The Beauty and Burden of Books

(First published in September 1992) 

There’s no doubt about it. I have too many books.

Too many is defined as: more books than I have shelf space for. My wife and I have instituted a very sensible rule which says that I’m not allowed to put up any more bookshelves; and I’m not allowed to buy any more books unless there is shelf space for them.

What this means is that I have to constantly cull my existing collection to get rid of the books that I don’t consider essential, to make room for any new ones.

And when I do this every few months (when my attempts to squash another new book on a shelf has resulted in a cascade over the side), I keep coming back to the basic philosophy of why I like to own books. My wife asks from time to time about a new purchase: “Couldn’t you get it from the library?”. Well, in some cases I could, but dammit, I want to own the book. But why? What are the reasons we want to possess books and keep them near us?

To read, yes. I don’t ever buy a book I don’t think I am going to read. I’m not a collector of first editions or of art books. If I buy a book, it is because I’d like to read it. Nevertheless, I calculate that I’ve only read about 60% of my collection. Out of a total of some 2,500 books, that means that I own some 1,000 books I haven’t read. Good grief! Will I ever read all of those books? Highly unlikely. And yet I still buy new books.

But why keep a book once I have read it? To re-read, of course. I love re-reading favourite books. I especially re-read a lot when my mind is at a low ebb. Re-reading is enjoyable because you know there aren’t going to be any unpleasant surprises!

And I do like to have reference books. I love to be able to look something up, either from casual interest, or because of a crossword or a competition in a newspaper, or to help my daughter with her homework. It peeves me no end if I can’t find the answer to some question in my own library.

Why else do I like to own books? I think a large part of it is just the sheer aesthetic pleasure of books. A well-made book is a beautiful thing to look at and handle. And rows of books generally look wonderful on the shelves, full of variety and interest. Despite my passion for computers, I can’t imagine electronic versions ever totally replacing the traditional book. There’s too much of a sensual pleasure in holding a book, feeling its weight and the texture of the cover under one’s fingers, turn ing the pages and being able to see at a glance how far you are from the end. In a very real sense, the technology of the printed book, the brilliantly appropriate techniques crafted and honed over nearly two thousand years, will take a lot of beating. Only when a computer version looks, feels and works like a book will there be substantial replacement of works printed in the traditional way.

But there is one dreaded aspect of books, and that is moving them. The volume and weight of numbers of books, once you take them down from the shelves, is simply astonishing. You can look up at a row of books on the shelves and think that you’ll easily fit them into a few cardboard boxes; but then when you try to do it, you find that you have filled all your boxes to the point where they are too heavy to lift, and you’ve only cleared half a shelf.

It’s also true that books have very little resale value. It makes me almost ill to see school fetes or markets selling hardback books for as little as 10 or 20 cents. To me, this devalues the worth and dignity of books.

Despite all that, I still love to own books, and I’ll certainly keep on buying them. I think perhaps half of the pleasure is browsing in a bookstore and finding a new treasure: a book long-sought-for, or a new volume dealing with a subject I’m really interested in.

Melbourne is reasonably well served with bookstores, but the best bookstores I’ve been to in Australia have been in Sydney, where they seem able to support quite specialist and academic bookstores like Abbeys. Their bookstores seem also to be much bigger: there’s nowhere in Melbourne as big as the Sydney Angus & Robertsons or their Dymock’s.

But when, clutching my new treasure, I get home and look up at the shelves, there’s that dreaded sinking feeling as I think:

“Now where is this going to fit…?”

I guess things haven’t really become much worse in the 16 years since I wrote this article. But on the other hand, they haven’t improved, either, either. Nanny is still going strong.

Yes, Nanny

(First published in September 1993)

I suppose it was inevitable.

Back in the bad old days, computer software was of the “hairy-chested” variety. If you couldn’t work out how to use it, that was just too damn bad.

