The 2012 London Olympic Games could be hit by electricity blackouts as energy supplies fall off, according to a poll of scientists and other eminent folk in this story by the BBC. Well, pole vaulting and javelin throwing have not been done in the dark before, but I guess it might have a certain novelty.

Seriously though, how should one take these jeremiads about impending shortages to electricity generation? This excerpt from the BBC story makes it clear that many analysts believe that solutions must embrace technologies including nuclear power:

All 140 respondents to the survey said that the best way to ensure energy security for the future lay in a diversified mix of electricity generation, including renewables, coal, gas and nuclear

This story of a few days ago suggests the opposition Tories might, in their quixotic desire to appear Green, ditch the nuclear option. This seems rather ironic given that some figures in the environmentalist movement have started to embrace nuclear energy as a way to cut carbon emissions (while not being blind to the problems of nuclear waste disposal and the large capital outlays involved in building nuclear powers stations).

I am an agnostic on nuke energy. If it can, in a free market, hold its own compared with other energy sources, fine. But given the vital importance of electricity to our modern, information-age economy, it is madness to tempt disaster by shutting down options now.

Those who have a superstitious aversion to nuclear power on the grounds that "the waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, man!" really ought to learn to ask, 'what?' and, 'how much?'

Medical (and industrial) use of radioisotopes is happily accepted (or at least ignored) by the same people. Medicine is good. Industry is hidden in a black shade of ignorance. But power stations are bad. Like the Bomb.

This rather misses that medical materials can be very dangerous. Those "thousands of years" for power waste also indicate lower specific activity. Is a long period of mild, static, buried, danger really a thing to have nightmares about, when really fearful stuff is to be found loose at the end of the street?

Perhaps this story will lead to better public understanding:

The Oxfordshire-based company was transporting part of a piece of cancer treatment equipment, which had been decommissioned at Cookridge Hospital in Leeds, to the Sellafield complex on 11 March, 2002.

But a "plug" was left off a specially built 2.5 tonne container to carry the contaminated material on a lorry.

Mark Harris, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, said: "Through pure good fortune no-one involved in the removal, containment and transfer of the source may have been directly exposed to the radiation beam.

"The risk of such exposure was undoubtedly present - at Cookridge, during the journey and at Sellafield."

He said detected radiation at Sellafield was between 100 to 1,000 times above what would normally be considered a very high dose rate.

Mr Harris said it was beyond the capabilities of normal hand-held monitoring equipment.

Even discounting the doom-mongering approache of HSE prosecutors, this is a pretty alarming incident. But the chance of its changing public attitudes, or even inspiring curiosity about risk, is close to zero. We may get a small addition to the towering mass of safty-anxiety, but a sense of proportion? Never.

PS. Remarkable don't you think, that the BBC story I cite is illustrated with, not a picture of a container lorry or a piece of radiotherapy equipment, but a glowering shot of Sellafield. The place where the danger was discovered and made safe is made the villain. The 'Sellafield baa-d' habit of mind - look, it even has the capitalist word "sell" embedded in it, what could be more damning? - cannot be eradicated by what RCD calls "pesky facts".

Seeing as Perry is dabbling in the kingdom of Animalia, I feel I should wade in with my own weighty observations. As it is summer in Australia, cockroaches are making their presence felt in even the most salubrious of households. This must be so - I live in a shared-house dump and they are everywhere.

Tonight, as I was in the shower, I noticed three large brown cockroaches (not the more numerous but less offensive small types) scurrying about the bathroom. This convinced me to abandon my do-not-kill-if-not-necessary morals and I thus plunged the three big brown blighters into the tiles with a - erm - plunger. You know - that rubber implement you use to unblock the drains. Well, it was the first thing that fell to hand. Anyway, this did the trick and happily broke the cockroaches perfectly in half. Fine - let them dry out a bit, sweep them up in a few days and be done with it. I am a student living in a shared house; cut me some slack.

I leave the bathroom after performing my twice-daily cleansing rituals - it is summer in Australia, after all - to attend to this and that. I return two and a half hours later to find the upper part of each cockroach still wiggling its (remaining) legs lamely; unsurprisingly, for it's stuck on its back and missing half a body. The lower part - sadly disconnected from the mothership - was not returning calls.

