Hedge Trimmer Safety, 1968

(first posted 20th September 2016)

The Black & Decker D470 (U-272) Hedge Trimmer

If you want the kids to cut the hedge and mow the lawn, get them some dangerous power tools and they’ll do it happily while you’re at work. On no account stay home to watch or they won’t do it. Or if they do, they’ll make it look so risky you’ll have to do it yourself. 

My brother and I fell for it. We moved to a house with a six-foot high hedge all along the side. We had to cut both sides because it was next to a field. Dad came home with two seriously businesslike items of equipment: an Atco petrol mower and a Black & Decker electric hedge trimmer with a sixteen-inch blade. The mower, to which I owe a useful understanding of engines, particularly the operation of the clutch, is long gone, but the hedge trimmer is in my shed. It still works, and I still use it.

Electric hedge trimmers are brutal pieces of equipment. They cause more than three thousand injuries in the U.K. every year, mainly lacerated fingers and electric shock. After all, they are designed to cut through twigs the thickness of your fingers. Today they boast numerous safety features. They have two switches to ensure you keep both hands on the machine at all times, and the blades stop the instant either switch is released. They have blade extensions: fixed teeth which extend beyond the cutting blades so you cannot hurt yourself by accidentally brushing the trimmer against your leg. They have cable protection such as coiling and a belt clip to stop you cutting through it. They have guards to protect your hands from flying or falling debris.

Not only that, they also come with pages of warnings against the ill-advised actions of idiot users. They tell you to wear heavy duty gloves, non-slip shoes and suitable clothing, not to wear a scarf or neck tie, and to tie up long hair. They suggest eye and ear protection, but to be aware that ear protection impedes your ability to hear warnings. They advise against using the trimmer in damp weather, and to watch out for roots and other obstacles you might fall over. And you should always use an RCD (GFCI) circuit breaker.

Your imagination starts to work overtime as you picture the terrible accidents and injuries that might occur. The manufacturers really do think you are an idiot. They say you should never use the equipment while tired or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. You must not permit bystanders, especially children and animals. You should not cut where you cannot see, and should always first check the other side of the hedge you are trimming. Never hold the trimmer with one hand, they say, hinting that those who do might henceforth be left with only one hand to hold it with. And to ensure they have covered everything, including themselves, they tell you never to use the trimmer for any purpose other than for cutting shrubs and hedges. They seem unwilling to specify what these other purposes might be in case you take it as a recommendation. “Do not use the trimmer for shearing sheep,” they could say, “or for grooming your poodle.”

Some manufacturers even include warnings about vibration-induced circulatory problems (white finger disease), and provide advice specifically for those whose heart pacemakers might be affected by the magnetic fields around the motor. And all of this is before they get on to things that might go wrong with petrol driven trimmers and their toxic exhaust fumes and inflammable fuel, which I suppose would have applied to the motor mower my brother and I used to enjoy unsupervised.

The warnings seem so comprehensive they must be based on real accidents and incidents that have occurred over the years since home power tools emerged in the nineteen-sixties. Did someone, somewhere, magnetically disrupt their heart pacemaker and drop down dead? Did someone else, in their business suit straight from the office, catch up their necktie and die through strangulation? Could you really chop up your pet cat hiding at the other side of the hedge? And did some simpleton, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, imagine their hedge trimmer as a light sabre, and prance down the garden like Obi-Wan Kenobi to be electrocuted when the power cord tightened around their ankle and tripped them into the fish pond? 

So, just how many of these safety features do you think are designed into the 1968 Black & Decker D470 (or U-272 in the United States) electric hedge trimmer? Practically none of course, save for blade extensions and a few warnings. The manufacturers thought it more important to tell you about its power, speed and ruggedness, and the sharpness of the tempered spring steel blade. There is nothing to prevent you from using it one-handed, and it will keep going even when you put it down. One-handed is actually useful: you can reach further without having to move your step-ladder.

When you switch off it takes two or three seconds to stop. That is why my brother did have an accident. At home on his own one summer afternoon aged about fifteen he helpfully thought he would trim the hedge. He caught the end of his finger in the blade and had to phone Mum at work because he thought he might need to go to hospital, which he did. He had cut about a third of the way into the side of his nail and only noticed when his arm began to feel wet. 

Maybe I shouldn’t use it, but I do. It may be so old as not even to get a mention on the Black & Decker web site, but why buy a new one when it is still good? Modern ones are so feeble they need replacing within ten years. This one has already lasted over fifty.

In any case, hedge trimmers are only the third most frequent cause of garden injuries requiring hospital treatment. Far more people are hurt by lawn mowers and even by plant pots.

Instruction sheet for the Black & Decker D460 and D470 (U-272 or 8120) hedge trimmers

Siemens A55

(Updated from original post of 22nd June 2016)

There were gasps of astonishment as billionaire Sir Philip Green, answering MPs’ questions about the BHS department store scandal, checked his texts on a cheap, twelve-year-old Nokia 6310. Surely, you would expect him to be able to afford the latest Diamond Rose iPhone.

All kinds of reasons why he might be using such an obsolete device were suggested: the Nokia was made to last; battery life is outstanding; he does not want constant email interruptions; pre-GPS phones are not easy to track; he is penny-pinchingly mean; he likes playing Snake 2. 

Who knows? Maybe all of these. That was in 2016. But I’m still with Sir Philip, especially the penny-pinchingly mean. Here’s mine – even older – a Siemens A55 bought October 2003. It’s a phone. It does texts. It works. And no, I do not play Stack Attack, Balloon Shooter, Move the Box and Wacko.

With O2 Pay As You Go, you have to top up at least once every 999 days so as not to lose your account and credit balance. My diary (paper of course) noted I next needed to top up before 13th July, 2016. £10 would see to it. There is also a usage requirement but a weekly text from the bank meets that. Some weeks I forget to switch it on.

NOVEMBER 2018 

Sir Philip was in the news again with unflattering revelations about his other behaviours and attitudes. I added a note emphasising I did not share them. For example, I do not iron creases in my jeans (for comic effect I wanted to add that my wife does it for me, but actually I iron my own jeans). I still had my ancient phone, though. 

AUGUST 2021

I still have it. I still use it. Will it make twenty years? Or will I have to get a smartphone to go places, buy things and prove my vaccination status? Even King Canute was forced to get one in the end.

I know it’s eccentric and appreciate that smartphones can be useful, but I’d hardly use one. I also fear what I’d be like. It’s something to do with having worked with computers. I like the idea of not being instantly contactable. I’d be constantly fiddling with it while eating, or fact checking during conversations. I like to let thoughts take their course rather than being hijacked first thing in a morning. That’s why I try not to switch on the computer until I’ve done at least a couple of jobs, like ironing jeans. The daft thing is, I could probably program them (phones not jeans, although maybe when we get smartjeans...).