Computer programs had to be started up with a series of cryptic and hard-to-remember options from the “command-line prompt”. Even if you could recognise that as the set of bizarre “C:>” characters that stood blinking at you imperiously from the top left of a black computer screen — why “C” ? – why a colon? – why a funny right angle bracket? — you still had to remember and to be able to type such impossibly awkward combinations as “split -fmyfile.zip -wmyfile.000 -s720″ in order to carry out perfectly ordinary functions.

If you used the Unix operating system, it was even worse. You had to know that “cat” meant “show me the contents of”, that “grep” meant “search for this bit of text”, that “ls” meant “show me the files on the hard disk”, and that “kermit” was neither the name of Theodore Roosevelt’s son nor the name of a little green frog on television, but a modem communications program.

But as the years went by, software gradually became more “user-friendly”. Commands became less cryptic, programs started to sport “menus”.

We reached the era of the “graphical user interface”, and of control using those weird Camembert-cheese-shaped objects now known fondly as “mice”. Once you mastered the non-trivial skill of learning to move something around on the desk in order to see a little arrow moving around in sympathy on the screen, you had joined the era of “point and click”. The only trouble was, there were suddenly an awful lot of things to point and click at, and pointing at the wrong thing at the wrong time could be as embarrassing as it would be in public.

Eventually, programs started to come with “Help” systems, even — good grief — “context sensitive” help systems, which gave us advice about just what we were trying to do at that moment. Software at last became easy to use, and if only things had stopped there, all would have been well.

But now we have reached the ultimate in helpful software, and in my humble opinion we have finally gone one step too far. Now we have reached the era of what I like to call “Nanny software”.

Nanny software knows what is for your own good, and is determined to let you know about it.

Nanny software asks you “Are you sure you want to delete that file, dear?”, and when you say “Yes,” asks “Now are you really sure? You can’t get it back afterwards, you know.”.

Nanny software says “Do you really want to copy that file over there?”, and you feel like screaming “Well, why else would I ask you to do it?!”.

The ultimate point has been reached, I think, with software like Microsoft Publisher 2.0, which contains the most bossy nanny I have yet encountered. Until you find out how to shut her up (a non-trivial undertaking), the MsPub nanny will keep on interrupting you whenever you try to do something with messages like “I see you’re trying to print out this document. Now, let me just show you how to do it better, dear.” or “You’ve been working on this document for a quarter of an hour, dear, and I think it’s about time you saved it.”.

The nanny in Microsoft Word 6.0 is just as bad. This one even insists on fixing your spelling for you as you type. “Now I know you typed ‘teh’, dear, but I’m sure you really meant to type ‘the’, so I’ve just changed it for you, wasn’t that nice of me?” Or it fixes the capitalisation for you, so that you can’t work out why you can’t type names like ‘McDonald’ because Nanny keeps changing it back to ‘Mcdonald’. After all she knows, even if you don’t, that you can’t have a capital in the middle of a word, now can you?

It seems that the future holds even more of this kind of thing. People are talking about developing intelligent “agents” which do such stuff as tidying up your computer desktop for you by putting files in folders where it thinks you would like them to go. You know what the result will be, of course. It’s like when the cleaning lady clears up your real desktop. You can’t find a damn thing for weeks.

Already we have “scheduler” software which interrupts you in the middle of a perfectly entertaining computer game to remind you about something. “Don’t forget to write that article for The Age”, or “You’re supposed to be on your way to Aunt Mabel’s” or “You’ll be late for your doctor’s appointment if you don’t hurry up”.

And then there’s grammar-checking software! It’s bad enough to have spelling checkers telling us that there is no such word as “gafia” and that there are two ‘p’s in “applicable”, but now we have software to nag us about the passive and active voice, and to tell us not to make our sentences too long, like this one, because long sentences are too difficult to understand.

I tell you, things have gone too far, and it won’t be too long before we have software which tells us we ought to send a thank-you note to Aunt Jane for the lovely pair of thick socks she sent us for Christmas, or which nags us to sign up for that aerobics program to get our weight down instead of spending so much time in front of the computer screen.

