Grammar Police avoidance: part 1

The purpose of this post is to help those who often fall foul of the grammar police.

It shall be split into several sections, the first of which being a personal favourite of mine: the beloved apostrophe, and its use in a possessive context.

For this, I'm enlisting the help of the following imaginary people: Bob, Chris(tine) and several unnamed individuals.

Bob and Chris are both owners of quite a lot of stuff. Some of it is shared with others.

Let's say Bob has a car. Bob's car. Also referred to as his car. The car is his. Note the apostrophe for Bob, but the lack of one for "his".

Hang on. Who in their right mind would put an apostrophe in "his"? That's patently ridiculous. What on earth am I thinking? Oh well, let's move on.

Chris is the proud owner of a house. It's Chris's house. Her house. The house is hers. Again, only the one apostrophe (also note the trailing "s". The rule here is: if you say Chrises, you write it). Surely no-one would put an apostrophe in "hers" either. Silly me. Not worth mentioning.

Oh, did I mention Bob and Chris are married? So, what's his is hers, and what's hers is his. They share like that.

So a quick question: who can be said to own the car now? Or, put another way, the car belongs to whom? Whose car is it?

Well, it's their car. The car belongs to them. The car is theirs. Obvious. No apostrophes in sight.

OK. Here's the killer. The driveway where the car is parked can be said to belong to the house. It's my page. I can say what I like, so there.

So it is the house's drive. It owns the drive. The car is found on its drive. Any apostrophes? Curious.

So in summary: You wouldn't put one in "his", "hers", "theirs" or "whose". Don't put one in "its".

Of course, there is one (and only one) occasion where "it's" is valid, that being a contraction of "it is". This is just the same as there only being one valid use of "he's", "she's", "they're" and "who's".

Once more, in table form:

	Bob	Chris	Me	You	It	Male	Female	Plural	Question
The car belongs to ...	Bob	Chris	me	you	it	him	her	them	whom
... car	Bob's	Chris's	My	Your	Its	His	Her	Their	Whose
The car is ...	Bob's	Chris's	mine	yours	its	his	hers	theirs	whose?
... own(s) the car	Bob	Chris	I	You	It	He	She	They	Who
... in the car	Bob's (Bob is)	Chris's (Chris is)	I'm (I am)	You're (You are)	It's (It is)	He's (He is)	She's (She is)	They're (They are)	Who's (Who is)

If this is at all confusing, the golden rule is: IT'S = IT IS and never anything else.

Carbon Neutrality

First things first:
I tend to get to work by one of two methods: Bus and bike. It's winter and I've been unwell, so it's the bus at the moment.
If you're driving to work for whatever reason, and are feeling guilty about your carbon footprint, why not relieve some of that guilt by sending some money my way?

For every £1 I receive I'll cycle into work and back instead of taking the bus. I will therefore be using 0 fuel (apart from a hearty breakfast, which I would have had anyway), so you can sit contented in your traffic jam, safe in the knowledge that you're doing good by proxy. I'll even take a snap of myself and send it to you if you like, so you know I'm not cheating you.

OK. Now that my millionaire plan is in motion, a quick word about carbon offsetting.

Carbon offsetting is, for the most part, bad.

The idea behind it was simple enough: pay someone to reduce carbon emissions on your behalf, thereby offsetting the amount of carbon you're creating.

Unfortunately there are several small flaws in the approach:

1. Planting trees does not replenish fossil fuels.
Well, okay, if you left them long enough (a few thousand years should do it) then everything would be great. That is, assuming you started offsetting your carbon a few thousand years ago. You didn't? Oh, that's unfortunate. I know how these things can slip. Still, you're planting trees now and that's got to be good, right? Wrong.

2. Here's the big secret. There are two separate carbon cycles.
I know, I know. It's hard to believe, but all those trees sucking carbon out of the air, they're not part of the carbon store that's being diminished. This is very closely linked with the first issue, but it seems people have difficulty grasping it. Let's call trees a part of the 'living' cycle and oil part of the 'dead' cycle. The 'living' cycle is all about getting CO2 out of the air, and using it to feed plants and trees, which will then grow. Great. You've moved the carbon from the air to the trees. Well done. Does your car run on phosphates? Thought not. What about power plants? Running on tree energy? Sorry. You're not offsetting the right things. Oh, but there's more.

3. Raising trees is not a profitable business.
So, you've googled for a carbon offsetting company, and they promise to plant a tree for every £10 you give them, which will go towards the lifetime upkeep of that tree. Great. Fantastic. Except they're lying. They've found some country where £10 is a lot of money. They've promised some farmers let say: £5 a tree. They've delivered trees, with the promise of fertilisers and money to follow. Unfortunately for the farmers, that's often the end of the story. They don't get their fertilisers. They don't get paid for their (often numerous) trees. In that situation, would you still look after the tree?

Of course, I'm sure there are some companies out there with the best of intentions, but the fact remains that the entire idea of offsetting your carbon is ludicrous. You're paying someone else to make your problem go away. In what other part of society is this acceptable? If you commit a crime is it okay to pay someone else to take the fall? If you overeat can you pay someone else to starve themself? Even after you've done all of this, are you any less of an overweight criminal? No.

Society tried this once before. The reasoning was that certain wealthy people didn't have the time to be good, pious and righteous, so they found some very good, pious and righteous monks, who clearly had some goodness and piety to spare, and they bought it off them.

Apparently offsetting can only be done with things that aren't immediately quantifiable. Funny that.

How installation instructions for linux apps should look

or: Stop telling people to use the terminal unnecessarily!

I've lost count of the number of times I read something along the lines of:
Open the terminal and type "sudo apt-get install <package>"
Seriously. How hard is it to say "Run Synaptic Package Manager (From the administration menu)"?

I'll just list a few issues with the first method:

1. If you can open a terminal, you can open Synaptic.
2. apt-get throws up a lot of text even doing the simplest of installs.
3. apt-get can be confusing if someone else tells a user to use "apt" or "aptitude" instead.
4. Users who don't know how to install something that is one package are probably going to be happier with a GUI method.
5. Synaptic informs the user clearly about dependencies and unverified sources, rather than as a stream of text.
   
6. It is not good practice to get users used to blindly opening terminals and executing commands they don't understand. That is the path to sudo rm -rf woes.
7. If you never discover Synaptic, you'll miss out on a lot of packages.
8. If the name of a package has changed slightly, it's easier to find the correct package in Synaptic rather than guessing at names at the command line.
9. Synaptic offers descriptions of packages, so the user may have at least some small grasp of what they're doing, rather than feeling like they're typing incomprehensible incantations that could do anything.
10. Scanning through Synaptic is a great way to find new things.
11. Uninstalling via Synaptic is far less confusing.
12. Quitting Synaptic leaves no superuser windows lying around for misuse.
    

I'll stop at twelve. It's a nice number.

So remember: "First, open Synaptic. Next, find the package <blah> and install it (using the install button)"