Dear Google User...

I have wondered for some time how long it can be sustainable for internet providers to keep storing ever increasing amounts of data. It all relies on chains of energy-burning electronics which must be enormously expensive in terms of hardware and energy use. It has even been suggested that if each person in Britain sent one fewer email per day it could save over 16,000 tons of carbon a year, equivalent to thousands of flights.

It looks as if Google are beginning to do something. Like me, you may have received this email:

Dear Google User,

We are writing to let you know that we recently announced new storage policies for Google Accounts using Gmail, Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard files) and/or Google Photos that bring us in line with industry practices. Since you have previously used one or more of these products in your Google Account storage, we wanted to tell you about the new policies well before they go into effect on June 1, 2021. Below is a summary of the new policies. Please reference our Help Center article for a complete list of what's changing...

The email provides links to policies and a help centre article. 

In essence, it goes on to say that if after the 1st June, 2023, you have not used these services for 24 months, or if you have exceeded your storage quota, they might delete your content. Other outfits such as Flickr have already started deleting things. I like the bit about it being “in line with industry practices” as if they have some kind of standards. There is the suspicion it is all about cutting the costs of non-profitable activities.

In other words, we can’t assume our stuff is going to remain in perpetuity. I guess, eventually, this may also apply to Blogger, Wordpress and other blogging platforms. At present, we can read blogs written twenty years ago or more, but it might not always be the case. All those interesting, witty and wonderful posts and comments we have all made could simply disappear.

Hi there Duggy!

A student sends an awkward email to an eminent professor

Early in the nineteen-nineties, I came across a strikingly enlightening piece of research that suggested that girls who learn things together, remember much more than boys. It was an experiment in which pairs of eight-year-old children explored an interactive videodisk – the kind of thing that tells an illustrated story in which, if you click on a word or group of words, it reads it out, and if you click on an object or character in a scene then something happens, for example clicking a parked car in a street scene sets off the alarm, or clicking a tray of biscuits in a kitchen makes them sing. It was a new and unusual experience at the time. 

Some weeks later the children were asked to write essays about it on their own. The surprising result was that girls who had been paired with other girls remembered twice as much as boys or girls who had been paired in other combinations.* There were other aspects to the experiment too, making a useful contribution to the idea that educational software can encourage learning through collaboration as well as individually.

I stumbled upon this as a new lecturer in a recently upgraded northern ex-polytechnic, hoping to carve a niche for myself by devising innovative courses about emerging technologies. I asked students each to lead a small, short seminar about a published research paper from a list. One student, let us call him Arshad, chose the paper about the pairs of children and the videodisk. 

Email was relatively new in those days. Some university staff still resisted its use, and those who welcomed it were having to come to terms with the accessibility and informality it brings. We took pains to educate students about the possible pitfalls. It seemed inevitable that things would sometimes go wrong, but it was with disbelief that I read the email Arshad had sent to the author of the research paper.

The author was Professor Dougman Fairwood, an eminent and influential Head of Department in a top Russell-group university, author of numerous books, review articles and research papers across a wide range of topics. He had been awarded many high-value research grants, guided no end of doctoral students to successful completion, served on government advisory committees and was internationally respected in his field. You get the idea. Think of those over-achieving grey academics who only creep into the public eye when they advise or criticise governments in times of crisis. Most are pathological workaholics and take themselves very seriously. They get upset if you don’t address them formally, or fail to treat them with the respect and deference they think they deserve. 

This is the email Arshad sent:

From: sexyarshad@screaming.net
To: d.p.fairwood@-----.ac.uk
Subject: Study questions?
Hi there Duggy!
Hows it going,, My name is Arshad A-----, Im a student at --- University, Currently I am reviewing one of your publications titled “------------ ---- ----- ----------”. Its realy cool and I would be very gratefull if you or you coauthor Mrs Farwood would be so kind to answer a few questions reagding the study.
1 - Was there any initial asumptons taken into account about the children taking part in the study? (if any, how valid were the asumptons?).
2 - Taking a retrospective look at the study, how well do you think the study was carried out?, do you think anything was overlooked in terms of implemantaion or methodolgy?
3 - Do you think your study has any implicatons or links to other ideas?
4 - How importantly do you think your study is relevent today and more importantly in the future?
Thanks in advance
Keep it up
Arshad A-----.

It was not long before an angry reply was circulated to staff.

Dear Colleagues

The attached is a message received both here and by my co-author, and comes, apparently, from a --- University student. The student does not identify his Department, so I’m sending this complaint to the Heads of Psychology, Education, Computer Science, Engineering, Multimedia and Information Systems, with a copy to the Vice Chancellor.

Your student appears to be writing an assignment on one of our papers, and the questions that we are being asked are just the kinds of questions that a tutor might set. Is it your practice to have your students get the answers to their questions by doing the equivalent of looking at the back of the book? Obviously not, and you might want to take some action to inform the student about your preferred practice.

But the main reason for writing is to complain about the e-mail itself. The interrogational style had ------ and I phoning each other to ask what was going on here. Speaking for myself, I am decidedly cheesed off with this e-mail. Being asked to justify the validity of my own assumptions, or the relevance of my work, is something that I do not expect from a student hoping to pass a term paper. Of course, if you believe that your student is doing exactly the right thing here, then I would be especially grateful to hear from you.

Best regards

Dougman Fairwood.

Professor Dougman P. Fairwood BSc PhD DSc CPsychol FBPsS
Head, Department of -----
University of -----

cc Professor Susan A. Fairwood BEd PhD

I can think of at least five so-called rules of email etiquette Arshad ignored, but even had all been followed correctly, the content was way out of order. Students may well have genuine grounds for writing to staff at other universities, but they should always pass it by their own supervisors first. They certainly should not do it in such a clumsy and tactless way.

I drafted a grovelling apology but never had to send it. It turned out that our Head of Department had already apologised on behalf of the university believing that Arshad had been reading around for his final-year project. No one ever associated his email message with the course I was teaching. That was fortunate because at the very next academic conference I attended, I got into conversation with the friendly chap sitting next to me and asked his name. “I’m Doug Fairwood,” he answered and invited me along for a coffee. We had an interesting chat about interactive videodisks.

I raised the matter of the email with Arshad but he paid little attention, and when his seminar came along it was fairly obvious he had not really read or understood the research paper at all. He still graduated that year with a respectable degree – well, he was a nice enough lad and the university did not like us to fail people. I wonder what he’s doing now.


* One possible reason for the girls’ so much stronger recall is rehearsal, i.e. the more you repeat something the better you will remember it. Girls, being more sociable, seem more likely to have talked about their experiences afterwards between themselves, possibly in play. Strangely, the authors did not consider this in their paper. Professor Fairwood seemed very interested when I suggested it to him. 