Just one step further, and we’ll have robots which make us chicken soup and tuck us up in bed at the first sign of a sniffle. Shades of Jack Williamson’s horrifying story With Folded Hands.

In fact, I’m starting to realise what the word “personal” means in “personal computer”. It means “damned impudent” as in “if I may ask a personal question…”.

It’s true that I don’t want to go back to the days of “hairy-chested” computing, but I do think that we have to re-assert our dignity a little bit and get rid of software which pampers us to the point of irritation. In other words, it’s time we left the nursery for good, gave Nanny the sack and let her perambulate away into the sunset, never to be seen again.

The Pleasures of Poetry

(First published in February 1996)

The trouble with a lot of high school courses, I suspect, is that rather than leading you down to the pool and inviting you to drink, they drag you down screaming and try to push you in, leading to a life-long aversion to water.

At least that seems to have been the way it was when I went to school, thirty years or so ago. But I’m not confident that things have changed since.

Among the subjects that seem to have been spoiled in this way for people are most of mathematics and literature. Being forced to digest either algebra or Dickens before you have acquired a taste for them is probably the main reason that most adults appear to suffer indigestion at the very mention of either.

In particular, I fear that many people have their taste for poetry spoilt by their experiences at school. Few adults, I imagine, nowadays read or re-read poetry for pleasure. If you have any books of poetry in your house, the odds are that they are the remnants of your school or university education rather than the result of a deliberate purchase.

I have to confess that this certainly applies to me, but on the other hand every few years or so I seem to re-discover the pleasures of poetry, and I start picking up my old school volumes and begin to dip here and there, rediscovering my old favourites and from time to time discovering new ones.

What exactly is ‘poetry’? It’s a curious word, suggesting that it can only be defined as the result of what poets do – as though all furniture could only be defined as ‘carpentry’ – that is, the result of what a carpenter does.

Poetry often but not always involves some kind of rhyme – an odd convention when you think about it. And poetry often uses rhythm, with or without rhyme. But neither of these is essential to what makes something poetry. Is the following a poem? I think it is, yet it has neither rhythm nor rhyme:

You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and the pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
(1)

What seems to be constant, at least in the best poetry, is a heightened, almost ceremonial use of language, a precise care about how every word should sound.

More than anything poetry expresses a profound emotion, or tries to call up some deep feeling from us:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(2)

This is in danger of starting to sound like one of those English Lit classes that destroy so many people’s love of literature! That is the opposite of my intention. What I want to show you here is why some poetry appeals to me and why I am drawn back to it. Poetry which works for me calls forth some profound sympathetic feeling, as when Yeats writes out for us the city dweller’s yearning to escape to a simpler life:

…for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
(3)

“I hear it in the deep heart’s core”. That is a phrase that strikes for me a resounding chord. To analyse why that phrase works, as one would do in school, would be to destroy it.

I have a poor memory for recalling whole poems. It is individual verses or phrases of great power and beauty that stay in my mind:

But at my back I always hear
Times winged chariot hurrying near.
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
(4)

How well that expresses the urgency of time, as Marvell urges his coy mistress not to waste it, in what must surely be the most famous of all come-ons in literature.

Or, another example in the same vein, the wry humour as Shakespeare debunks the overblown romantic nonsense of some poetic lovers:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
…I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
(5)

Or poetry can inspire in us a sense of magic and mystery:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past hours are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot…
(6)

It can range from humorous playing with words and ideas…

O who shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In Feet, and manacled in Hands…
(7)

…to the tragedy of modern times:

…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….
(8)

The subject of love poetry is a large one, but this poem is dear to my heart (it formed part of our wedding ceremony):

If questioning could make us wise,
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes.
If all our tale were told in speech
no mouths would wander each to each…
(9)

And then there’s poetry which one loves just because of the wonderful sound of it:

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to Man
Down to a sunless sea.
(10)

A great deal of the pleasure I find in reading poetry is re-discovering the context of magical fragments like these.