Am I the only one who thinks this an amazing natural phenomenon?

Techie and futurism magazine Wired has a delightful article about how the toy company Lego is harnessing the best minds of the computer software industry to make its toys even cooler and intricate than before. I used to love playing with the stuff back when I was a small boy and generations of kids have had fun playing the brightly coloured building blocks, fashioning them in to planes, cars and houses, rather as an earlier generation used to play with Meccano kits. In its way, it helped probably fire enthusiasm for a whole generation of engineers and builders.

And the kicker is that Lego is Danish. If you have children or friends with youngsters, perform a nice gesture and buy them a pack.

The Japanese are working on a robot that can operate as a butler. Hmm. If they can create a character that can talk like Stephen Fry portraying Jeeves, make the perfect gin and tonic and do my ironing, I might consider one. Second thoughts: I'd probably be irritated as hell with the thing after a while.

Like those in most developed countries, British telecommunications regulators several years ago introduced something called 'mobile number portability', which simply means that if you change from one mobile phone operator to another, you are able to transfer your number to the new network. Legally, this is basically a statement that phone numbers are the property of telephone company’s customers and not the companies themselves, and I find this entirely reasonable. As items of property, telephone numbers are now transferable and tradeable in a way they were not before. Certainly it means that when your contract is up you can shop around for any deal on the market, change to that deal, and then not have to tell all your friends and acquaintances that your number has changed.

As it happens, a few months back I took advantage of this. I switched over from Orange (whose customer service had been questionable, and whose network has poor coverage at my workplace) to O2 (formally BT Cellnet, and but who have managed to transform themselves into a surprisingly good business since being divested by BT). Normally what one does in such circumstances is get a new handset and sign a new 12 month contract. (British networks seem to be trying to lengthen this 12 month upgrade cycle at the moment – many of the cheapest deals now seem to be offered on 18 month contracts, and there are plenty of post-pay deals out there that provide substantially cheaper calls if you don’t take a new handset). Coming from Australia (which typically used 18 month contracts when I got my first mobile phone in 1999 and switched to 24 month contracts in around 2001) I was struck by the shorter contracts and higher prices.

However, my circumstances were that I wanted a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile. The best selection of these devices in the UK seemed to be the XDA range offered by O2 from HTC of Taiwan. (Also, a friend had one of these and it was really cool). So I got an XDA IIi with a mobile contract with O2. There was a hefty up front cost for this, but it was still substantially cheaper than buying a Pocket PC without a mobile contract. The XDA works fine as a phone, but it is big and bulky. (Most people want to want their mobile phone to be stylish, but the XDA is a device for people who want everything including the kitchen sink in their phones, but who do not care about being uncool). My plan was to transfer the phone number from my old phone over to the new O2 SIM, and then to use the O2 SIM, which I could transfer between the XDA and the old phone (a perfectly fine Motorola v500) as need be.

So, after I had worked out the Orange contract I did all this. The next problem was that very irritatingly (like most UK mobile phones, even those you get on a contract) the v500 was “locked”, meaning that it could only be used with one network. UK mobile networks do this, principally because they want to add an extra little hassle to leaving the network, and because they want you to pay their extortionate roaming rates rather than a local SIM in some other country. As a consequence, a large (and perfectly legal) unlocking business has sprung up in the UK to unlock phones like mine. Rather than using one of these businesses I paid to download some unlocking software and an unlock code over the internet, and did the job myself. This greatly relieved one of my female workmates, who saw me talking into a PDA and assured me that if I kept doing this there was no way I would ever find a girlfriend.

So, anyway, that was all resolved. One further reason that I wanted to get the v500 unlocked was that it is quad band GSM, whereas the XDA is only tri band. Although both phones will work in the US, the v500 will therefore likely provide better coverage. And as I got all this done immediately prior to a trip to the US, this was important to me.

Another thing that is interesting about number portability is that despite the fact that it has been in existence for several years, most people seem unaware of its existence.