Acornsoft

Another bit of the memoir

For every multi-megabucks idea, there must be thousands that come to nothing at all. I thought I’d got one once, but it didn’t happen. Within a few months, I was down at the Labour Exchange signing on for unemployment benefit. 

It was educational software. The government had decided every school should have a computer. Generous funding was provided, advice centres were set up, projects started and teachers trained. Most schools bought “The BBC Microcomputer”, a machine commissioned to accompany a television series and computer literacy project. The manufacturer, Acorn, did very well, eventually selling over half a million machines into schools and homes. A subsidiary company, Acornsoft, was also raking it in by supplying games and educational software to go with the BBC machine.

Acornsoft Word Sequencing
written by Ann and Russel Wills

Much of this early educational software was unexciting, and some was terrible, but there was so little available it was all in terrific demand. For instance, there was a literacy program called Word Sequencing which simply asked children to rearrange jumbled sentences into the correct order. The example on the cover was “Cobras deadly are snakes”. Another (in correct order) was “Brush your teeth twice a day”. The full set consisted of just eighty-eight fairly random sentences. I suppose it had its benefits, but I would not have been too happy with a maths or language textbook that offered only eighty-eight test questions. I would also expect them to be in some kind of logical progression. Yet, because teachers and parents were naïve and feared missing out on the microcomputer revolution, it sold a lot of copies. They were priced at £9.95 each.

To be fair, educationalists had yet to understand what kinds of computer-based activities were best. Word Sequencing would have been referred to as “drill and practice” because it repetitively “drilled” learners through a sequence of practice questions. It follows the ideas of behavioural psychologists such as B. F. Skinner and their theories of conditioning. Developmental and educational psychologists, however, were sceptical of this approach, and argued that computer-based learning could be more effective by promoting playful exploration or collaboration with others.

More by luck than judgment, I found myself well-placed to work in this area having recently completed a degree in psychology and an M.Sc. in computing. My M.Sc. project had been with programs that handled language, similar to early chatbots. I got a job with a university team researching how computers might help children whose understanding of language had been held back by conditions such as deafness or learning difficulties. These children needed a lot of one-to-one support, and it was thought that computers might be able to help with the workload of psychologists, speech therapists and teachers. The team had collected thousands of carefully structured sentences from established remedial schemes, and I was taken on to write the computer programs that used these materials.

We were not using BBC computers which would not have been up to the task (they had a thousandth the speed and a quarter of a millionth the memory of a modern laptop), but in my own time  I started to think about what might be done with a BBC. One idea came from an early artificial intelligence program called SHRDLU from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was capable of holding written conversations about objects of various shape, size and colour. You could ask it questions and instruct it to move things around.

I came up with around twenty much-simplified versions of the idea, each of which just squeezed into a BBC and made use of its (rather limited) colour graphics. Some posed problems that had to be solved by asking questions and giving instructions.

A sequence from one of the programs

My supervisor started talking about the programs at academic conferences, which caught the attention of Acornsoft. The managing director came to see us: a tall, young-faced man, precisely how you might imagine a successful computing entrepreneur to be, who uncurled himself languidly from the driving seat of his sporty Jaguar, took one look at the software and said: “I’ll buy it”.

They would pay 25% royalties and, going by Word Sequencing, would expect to ship at least twenty-five thousand during the first year. F-ing hell! Do the maths. Twenty-five per cent of twenty-five thousand at £9.95 a time. How long before I too would be languidly uncurling myself from the driving seat of a sporty Jaguar?

Then the university management heard about it. I was hauled before one of the deputy vice chancellors and firmly told that anything I invented was the intellectual property of the university: it had been developed on university equipment and despite doing it in my own time my contract specified I had no own time.

Acornsoft already had the programs anyway, and we had also proposed a new project under which they would fund my university salary to dream up educational software to create collaborative learning activities over computer networks. We had only vague notions of what these activities might be, but four brand new BBC Microcomputers with as yet unreleased Econet nodes rapidly arrived free from Acornsoft – over two thousand pounds-worth of kit.

Then we waited for the programs to be published. And we waited for the new project agreement to arrive. And we waited longer. And my fixed-term employment expired but Acorn assured us the new agreement would soon be with us, so I worked for almost a month unpaid. And then Acorn ran into financial difficulties due to problems with the new Acorn Electron and Acorn Business Computer and heavy research and development costs, and was broken up and sold off. My programs were never published and the new project never started, and I had to sign on the dole. That was my brave new world of 1984.

For a short time, I really believed I’d made it. It would never have turned me into a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but when the average U.K. house price was still under £30,000, it could have set me up very comfortably.

There was just one minor benefit. I still had one of the new BBC computers and used it for games and word processing for six or seven years. I even won my Elite badge. Then my nephew borrowed it for three or four years more. Acorn did ask for all four machines back during the winding-up process (I have no idea what happened to the other three), but I ignored it and never heard anything more. It finally conked out around 2005.

Norn Iron

I had been asked (i.e. told) at short notice to give an outline of our business computing system to some new customers whose primary contact had been sent off to an urgent problem abroad. All I knew was that the four guys in front of me were from an outfit called NIPF and that they spoke with those throaty Northern Irish voices you sometimes hear on television. One, a big, confident man in his fifties with a shiny, shaved head and intense stare, was clearly in charge. Another was half his size and looked a bit shifty. I began, predictably, by introducing myself and asking their names.

“Con Cluskey,” answered the one on the left.

“John Stokes,” said the big, confident man.

“Eric Wrixon,” said the third.

“John Stokes,” said the little, shifty guy.

“Oh! That’s interesting.” I exclaimed. “So, you’re John Stokes as well? You’re both called John Stokes?”

John Stokes 2 looked flustered. “Sorry. It’s Morrison... Van… er, George… George Morrison… George Morris.”

“He’s very tired,” said John Stokes 1.

It was unsettling, but it seemed best to let it go and get on with the presentation. I showed them the system: how it could keep track of their computers and printers and other pieces of equipment, and would tell them when they needed updating or maintaining, and could record what things had gone wrong and repairs that had been carried out, and what parts they used, and so on. All went well.

When I got home that evening, I told the future Mrs. D. about the guy who didn’t know his own name.

“As if they weren’t using their real names,” she suggested.

It turned out that was indeed the case. In fact, they possibly did not even know each others’ real names. And it wasn’t just for maintaining computers they had bought the system. They had mobile communications equipment, surveillance kit and other stuff they’d rather not talk about.

Three or four weeks later, the Customer Support Director called me in. He asked me (i.e. told me) to go to Belfast to run a two-day training course for NIPF’s staff.