There is a delight in the sound and texture of this language on one’s tongue, and an upwelling of feeling that, for me, makes poetry well worth returning to again and again:

…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

————————-
Sources:

(1) G.K.Chesterton, untitled poem
(2) Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
(3) W.B.Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
(4) Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
(5) W.Shakespeare, Sonnets CXXX
(6) John Donne, “Song”
(7) Andrew Marvell, “A Dialog Between Body and Soul”
(8) W.B.Yeats, “The Second Coming”
(9) Christopher Brennan, “Because She Would Ask Me Why I Love Her”
(10) S.T.Coleridge, “Kublai Khan”

(It may be objected, and with justice, that these examples are all drawn from the now fashionably-discredited white male-dominated Anglo-Saxon culture. That’s true. But while I have no objection to others celebrating their culture in their own way, the fact is that I am a white Anglo-Saxon male – this is my culture, and I see nothing wrong with celebrating it and, indeed, rejoicing in it.)

I hope that things have changed a little in programming circles since I wrote this 13 years ago, particularly with regard to the gender balance… but I’m not so sure!

This Rough Magic

(First published in July 1996)

From time to time as part of training for my job I attend computer programming seminars of various kinds. The most important is the annual Microsoft Tech Ed conference.

Now, whenever I go to one of these events, it immediately strikes me what a heterogenous collection of people are in attendance.

With no exaggeration at all, the audience is always 95% to 99% male. At least 30% of the attendees have beards and are bespectacled. Well over 75% are wearing jumpers, cardigans or short sleeves (depending on the weather), and look as though wearing a suit or even a tie would be absolute anathema to them. By far the majority have a distant, dreamy look.

What is very depressing to me is that I fit this stereotype perfectly.

But I’m also very puzzled. Certainly when I did my graduate diploma in computing, the students did not fit this stereotype; indeed the gender balance was almost equal, and the dress sense of both men and women was far more formal.

It seems there’s a great difference between the students of computer science and those who end up as practictioners of programming and the more technical side of things.

As I looked over the audience at the last such conference, it slowly began to dawn on me that there was a strange and compelling similarity between this group of people and that of another such group as described in history and legends.

Computer programmers are, in fact, wizards.

Think about it.

A group of almost entirely male. usually bearded, practioners of art which is highly arcane to the general public. A group of unworldly men absorbed in their books and their learning. Men who spend most of their days staring into a glowing crystal screen, muttering and cursing at it.

These people treasure special methods of doing things written in obscure languages. These methods may have been inherited from others, or found in special texts, or may have been worked out painstakingly by themselves by trial and error. Certainly they treasure their private libraries of methods and tools which they can use to alter the way things work. What is an algorithm if not a spell? What is a spell, if not an algorithm written in a difficult to understand language?

In the world of the computer, these people have real power to affect reality, and to conjure up things that were not there before.

There are some who have sold their souls to evil, and who create spells/programs which attack and destroy the work of others. Others, more pure-minded, who have dedicated themselves to the common good.

Looked at in this light, it is no wonder that there are so few women among this group. Wizards, both in Terry Pratchett’s books and in real legend, are an exclusively masculine lot. Witches operate in a different mode and gather in different groups. Not for them the lure of obscure knowledge and power, more the practical application of skills to everyday life.

For the wizard, often the more esoteric the knowledge, the more difficult the language, the more obscure the task, the better. How else to explain the popularity of cryptic programming languages such as C++ and Lisp?

The obsession that these people have is a strange one. It is certainly the lure of power, enormous power, within a particular sphere. It is the power of creation and destruction; of life and death, if you like. But the world in which this power is wielded is not the real world. It is the universe of cyberspace.

For all the increasing dominance of computers in our workplaces and our everyday lives, it is hard to imagine that these dreamy, bearded souls who are wizards or programmers depending on how you look at it, are ever likely to control the world.