When I have mentioned to friends that I have changed mobile networks, several have then asked me for my new number. When I extol to virtues of being able to shop around and keep my number, people using prepay have said to me that this is great, but that it doesn’t apply to prepay numbers. They are of course wrong. Carriers are legally obliged to transfer your number to another carrier if you ask them to, and although I don’t think they are obliged to allow new customers to bring their new numbers with them (or perhaps they are – I must check), most will, including those offering prepay plans.

And when I think about it some more, there is another fact that suggests that number portability is not well understood, which is that most networks offer much better deals to new customers coming to the network from somewhere else than to existing customers at the end of a contract who simply wish to upgrade a phone. This has made it almost necessary to switch networks at the end of a contract. Number portability was perfectly efficient one would expect the deals in both cases to be the same. As it happens, I think that it may be getting more efficient, as the difference between the offers in the two cases has been getting smaller. Ian addition, once a mobile carrier figures out that you are really serious about leaving, they tend to start offering the “new customer” offers to existing customers as well. But they seem to try not to publicise this. If you don’t explicitly tell them that you know the rules of the game, they are not eager to tell them to you.

Of course, it is in the interests of the large four mobile operators with most of the market already to not want to publicise portability very much. The four operators have most of the people in the UK between them as customers, relatively fat margins, and are probably likely to lose more than they gain if the customers who have until now stuck around start moving from network to network. For each customer they gain they will lose another, and their marketing costs will likely go up for little net gain. As the four UK GSM operators have nearly identical market shares to each other, there aren’t smaller operators to chip away at the market share of big operators in the way there are in some other countries.

This lack of enthusiasm can be seen in the way in which the large mobile operators have implemented number portability. The law requires that when asked to move a number to a new network, the process should take no more than a week. So, when you apply to have a number switched over, the process always takes exactly a week. This is usually not a problem – if you have had to give a month’s notice to terminate a previous agreement then you can incorporate the week it takes to switch the number into this – but in some countries a number can be switched over in a couple of hours.

However, what are known as Virtual Mobile Network Operators (VNMOs) are becoming more common. These operators buy airtime wholesale on the four main networks and then sell it at the retail level, and provide billing, support etc to the customer directly. The best known of these is Richard Branson’s Virgin Mobile, which is in the process of selling itself to cable operator Telewest Broadband. The Carphone Warehouse, Britain (and Europe’s) largest retailer of mobile phones, also operates a substantial VMNO prepay business under a variety of brand names. (Fresh, Mobile World, and TalkTalk, in case you were wondering). Supermarket chain Tesco markets mobile services to its large customer base. And, quite interestingly, British Telecom markets mobile services (reselling time from Vodafone) to its many fixed line customers under the “BT Mobile” brand.

One would think that these businesses would be extremely aggressive about advertising the fact that customers who switch to them from other networks do not need to change their numbers. They have relatively little to lose, and lots to win. However, they haven’t really done this. They have FAQs on their websites that mention that customers coming from other networks do not need to change their numbers, but nobody has run a big advertising campaign along the lines of “Come to us and save money. You can keep your number” which would to me seem obvious. This may be because they are relatively small companies that mostly sell relatively low value prepay products to people who want a mobile phone now and want it to work immediately without any hassle, or it may be (particularly in the case of BT) due to their general cluelessness as marketing organisations or it may be (in the case of the Carphone Warehouse) that most of their revenues come from selling phones for the four big networks as an agent and they are therefore walking a very fine line between selling their own mobile services and annoying their biggest customers. (They show now such reticence in selling fixed line services in competition to BT).

But I think things are changing. After five years of rubbing their wounds of the late 1990s and slowly paying down their debt, the telecoms companies another wave of mergers has been underway this year. The has been lots of talk of “triple plays” and “quadruple plays”, in which a consumer will supposedly want to buy fixed and mobile telephone services, pay television and broadband internet from the same company, or at least in which companies will use the fact that they sell one of these things to a customer to try to sell the others. In that vein, we have seen Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television company BSkyB purchase the small but technically advanced ISP and telephone company Easynet, we have seen the Carphone Warehouse purchase British Gas’ telecommunications subsidiary OneTel and merge it with its own existing services to become the largest telecommunications provider in the UK besides BT and the four mobile companies, and the abovementioned merger between Telewest (which has also merged with NTL to form a single cable television company for the entire United Kingdom) and Virgin mobile. Even prior to the coming merger, Virgin Mobile has recently been adding higher value, post-pay services to its traditional pre pay only product mix.