“It’s extremely confidential,” he warned. “They asked specifically for you. You have been checked out and granted security clearance. I would fully understand if you didn’t want to go. It would not count against you in any way .” Of course he would. Of course it wouldn’t. I started to feel very apprehensive. Not put too fine a point on it, I felt a bit sick. 

NIPF was a covert name for the Northern Ireland Police Force, then known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). It was the late nineteen-eighties and they were still dealing with the ethno-nationalist “Troubles” between warring paramilitary groups. Three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) had recently been shot by British security forces in Gibraltar, and at their funeral in Belfast a member of the opposing Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had thrown grenades at the coffin and shot three people dead. At one of the ensuing funerals, two British Army corporals were surrounded in their car, taken away and killed. It was not a place any English person would go for a holiday.

When I told the future Mrs. D. where I was going, not even giving the full details, she almost had a meltdown. It’s the kind of thing that brings home how much you love each other.

Well, I am still here. NIPF gave me strict rules to follow. I would be met at the airport and taken to a hotel. The hotel was safe, but I was not to leave it under any circumstances. I would be collected each morning and taken to NIPF’s HQ, and returned to the hotel again in the evening. They would take me back to the airport at the end of the second day. I should speak as little as possible so as not to reveal my English accent. Everything would be fine, they assured me. The effect was to make me even more queasy and apprehensive.

John Stokes 1 collected me from Belfast International Airport. The windows of his Ford Granada had inch-thick glass. He warned me to mind my hands as he heaved shut the heavy door. It was reinforced with steel plating. The car averaged about seven miles to the gallon. When I asked was it all really necessary he said the route between the airport and hotel passed through bandit country and it would be dangerous if we broke down. Otherwise, it was just like being at any other customers’ except for the armoured Land Rovers parked outside, and the canteen where uniformed squaddies piled their submachine guns and body armour outside in the corridor. I didn’t eat much.

One thing I did like was the Belfast accent: the way they say “BelFAAST” with a big, wide “aa”; how words like “now” and “flower” become “noy” and “floyyer” (“hoy noy broyn coy”); the way they pronounce Rs at the end of words; how “rain” becomes “reey-in’ ”. They gave me elocution lessons, although I was a poor learner. On leaving, they gave me a present, a book on how to speak “Norn Iron” (you sound both Rs in that).

My queasy apprehension did not lift until safely on the plane home. I gazed over Port St. Mary and the little island known as the Calf of Man glowing in the evening sunlight, and giggled on finding the phrase I might have used to buy medicine for an unsettled stomach without giving away my English accent (remember, emphasis on the big wide “aa”s):

“Do you hav’ a battle fer vamittin’?”

Coronavirus Pacman

Scammed

Images link to Which? and Guardian articles

I’d never get scammed. Not me: M.Sc. in computing, software writer, programming teacher, systems consultant, researcher, lecturer, forty years computer experience. I even wrote articles for so-called learned journals. Scammed? Me? Never! 

A month ago I bought something from Amazon. I know. I shouldn’t. They’re a scheming, two-faced outfit who don’t pay their fair share of tax and use too much non-recyclable packaging, but it was convenient. And before I knew, I’d signed up to a month’s free trial of Amazon Prime.

You have to credit the devious way they trick you into clicking that button while making you think you’re just selecting free delivery. There seemed to be no other way forward. It’s a masterpiece of interaction design. They hope you’ll forget you’ve signed up and that later you won’t notice the £7.99 disappearing from your bank account every month. 

I wasn’t worried. I knew all I had to do was go to my Amazon Settings –> Accounts and Lists –> Your Prime Membership and unsubscribe. I knew that because it’s the second time I’ve been caught out. It shows how ingenious they are that I should fall for it again, even when trying not to. I am not alone (see another Which? article).

You have to confirm you really do want to unsubscribe; that you don’t want the free next-day delivery, the video and music streaming, the books, the games and other supposed benefits. Well I don’t. I’m not interested. So I unsubscribed. Nevertheless, want it or not, you still get the free trial for the full duration. You can’t opt out. It’s like a stop smoking programme that supplies you with free cigarettes just in case you don’t really want to stop.

You harbour a lingering unease they are still out to get you somehow. For the rest of the month you are checking your Amazon account every few days to make sure it still says “Your free trial will expire on …” and afterwards that “You are no longer a member of Amazon Prime”. It did. All looked absolutely fine.

But then, two days after the trial ended, I received a phone call on the landline, an automated voice reminding me that my Amazon Prime subscription was about to be renewed at a cost of £39.99 to be charged to my bank account and that if I did not want to renew I should press 1 to speak to an account manager.

Did I believe it? Well yes. Given the circumstances you can see why. I was furious. Did I press 1? No, but only because the phone had not been resting properly on its stand so the battery went flat and cut me off. Would I have pressed 1 if not cut off? Probably not, but I can’t be sure. Amazon does have my landline number on the account but no mobile. I thought it might be a text-to-speech message.*

I was agitated for the rest of the day. I logged on to Amazon to check it still said: “You are no longer a member of Amazon Prime”. I checked my bank account. Only on finding the Guardian and Which? articles did I begin to relax. But in the sense that I believed it a genuine call, yes, I’ve been scammed.

Scams depend on timing and circumstance. If you email enough people to say their Wordpress account has been compromised and they should log in immediately using the link you provide, some will fall for it, especially if they do indeed have a Wordpress account and have recently experienced problems (Blogger users, of course, would instantly see straight through such a simple trick). Pressing 1 would have connected me on a premium rate line to some irresistibly persuasive person in Africa wanting me to allow them remote access to my computer, give them my bank card details or log on to a fake website. I could have been thousands of pounds out of pocket. 

Scammed? Me? Er, no way?

 
*If it had been sent as a text, then pressing ‘1’ would have had no effect because there is no direct connection to the sender while reading a text. 

 

Adsense Revisited

UPDATES 

April 2022 - I have now removed ads from this blog

April 2024 - I removed the custom domain and reverted to blogspot.com to prevent the blog becoming inaccessible when the domain expires

 

Old Blogger + Adsense Screen, 2014

In the unlikely event of me still being here if and when the income from the ads reaches the £60 payout threshold, I’ll donate it to a worthy cause, perhaps by asking long-suffering readers for nominations. On the 1st September, 2021, it was £29.15.

*         *          *

By far the most visited and commented-upon post on this blog is one of the earliest: Adsense, Blogger and YouTube from November 2014. It’s one of several off-topic, technical pieces written out of an interest in how the web works behind the scenes, using some of the skills I learned writing user manuals for a software company around nineteen-ninety. 