Shakespeare, as always, knew the truth of it when he has his wizard-Duke, Prospero, recall wistfully:

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported,
And rapt in secret studies.

– The Tempest, Act I Scene II

The Infernal Engine

(First published in October 1995)

It came to me only recently that spell-checkers are the invention of the Devil.

No, seriously.

Well, an invention if not of the cloven-hoofed gentleman, then certainly of someone or thing whose intent is the Destruction of All We Hold Dear.

It was General Jack D. Ripper, I think, who informed us that fluoridation of drinking water was all a dirty commie plot to Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. These days, with the end of the Cold War, I would hesitate to point the finger in the same direction, but I ask you, have you ever heard of a Russian spell-checker? You bet your sweet babushka you haven’t.

I came to this revelation only recently, I must admit. But it all came clear to me when I was reading an article in “The Age” newspaper, on the concerns that parents have about the apparent decline in their children’s reading and writing skills. The article reported (unidentified) teachers as claiming that it was no longer necessary to teach children how to spell. “After all,” they went on, “there’s always the spell-checker”.

That was bad enough, but then I went on to read that the “whole-learning” approach depended on children learning to read, not by spelling out the sounds, but by learning to recognise the whole word in context, using “picture queues” and other non-verbal evidence.

Picture queues? Putting aside images of portraits lined up to get into a gallery, I puzzled over this for a long time, until I realised that what was meant were “picture cues”, that is, hints from illustrations. The article, I realised with a sense of impending dread, had been spell-checked!

“Queues” is a perfectly good word, of course. It would have passed the spell-checker easily. But it was the wrong word, and entirely the wrong meaning in the context of the sentence. A queue is something long and boring, the epitome of inaction. A cue, on the other hand, as in a billiard cue, is something which prompts something else into action.

A perfect example, in other words, of why spelling is important, and why spell-checkers are the invention of the Devil, or of someone who admires him.

Later in the same edition of the newspaper, in an article discussing ethics, we see “principle” used incorrectly instead of “principal”, greatly confusing the sense.

No newspaper in Australia now employs a proof-reader. The profession of proof-reader is going the same way as that of gas-lighter. Archaic, unnecessary, old-fashioned. Yet its loss will leave us all in the dark.

The problem with spell-checkers, of course, is that they don’t check spelling. They merely have a long list of combinations of letters which are known to be valid English words; and the best they can do is to report that a certain combination is not in its list. This entirely negative check does pick up some mis-typings of course, otherwise no-one would use spell-checkers. But as any Scrabble player knows, there are some very weird combinations of letters which are perfectly valid English words. Worse still, people can add their own words to the list in the spell-checker, if they find the checker regularly picking them up and questioning them. Ah, blessed relief: no more annoying “Ignore, Change, Add?” messages from the spell-checker. But the result is, that over time, the list of accepted spelling combinations in the checker gets longer and longer, and fewer and fewer mis-spellings are actually identified.

Spell-checkers would still have their uses even so, but because of sheer laziness, or for short-sighted economic reasons in the case of the newspapers, no-one who has run a spell-checker over an article feels any impulse or duty to read it to pick up any other errors, let alone to check for sense and coherence. The result is that the quality of journalism (never very high) is plunging rapidly. One frequently these days comes across sentences or phrases in published material which simply do not make sense, or which are so badly mangled that one has to give up in disgust. So no example is set to young people of good writing, and so the standards of literacy continue to drop into the abyss.

A friend of mine recently tried to convince me that within five years keyboards will be a thing of the past: all computer input will be through voice-recognition.

“But what about words which sound the same, but have different spelling?”.

“Oh, artificial intelligence will sort all that out,” he said airily. “Besides, we have spell-checkers.”