Not all these players are substantial mobile players at the moment, but inevitably they are going to offer services of this ilk (setting up a VMNO is not difficult if you have the other resources and infrastructure these companies have) but these players are generally substantially capitalised and with large marketing budgets and substantial existing customer relationships. Inevitably some of these companies are going to attempt to raid the mid-market post pay customers of the existing networks. It has to happen soon.

And for this as well as a lot of other technical reasons that I might go into in another post some time soon, the existing mobile networks to me look extremely vulnerable. In the short to medium term they will remain important as providers of wholesale services, but they have long tried to see themselves as more than that. However, I am not sure that they are.

It might be expected that free-marketeers should be loyal fans of Microsoft, and the "left" worshippers of open source. I checked out the websites of the main UK think tanks and had a look at what software they're running on. The results may be surprising.

The open source Apache web server software, running on a variety of non-Microsoft operating systems, is widely used by the free-market think tanks. It is used by the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Civitas, Globalisation Institute, Global Growth, Institute of Economic Affairs, Libertarian Alliance, Social Affairs Unit, Taxpayers' Alliance, and (across in Brussels) the Centre for the New Europe. Policy Exchange is running server software called Zeus on Linux – again a non-Microsoft setup. The notable exception is Reform which uses Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Reform is nevertheless an extremely effective, worthy think tank!).

Conversely, on the "left" of the political spectrum, people seem much keener on Microsoft Windows Server. The Institute for Public Policy Research, Demos, the Fabian Society, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, and Forum for the Future are all host their sites using Microsoft software. A notable exception is the Work Foundation, which boasts Microsoft sponsorship on its website, but uses an open source server called Jetty running on Linux.

"It was ironic that an aircraft funded by a Labour government was used by the wealthy to get out of Britain as fast as possible to avoid paying tax."

A comment I heard yesterday on a BBC travel programme about the supersonic plane Concorde.

Linux has been growing in popularity, now enjoying a higher market share than Mac OS. However, I fear that in all the hype and hysteria, the dangers have not had enough attention. We face a real possibility that the future of the creativity will be a barren world: a "tragedy of the digital commons" in which no one will create any content.

The truth is that Linux is one of the biggest threats to human creativity worldwide Some of you will find that statement remarkable, but it is true. As Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has said, "Linux is cancer." Ken Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has said that: "Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

Moreover, because it is uncontrolled by a single entity, and because the source code is freely available and open to modification by anyone, it is a key way that pirated content can find its way onto the internet. Put a copy-protected CD into a Windows machine, and the copy protection kicks in. (OK you can get round it at the moment by doing things like pressing Shift while you put the CD in, but that's just teething troubles.) But put a copy-protected CD into Linux and it just ignores the copy protection. The software on Linux to rip CDs does not check whether publishers want their CDs copied. It will be easy to legislate against Microsoft's and Apple's tools that allow copying, but Linux is just too uncontrolled.

Fortunately, the US Congress is waking up the the threat of the tragedy of the digital commons. A new bill introduced to the US House Judiciary Committee before Christmas would ban the "analog hole". In other words, any equipment that can play music or films, like a DVD player or CD player, would be banned from having analogue outputs that could be used to pirate the content. Any outputs would have to use a "rights signaling system". Of course, certain professionals need access to analogue outputs and of course they would be allowed to have them.

That's the hardware side. But we will not succeed in fighting the evil of piracy unless we also deal with the software side. At the moment it is too easy to write software that can pirate content. Linux is just an anarchy and we need to ensure that all computer motherboards sold prevent Linux from being installed. We need a licensing scheme, headed by the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, for all programming tools so that only trusted individuals may use them, and that inappropriate use of them is communicated via the internet to the government. To put it simply, either Linux dies - or the whole of human creativity will become a stagnant swamp. Anyone who disagrees with this is a communist.