The post describes a way of setting up Adsense ads on both Blogger and YouTube together, something Google used to make difficult. It was easy enough easy to have ads either on one or the other, but not both. From the comments, it appears some found the post helpful, although, from a technical point of view, the original post is now redundant. It became so some time ago when Google changed the criteria for YouTube ads. It also never applied to WordPress where you have no choice: with a free WordPress blog, you get ads, like it or lump it.

To test things out at the time, I set up ads on this blog where they still appear on the right and below (unless your browser blocks them). I set them up as a demonstration, not to make money – I would need to produce far more interesting content and get thousands more hits and clicks to make it financially worthwhile. In the month just ended, it generated the exhilarating sum of 10p, which is typical. Often it’s less, but just occasionally, it will be more if someone shows interest in an ad.  

Unfortunately for me, some readers detest blogs that carry ads and shun them. Some have actually said so as if I’m unclean. It’s a pity because many of them write rather interesting blogs.

Actually, I quite like the attractive blocks of colour that, by means of some impenetrable algorithm, Adsense places on the page. I wonder about them. I can see why the original post about Adsense attracts ads from computing businesses, and why posts about stamps and coins pull in ads for philately or numismatics, and why posts about school and college get ads for educational services. I feel miffed that some posts are apparently unworthy of ads. I’m disappointed when a post gets one of those ads that crop up indiscriminately almost anywhere, such as the ones for genealogy or PDF converters. And sometimes, there is the delight of an absurdly misplaced ad – the ones Private Eye call “malgorithms”.

I can’t match Private Eye’s quality of malgorithms: e.g. reports of overseas terrorist incidents accompanied by ads for holidays in those countries, or articles about paedophiles attracting ads claiming child models have never been so much in demand, but the other day I did notice that one of my posts about hi-fi stereo was adorned by an ad for hearing aids. Or was I just targeted because of my age?

Ads may be putting off some readers, but I am going to keep them, at least for now. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

Significant Plagiarism Detected

Vainly looking at my blog statistics (both in vanity and in futility), I noticed quite a lot of hits from web site called PlagScan, a plagiarism detection tool. Had someone been scanning me for plagiarism I wondered. Well, scan away. I don’t pinch other people’s stuff.

Or do I? I went on to PlagScan (what an ugly name), uploaded the text of my post about Paul McCartney’s Ram L.P. and clicked ‘>Check’. The result: 96.2% plagiarism! What? How can that be?

Of course! It had checked the uploaded text against my blog so it was bound to find close matches. Checking the actual blog page rather than the text upload, and disregarding all the matches against recurring items on my own and other Blogger blogs (e.g. lists of blog archive dates), brought the score down almost to zero. I say “almost” because apparently my use of the phrase “One thing led to another” is plagiarised from the text of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel Galaxy. Thanks, Isaac.

There are many other checkers on the web too, some free, some usage limited, some pay only. Some of the free ones are so useless they detected hardly any problems at all with my text, not even against my own blog. The expensive ones say “Significant Plagiarism Detected” and then wait to detect your significant payment before they give you the details.

Plagiarism has clearly become big business since colleges and universities started to worry about students passing off others’ work as their own. Unscrupulous students had been getting away with it for years, but it was becoming an epidemic.

At one time they preferred to pretend it didn’t happen. When I spotted it in my first lecturing job in 1985, they ignored it. A student had submitted an entire 5,000-word magazine article as his final-year Higher National Diploma dissertation. Unluckily for him, I had read just about everything there was on the topic because I was doing a Ph.D. in the area. Never underestimate how much university lecturers know about their specialist interests. With almost any other marker he would have got clean away with it.

However, the course leader, a senior member of staff, regarded it as more of a nuisance for him than for the student. Placing expediency before inconvenience he said: “Give it a merit rather than a distinction on the ground that it relies too heavily on a limited number of sources,” and added, “and perhaps it would be best if you were absent from the examiners’ meeting.” Which is what I did, complicit in academic dishonesty, glad of the extra day to spend on the Ph.D., an unforgivable failure of integrity.

Shouldn’t the student have failed his project, if not the whole course? I think back to a girl at school in the nineteen-sixties caught with an aide-mémoire during a G.C.E. exam. Not only was she penalised in that exam, the Examination Board barred her in all subjects and she left in disgrace. That’s how severely cheating used to be dealt with.

As more and more instances emerged, universities began to develop plagiarism policies and procedures. Some managers built good careers out of it. When I came across another plagiarised project fifteen years after the first there was plenty of guidance about what to do.

A student had submitted a project in which more than half the content had been copied verbatim from an American web site. This time, as course leader myself, I was not too pleased to have to spend the best part of an afternoon writing a report about the extent of the plagiarism and other background issues. The Examination Board awarded an ordinary degree rather than honours. Again I wondered whether the student should have failed his degree completely rather than being penalised only in the project module. It seemed an institutionalised failure of academic integrity.*

Within a year or two, such shameless, extensive plagiarism became impossible. Universities turned from handwritten to electronic submission and bought in powerful systems such as Turnitin to identify chunks of text taken from elsewhere. Students knew for certain it would be spotted. They could even use the systems themselves to check they had not inadvertently broken the rules (or to find ways to get round them).

It did not prevent one strange case I know when an external examiner accused a student of plagiarism during a handwritten, invigilated examination. The student’s answers contained paragraphs from a textbook written by the examiner herself. Strictly this was plagiarism, but the very nature of an examination is that answers may contain unattributed content, such as when a student cannot remember where it came from. And it is not unknown for some students to consign whole passages of text to memory. That is what the student had done here. She was still able to recite the passages later. She got a good mark.

To one who came to computing when we had to code our own database search and compression functions, plagiarism checkers are impressive. The speed with which they trawl through petabytes of documents to find a single phrase is nothing short of miraculous. The latest versions can even check individual writing styles to identify third-party and contract cheating where students submit work written to order by others, such as essay mills. I suppose you could still get away with paying someone else to write an essay for you and then rewriting it in your own style. Or even using artificial intelligence in article spinners such as WordAI to do it for you.

But I doubt they will ever pick up the highest level of plagiarism: the plagiarism of ideas. Take the bit in my Ram post, above, where I ungenerously and unfairly liken Linda McCartney’s performance to:

“… a primary school music class where everyone has to join in enthusiastically banging tambourines and triangles, even the talentless”

It matches my own memories of primary school, but the genesis of the idea is in Jayson Greene’s brilliant review, linked near the end of my piece, where he compares it to:

“… little schoolhouse plays that required every hand on deck to get off the ground. Paul had the most talent, so naturally he was up front, but he wanted everyone behind him, banging pots, hollering, whistling-- whatever it is you did, make sure you're back there doing it with gusto.”

Is that plagiarism?

It’s not as bad as Dan Brown who got away with using others’ ideas in The Da Vinci Code because, as the judges put it, he had used only “generalised or other unprotectable ideas” that were “of too low a level of abstraction to be capable of protection by copyright law”. And certainly nothing like Roots whose author Alex Haley had to fork out $650,000 for plagiarising ideas from a novel called The African. 