The trouble with artificial intelligence, of course, is that mostly it is artificial stupidity: dumbness repeated over and over again a million times to achieve a result. Like trying out a million possible moves in a game of chess. Like checking every word against a vast list of possibilities.
But the worst thing of all about spell-checkers is that I reckon they are going to halt the process of spelling reform. Lord knows, the English language is full of odd and non-phonetical spellings: that’s probably why we need spell-checkers in the first place. Laugh, cough, bough, though. Night and fright. Photograph.

Without the invention of the spell-checker, there was at least some hope that over a period of time English spelling would become more rational: the Americans have at least made a start on it. But if my spell-checker, based on an Australian dictionary, rejects “center” in favour of “centre”, “color” in favour of “colour”, and refuses to play along if I attempt “nite” or “foto”, what hope is there for spelling reform? We are all going to be locked into late 20th Century spellings of the particular country we base our dictionaries on. The process of slow shiftings in spelling will just stop.

Similarly, old, obscure or esoteric words will drop from use because the spell-checker won’t let them through – try using a great word like “logodaedaly”, for example, and have the Microsoft Word nanny peremptorily interrupt you and tell you to correct that word it has underlined in red for you, you naughty person!

To close, I can’t do better than to quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, written long before spell-checkers, but presaging their invention:

Lexicographer, n.

A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods… Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its resoration to favor – whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary”…

Ignore, Change, Add?

Why I Hate Computers

(First published in July 1995)

 
My feelings towards computers must, I imagine, be like those of an Arabian camel driver towards his camels.

They are essential to his business, indeed they are his business. On good days, he may admit to a sneaking fondness for them. But most of the time he has to put enormous effort into getting them up and running and doing what they are supposed to. And on bad days – which seem to be most days – they spit in his eye or kick him up the backside.

The Multimedia Camel - that's the pretty black camel with the jewelled humps and four left feet.

And on really bad days, when he is desperately trying to get a valuable caravan full of dates between Kuwait and Riyadh before they spoil, they get lost and take him on an unguided tour of an Iraqi minefield.

Ten years ago, if you had asked me why I hated computers, I would have said that I hated them because they always did exactly what I told them to. Not what I meant them to. Only what I told them to. And they would do it every time. The analogy back then would not have been with camels, but with a dumb but keen mongrel dog who treated your morning newspaper the way she treated the sticks you threw for her down at the park – sure, she fetched it, but you didn’t tell her not to chew it, now did you? But at least you knew that she’d chew it every time.

In the last ten years, we have had incredible progress in computers and computing power. Only it didn’t quite go the way we expected it to. We thought we were developing artificial intelligence. Instead what we got was – artificial stupidity.

Computers and their operating systems have now become so complex that they are no longer the least bit predictable. Now they are like camels. One day, you hit your lead camel with a stick and he’ll get up and start moving. The next day, he might bite you on the knee instead.

It’s like that with modern computers: now they have attitude. Things are never exactly the same two days running. One day they’ll work perfectly, next you find that some perfectly innocuous program you’ve used a hundred times before has decided to bite back and refuse to work.

There’ll be a reason for it of course – computers are not subject to random whims. But finding out why may be beyond the wit of humans. There’s probably a reason the camel bit you on the knee, too, but what are your chances of finding out?

But camels, compared to computers, at least have a saving grace: they don’t talk back.

They may spit disgusting stuff at you and defecate on your foot, but at least they don’t say with bland and infuriating calmness: “Sorry, a system error has occurred” and show you a pretty picture of a time-bomb while spilling your dates all over the sand dune.

We are moving now, it seems, towards computers that can be controlled by voice. Indeed, Microsoft will sell you a sound system that comes with a neat microphone that clips to the top of your computer monitor. The trouble is, they don’t explain what will happen when you come out with the most common phrase I hear people yelling at their computers, the infuriated, baffled: “What!?!”.

I suspect the computer will just smirk at you with that sloppy, supercilious sneer that camels have and head off at high speed into the desert carrying away all your precious data, never to be seen again.