thing to avoid is not long sentences, but complicated sentences. A sentence that is long can still be quite simple, if it doesn’t require the reader to remember previous parts of the sentence in order to parse the rest. Instead, each part of the sentence just extends the thought made in the previous one, with appropriate punctuation that shows the relationship between the two; a sentence of that sort can go on for many lines without confusing anyone. What is confusing is when a sentence does something like requiring the reader to remember which verb was used back forty words previously, before the sentence went off on a tangent. And the cure for such sentences is never as simple as just bisecting them. Often one can rearrange them to bring together the separated pieces of an idea; but if that doesn’t work, one has to drop the idea and then explicitly take it up again when one later comes back to it. Or, more brutally, one can axe the tangential remark; not everything needs to be said – or if it does need to be said, maybe it can be said somewhere else.

Most car recalls are pretty tame. But the recent Takata airbag recall is not one of them. It’s not your ordinary situation where something might malfunction in a mild way – say, a wire shorting out which might lead to a fire, which in turn might injure someone who handled the situation wrong. With these airbags, the risk is that when set off, they might explode and send shrapnel into you.

Something I’ve noticed a fair bit, recently, has been the use of the phrase “similar to” at the start of a sentence, where one would ordinarily use “like”. Say, instead of writing

When Donald Rumsfeld came out with his line about there being “unknown unknowns”, a lot of people laughed, and in response his defenders sneered at the laughers. But I didn’t see on either side a real appreciation of the phrase – indeed, I still haven’t, from anyone.

Trying to understand the immune system can seem like a neverending task. There are tens of different varieties or subvarieties of immune system cells, with new subvarieties being discovered every so often. For sending messages between those cells, there are tens (or is it hundreds?) of signaling molecules (“cytokines”, among others). A signaling molecule that turns up one part of the immune system may turn down another, as in (but almost certainly not limited to) the “Th1” versus “Th2” concept, itself a not very precise notion. There are also homeostatic loops in which the body reacts to its own reactions, damping an immune response when it has gone on for too long and threatens to be more damaging than it is worth.

One of the recent Snowden revelations was a catalog of spying items that the NSA’s “Tailored Access Operations” unit had for breaking into bad guys’ computers. Most of the items weren’t particularly surprising. We already know that since they can’t break cryptography, they try to break into endpoints, where the plaintext lives – and even if we hadn’t known that from recent revelations, it makes complete sense for them to operate that way. What was surprising was the Tempest stuff.

8 parts almond butter
1 part soy sauce
1 part fresh ginger, destroyed

The word “banksters” is thrown around a fair bit these days. But most of the time it doesn’t seem quite right: yes, bankers have gotten a lot of money from the government, but for the most part they “stole it fair and square”: their arguments were made in public, and approved by elected officials, by regulatory bureaucrats, and by most of the press. This is not gangster-like behavior. It is not bankers’ fault that too few others saw through their arguments and refuted them.

A request to members of the press: please quit using “militant” as a euphemism for “terrorist”. It just doesn’t work: by the normal usage of the English language, that isn’t even remotely what “militant” means. In normal usage, one might speak, for instance, of the militant members of Churchill’s cabinet, who wanted to impose sanctions on Japan, or of the militant members of the United Auto Workers, who wanted to go on strike. In neither case are these people who blow up women and children. Members of Churchill’s cabinet might risk war, and innocents might end up getting blown up as part of that war, but blowing them up isn’t the chief tactic or even something that will necessarily happen at all. Likewise, union violence has sometimes gotten ugly, but the accusation of ugly violence is in no way implied when one talks about “militant” union members. (If you screw up the language enough, in future it might be, but it isn’t now.) Even talking about “militant Islam” doesn’t yet imply that one is talking purely about terrorists, or even just about physically violent people: some aggression is implied, but it need not be physical; it might just be “lawfare”.

Ross Anderson’s book Security Engineering (the second edition of which is now available online for free) is generally quite good; but it’s still possible to tell, from the varying quality of the chapters, which subjects he personally has a lot of experience with. One of these is banking; his chapter on banking security is extraordinarily good. It even explains the reason for double-entry bookkeeping.