Do we stand on the shoulders of giants, or is it, as T. S. Eliot said: “good writers borrow, great writers steal”?

Now, where did I read all that?


* I do not believe many students want to have to cheat in this way, and its occurrence might indicate inadequate supervision or care. There were a lot of background issues in the second case, so possibly the final outcome was fair, but the student in the first case was extremely fortunate to get away with it.

How Well Do You Know Morse Code?

It was one of those click-bait headings I found irresistible, so I clicked.

Page 1470 of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia falls open automatically as soon as you pick up Volume 2, a page opened so many times fifty to sixty years ago. Opposite is a picture of how the telegram we might have handed in at the post office forty years before that would have been sent by Morse Code to a friend a hundred miles away. On the following pages are more photographs of the incredible electronic equipment of the day: Wonders of the Telegraph Office, How a Picture is Telegraphed, The Wonder Machine That Brings The News. They still captured your imagination as late as the nineteen-sixties.

But it was the table of Morse Code on page 1470 I always turned to. It shows only the letters, not the number or punctuation codes, but it was enough to get started.

Duncan lived across the road. I could see his bedroom window from my bedroom window. Equipped with flashlights, we could send each other messages at night in Morse Code, a short flash for a dot, a long one for a dash, just like the battleships in Sink the Bismark.

••••     •     • – ••     • – ••     – – –   (HELLO)

After a long pause he replied

••••     •     • – ••     • – ••     – – –   (HELLO)

• – –     ••••     •     • – •     •     • –     • – •     •     – • – –     – – –      •• –     (WHERE ARE YOU)

Then after another long pause

• – –     ••••     • –     –     (WHAT)

The problem was, of course, that it takes so long to become proficient in Morse Code we couldn’t do it. Apart from having nothing to talk about. We were never able to send messages from one end of the street to the other, or get our Cubs Signaller Badges. You have to take your hats off to the Monty Python cast learning to perform Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Morse Code, not to mention Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp and Wuthering Heights in Semaphor. Kids don’t know they’re born these days with their Snapchat and Instagram.

On clicking the link I was told that Samuel Morse was born on this day (April 27th) in 1791, and that he patented his telegraph system in 1838 and worked with Alfred Vail to create the Morse Code to translate letters into long and short pulses and back again.

So on to the quiz. How well do you know your dots and dashes? Pretty well, it seems. I got them all right. Our childhoods weren’t entirely wasted.   

Agents Of Maths Destruction

Who needs brains any more except to ponder how computers and calculators have changed the way we do everyday calculations?

At one time we needed brains for long multiplication and long division, drummed into us at primary school from time immemorial. It is so long since I tried I’m not sure I can remember. Let’s try on the back of a proverbial envelope.

Long multiplication and long division with numbers and with pre-decimal currency

To do it you had to be able to add up, ‘take away’ and know your times tables – eight eights are sixty four, and so on – but just about everyone born before 1980 could do these things without having to think. 

Those of us still older, born before say 1960, could multiply and divide pre-decimal currency – remember, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound. You had to have grown up with this arcane system to understand it. Perhaps we should have kept it. It might have put foreigners off from wanting to come here and there would have been no need for Brexit. As the example reveals, even I struggle with the division.

Logarithms and Antilogarithms

Then, there were logarithms and antilogarithms, as thrown at us in secondary school. To multiply or divide two numbers, you looked up their logs in a little book, added them to multiply, or subtracted to divide, and then converted the result back into the answer by looking it up in a table of antilogs. For example, using my dinky little Science Data Book, bought for 12p in 1973: 

To multiply 2468 x 3579:
log 2468 = 3.3923; log 3579 = 3.5538; sum = 6.9461; antilog  = 8,833,000

To divide 3579 by 24:
log 3579 = 3.5538; log 24 = 1.3802; subtraction  =  2.1736; antilog  149.1

It’s absolute magic, although the real magicians were individuals like Napier and Briggs who invented it. How ever did they come up with the idea? It was not perfect. Log tables gave only approximate rounded answers and it was tricky handling numbers with different magnitudes of ten (represented by the 3., 6., 1. and 2. to the left of the decimal points), but it was very satisfying. You needed ‘A’ Level Maths to understand how they actually worked, but not to be able to use them. Some also learned to use a slide rule for these kinds of calculations – a mechanical version of logarithms – but as I never had to, I’ll skip that one.

A Slide Rule

Due to a hopeless lack of imagination, I left school to work for a firm of accountants in Leeds. Contrary to what you might think, our arithmetical skills were rarely stretched beyond adding up long columns of numbers. We whizzed through the totals in cash books and ledgers, and joked about adding up the telephone directory for practice. The silence of the office would be punctuated by cries of torment and elation: “oh pillocks!” as one desolate soul failed to match the totals they had produced moments earlier, or a tuneless outbreak of the 1812 Overture as another triumphantly agreed a ‘trial balance’ after four or five attempts.

A 1960s Sumlock Comptometer.

But when it came to checking pages and pages of additions we had comptometer operators. Thousands of glamorous girls left school to train as Sumlock ‘comps’, learning how to twist and contort their fingers into impossible shapes and thump, thump, thump through thousands of additions in next to no time without ever looking at their machines. By using as many fingers as it took, they could enter all the digits of a number in a single press. It probably damaged their hands for life. I still don’t understand how they did it. There was both mystery and glamour in going out on audit with a comp.

A 1950s Friden Electromechanical Calculator

Back at the office we had an old Friden electro-mechanical calculating machine. What a beast that was. I never once saw it used for work, but we discovered that if you switched it on and pressed a particular key it would start counting rapidly upwards on its twenty-digit register.

“What if we left it on over the bank holiday weekend?” someone wondered one Friday. “What would it get to by Tuesday?”

Fortunately we didn’t try. It would probably have burst into flames and set fire to all the papers in the filing room. But we worked it out (sadly not with the Friden). It operated at eight cycles per second. So after one minute it would have counted to 480, after one hour to 28,800, and after one day to 691,200. So if we had started it at five o’clock on Friday, it would have got to 2,534,400 by nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. So, counting at eight per second gets you to just two and half million after three and a half days! It shows how big two and a half million actually is.

The obvious questions to us awstruck nerdy accountant types were then “what would it get to in a year?”– about two hundred and fifty million, and “how long would it take to fill all twenty numbers in the top register with nines?”– about thirty nine million million years. As the building was demolished in the nineteen eighties it would have been switched off long before then. But what would it have got to? 

An ANITA 1011 LS1 Desktop Calculator (c1971)

The first fully electronic machine I saw was a late nineteen-sixties ANITA (“A New Inspiration To Accounting”, one of the first of many truly cringeworthy acronyms of the digital revolution) which looked basically like a comptometer with light tube numbers.  Then, fairly quickly with advances in integrated circuits and chip technology, came the ANITA desk top calculator followed by pocket handhelds that could read HELLHOLE, GOB and BOOBIES upside down, and 7175 the right way up. Intelligence was as redundant as comptometer operators. We revelled so much in our mindless machine skills that I once saw a garage mechanic work out the then 10% VAT on my bill with a calculator, and get it wrong and undercharge me. It can still be quicker to do things mentally rather than use a calculator.

Around 1972, my dad saw one of the first pocket calculators for sale in Boots. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide, pretty much state of the art for the time, but at £32 (about £350 in today’s money) and not as compact as now, it required large pockets in more ways than one. I told him it was ridiculously overpriced. Infuriatingly, he ignored me and bought one. On the following Monday they reduced the price down to just £6. It was his turn to be annoyed but the store manager refused to give a refund. He stuck with that calculator for the next thirty years.

How often now do we even use calculators? Not a lot for basic arithmetic. Do we ever doubt the calculations on our computer generated energy bills and bank statements? Do we check the VAT on our online purchases? Do accountants ever question the sums on their Excel spreadsheets? Just think, a fraction of a penny here, another there, carefuly concealed, embezzlement by a million roundings, it could all add up to a nice little earner.


I believe the above images to be in the public domain except for the first which is mine.

My New IKEA Sit/Stand Desk

Bekant sit/stand desk, oak/black, 120x80cm

Health sites are good at scaring hypochondriacs like me into believing that sitting down for too long can lead to heart disease, diabetes, cancer and depression. Some even make out that sitting is as bad as smoking. Can it really be so harmful? I am not so sure. Being a complete couch potato is obviously undesirable for lots of reasons, not least that you begin to hate yourself, but what is unclear is how sitting at a desk relates to other levels of activity. It might not be all that bad for those who are otherwise reasonably active.

All I know for sure is that lengthy computer sessions, seated, make my back sore. Despite trying different seating configurations, I end up shuffling around like an arthritic super-centenarian. I have also seen the effects of entire working lives spent at the deskface. Men (mainly) with bad backs, stiff necks, severe stoops, obesity, shortage of breath, high blood pressure and other problems were all too common in the offices of the sixties and seventies – an unrecognised industrial disease from the public health dark ages. We had to put up with any old chair and desk available, no matter how worn out and unergonomic. Worst affected were those who sat down all day in a cloud of cigarette smoke – either their own or other peoples’. Some even put sugar in their tea as well.

So, I broadly accept that sitting down for too long is bad for you, and have for some time been thinking about getting a standing desk. What made me hesitate was (i) not knowing which type to get – a desktop frame or a complete desk, and (ii) the cost – it might be an expensive waste of money.

I thought about making one. It would be fairly simple to construct a sturdy table to stand on an existing desk, although it would not be height adjustable, and deciding its exact height might be a bit hit and miss. I know that a standard four-drawer filing cabinet is quite comfortable for someone of my height to work on, although I don’t know for how long, and getting it wrong could be worse than not having a standing desk at all. Anything I made would probably look naff anyway.  
   
Desktop frames are the cheapest option to buy, albeit not that cheap. For under £250 you can find a work surface to go on top of your existing desk, which can be raised and lowered by means of a pantograph mechanism. Some also have separately-adjustable keyboard trays. But you would have to put the whole thing aside to revert to the original height and space of your desk, and they look several times more naff than my imagined self-made version – lots of cold and clanky metal, like working on the roof of an electric train.

It therefore had to be a full adjustable sit/stand desk or nothing. They are expensive. Some cost over £1,000. A more affordable one was the Bekant desk from IKEA, but it has some damning reviews – unreliable, wobbly, poorly made. It is also 80cm deep (2 feet 7 inches), which is 20cm (7 inches) deeper than my normal desk. The hesitation continued.

Fortunately, we live near enough to an IKEA be able to look in-store. We twice braved the rank smell of Swedish meatballs to play with it, and it looked all right. We wondered whether a cheaper hand-cranked model might suffice rather than an electrically adjustable one. No. Stiff and awkward.

So, a month ago I splashed out £475 on a 120 x 80 cm Bekant electric sit/stand desk. It was Christmas after all. The price included a little extra for the oak veneer top which looks attractive with the black legs. 

I don’t usually review things (except books), and probably wouldn’t even if you paid me (although everyone has their price) but I am so happy with my new sit/stand desk that this once I will. I am not going to go into the technical specifications, plenty of other sites do that, but let me tell you about the experience. It was simple to assemble. It is not poorly made. The height adjustment mechanism, hidden in the legs, seems sturdy and reliable. The desk is not wobbly – the 80 cm depth allows you to stand and lean on it with the full length of your forearms, with the keyboard in the centre of the desk. It does not tilt when you do this. Alternatively, and perhaps better for your posture, you can place your keyboard or papers at the front of the desk to stand and work tall and free. It seems perfect for home use. I don’t know how well it would cope with commercial use but the IKEA staff have them in-store.

Just a few tips if you get one. During assembly, look carefully at the orientation of the brackets in the diagram when fixing them to the underside of the desk. I initially put mine on the wrong way round so that the flanges were too far apart to fit the base, although it was not too much of a problem to take them off and refit. Secondly, if you put weight on your arms while standing, get a foam pad for support, otherwise your elbows might feel sore. Third, replace your office chair with a light stool that can easily be moved aside when you want to stand, and brought back when you want to sit down. You might even want to lower the desk as far as it will go and kneel on the floor. Lastly, the buttons for adjusting the height are fiddly, but easy to use once you get used to them. And a warning: the legs and frame are very heavy.

After a month I find I can stand and work non-stop for a couple of hours or longer, although my ankles, knees and hips did twinge a bit at first. Nothing too bad – I have yet to experience ‘cankles’. Sometimes my shoulders ache a little as well, but moving the desk up or down an inch soon gets round that. And best of all – my back no longer suffers after a long computer session. Costly, but worth it.

I wish standing desks had been around during the years I spent in accountancy in the sixties and seventies, and in computing in the eighties. You would have been labelled a weirdo just for thinking about it.

What next? A treadmill desk? A cycling desk? A hamster wheel desk? I don’t think so. They really are only for weirdos. 

Alt-0247 and Rule: the Ed Sheeran Prize for Computer Science Education

Perhaps there should be a new category at the next Brits, the award for the year’s most outstanding contribution to computer science education, the first winner to be Ed Sheeran for his new album ÷ (pronounced Divide). This follows up his previous albums (or LPs as I still call them) + (Plus) and × (Multiply).

In trying to search for the new album, my daughter was frustrated by the lack of a ÷ key on her computer. She was about to go through the tedious procedure of using the ‘Insert Symbol’ menu in Microsoft Word to create one, which she could then copy and paste into the search box, when I said “Just type Alt-0247”, and the stargate opened into a whole new world of understanding. Ed Sheeran’s title had brilliantly illustrated the concept that everything you do on a computer has an underlying numerical representation.

The concept is ASCII – the American Standard Code for Information Exchange. I found it extremely useful in the early nineteen-eighties in working with Tandy TRS-80 and BBC computers, when I had the dubious honour of being the author of an educational computer program called Munchymaths.

ASCII had been developed twenty years earlier by IBM’s Bob Bemer and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standard way to represent characters in computers. It allows computers to communicate with each other.

In ASCII, the divide (or obelus) symbol is represented by the number 247, and can be produced by typing Alt-0247 on the number keypad.

To do it, hold down the Alt key while typing 0247 on the number pad, (number lock must be switched on), and the ÷ symbol appears when you release the Alt key. Some of us know this, and some of us don’t. It’s the Great Alt-0247.

Here are some other well known phrases or sayings in ASCII format:

• To be, or not to be; that is the Alt-63
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created Alt-61
• Alt-62 love hath no man than this
• To see the World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Alt-8734 in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour

Apologies if some or all of these symbols do not work or render as intended on your device. They appear correctly in the most used fonts in Windows 10 on Microsoft computers, but different devices, software and font selections use different codes. There are now several versions of the extended ASCII table to provide for the enormous number of characters computers are called upon to represent, such as  ê   €  Œ   ¶  and so on. The infinity symbol ∞ is particularly troublesome. Unfortunately, ASCII is not as standard as it could or should be.

Furthermore, ASCII is only an intermediate representation to make things easier for us stupid humans to understand. Underneath ASCII there are lower-level concepts such as octal, hexadecimal and binary, but let’s not go there now.

Ed Sheeran, however, is always going to be spoilt for choice for new album titles.

Side By Side Images in Blogger

(An off-topic post)

This post shows how to change the default layout of multiple photographs or other images in Google Blogger so that they appear side by side on the page instead of sequentially underneath each other. It works for two, three or more images. It can also be used for videos.

There are different ways to do this. Some people suggest using HTML tables, others using an image editor to combine several images into one. I have used both these techniques elsewhere in my blog, but the following is simpler. As well as being simple it has the advantage of keeping the images separate so that if desired any one could be changed later.

First upload your images in the normal way by means of the Insert Image button on the toolbar. Let us assume for now that you have just two images. By default, Blogger displays them consecutively on the page, one above the other as shown below. The issue with this is that readers might have to scroll quite a long way down before they come to the next piece of text.

To put the images side by side, go to the HTML part of the editor. At the top left click the HTML tab as indicated and you will see the underlying code for the page, like this:

You now need to find the code for the images. The file names for mine are Image01.jpg and Image02.jpg and you can see these names each inside the middle of some complicated looking chunks of code. But in between these chunks you can see the following which begins at the end of one line and continues on two more lines (as highlighted above):

                                                                                </div>
           <br />
           <div class="separator" style="clear">; both; text-align: center;">

All you then need to do is to delete this section of code. Be aware that, depending on how you have uploaded your images, the <br /> line might appear more than once or might be completely absent. If there is more than one then delete them all. If it is absent then don't worry. Basically you should just delete everything from </div> to .... center;">.

Be very careful not to delete anything else. Do not delete anything other than </div> at the end of the first line. You might want to make a copy* of your blog post first so you can recover if you make a mistake.

After deleting the code, your images will be positioned like this:

Technically, what this achieves is to place both images inside the same <div> section of the page, rather than in separate divisions as occurs by default. 

You might have problems if your images are too wide for the page layout you are using. You will have to resize them. For example, my images are portrait orientation and set to the Blogger Medium size, but if they were in landscape orientation then they would not fit across the page. The second image would overflow to the next line so they would still appear one above the other. I could get round this by using the default Blogger Small size instead of Medium. 

You can use this technique to place three or more images side by side by deleting the two lots of intervening code. For three images I do need to resize them to Small to get them side by side across the page as shown. This works when viewed on a computer. It might not always work when viewed on smaller-screen devices such as phones and tablets.

To display a greater number of images side by side, even the default Blogger Small size might overflow to the next line. I can get round this by specifying the size of the displayed images directly, but this requires more detailed editing of the HTML code which needs greater care.

The code for each image will look something like the following. It specifies the image size, in this case height="200" and width="133".

<img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrd_oY1BcXPgmgjdGKXBNI6yHwCO5z509MALmHiJMlHNsns3Jq08pHsMhmAua5RRozX5xNyXcP0XQcri8-2qD7MZtZprdKn_9TZN0p3Xs98fKv4m47aB2X6SrZODj2YFFFSHmfNpcRZ-8/s200/Image01.jpg" width="133" />

If I reduce these dimensions by a scale of 0.7 so that height="140" and width="93" then it is possible to place more images across the page.

Readers can always click on the images to look at them full size.

In the above I have also removed the code style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" associated with each image (i.e I have had to remove five instances of this) to reduce the margin spacing and pack them closer together.

The remaining frames and shadows around the images are defined at a higher level - the css level - and will appear on all images on all posts on your blog. It is possible to remove these too, but to do so for a single image is beyond the scope of this post. However, if you want to remove the frames (but not the shadows) from all images on a single page, then insert the following code in the HTML editor at the very beginning of the blog post.

     <style type="text/css">
     .post-body img, .post-body .tr-caption-container, .Profile img, .Image img,
     .BlogList .item-thumbnail img {padding: 0; border: none; background: none;}
     </style>

Be very careful when editing HTML. It is so easy to wreck the whole page or lose it irrecoverably. When you have a lot of content it is usually best to play safe and make a backup copy.*

To see another example, I have used this technique for the cigarette card album at the end of my post Cartophilic Concerns. However, the first composite image in that post was put together using an image editor.

Finally, you can also use these techniques to place videos side by side. In the following, the video thumbnail images have been resized and placed within a single division rather than the default two. Again, this has the proviso that it works when viewed on a computer but not necessarily on phones or tablets, or in email feeds.

  

* One way to make an exact copy of a blog post is to go into the HTML code editor, place your cursor anywhere within the content, press CONTROL-A to select all the content, then CONTROL-C to take a copy. Close the window (do not save if prompted), begin a new blog post and give it a name such as 'Backup', go into the HTML editor and place your cursor in the empty window, press CONTROL-V to retrieve the copied content. Save but do not publish the post, then close the window. If you then make a mess of editing the original blog post you can always delete it and rename the Backup with the name of the original.