"No possible good can ever come of a Patent Law, however admirably it may be framed."
- The Economist, 1851

Many people can imagine a world full of innovation that does not have patents. But when they think of pharmaceuticals, this seems like an exception. Pharmaceuticals are relatively simple to produce but have high research and development costs. So it’s obvious, surely, that there have to be patents in pharmaceuticals.

This exception, however, may not be as necessary as people think. Two economists have researched the history of chemcial and pharmaceutical innovation. Michele Boldrin (Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota) and David K. Levine (Armen Alchian Professor of Economics at UCLA and co-editor of Econometrica) argue (PDF) that it is not the case empirically that patents increase pharmaceutical innovation. Among the examples they give, they point to Italy. In Italy there were no patents on pharmaceuticals until 1978. Bear in mind that countries like India and even African nations are told they need patent protection in order to develop economically. Yet between 1961 and 1980, 9.28% of the world’s new molecular entities (NMEs) came from Italy. NMEs are the most important advances in pharmaceuticals as they represent leaps rather than just gradual progression. The authors suggest that after patents were introduced, Italy actually became less innovative, not more.

The example of Italy will be puzzling to many because it is totally contrary to everything the pharmaceutical industry says. Interestingly, before Italy introduced patents, its pharmaceutical industry contained lots of players: patents quickly reduced the number of companies involved. No wonder Big Pharma likes patents: they restrict competition.

Many people sympathetic to the free market are not at all sympathetic to open source. I used to be one of these people. It seemed to me that open source was doomed to failure: it cuts against the idea that innovation is more likely to occur when people exclusively own something. Yet the success of Wikipedia, Firefox, Thunderbird, and now the newer, more user-friendly versions of Linux means the old skeptical economic model is difficult to keep up. The open source world has upped its game, producing high-quality products that often beat closed source and more traditionally-designed products. Some will no doubt put their fingers in their ears, close their eyes and deny the reality. But it seems to me that when the economic model does not fit reality, it is time for a new model.

The Register carries a scary story I have not seen reported elsewhere. Kieren McCarthy's piece suggests that the independence of the internet may be one more casualty of the 'war on terror':

on 28 July 2005 at a special board meeting [...] consciously and for the first time, ICANN used a US government-provided reason to turn over Kazakhstan's internet ownership to a government owned and run association without requiring consent from the existing owners. The previous owners, KazNIC, had been created from the country's Internet community.

ICANN then immediately used that "precedent" to hand ownership of Iraq's internet over to another government-run body, without accounting for any objections that the existing owners might have.

Previously it had always been the case that ICANN would take no action (and only ICANN, through IANA, can actually change ownership of a ccTLD) unless both sides were in complete agreement. Now, ICANN had set itself up as the de facto world authority on who should run different parts of the Internet. The Iraq situation is more complicated than briefly outlined above (of which more later), but in a little under two hours, the ICANN Board set aside a process that had held since the very earliest days of the Internet. Not only that but it provided governments with instant, unassailable control over what happens under their designated area of the internet.

You have to read the whole thing, but the burden is that, far from preserving the net from the dictator's club at the UN - a posture applauded by Samizdatistas here - the US has provided the political mechanism for its nationalisation. And that merely in order to do a couple of favours for client regimes.

As I sit in the Coffee&Co café in Bratislava (a town I am rather fond of visiting) taking advantage of its offer of free wireless broadband (ah, no more OWLS for me)...

...I am yet again struck by what changes are being wrought by the internet, and what amazing possibilities it opens up.

Although I studied Russian many years ago when the Cold War was steering me in certain directions, that knowledge has long since been flushed by my brain. Yet the other night just before I left London for Slovakia, I was exchanging e-mails with a chap in Moscow, translating (or more accurately transliterating) my Latin script English into Cyrillic Russian via a free on-line system and similarly translating his replies into English.

The results were rather crude and took a bit of smarts to interpret but we were able to conclude our business most satisfactorily. It really did bring home to me that even though we are only at the very start of the communications revolution (and revolution it is), the ways the internet will change everything are incalculable. The social, scientific, economic and political implications are so far reaching that I am sure the world twenty years from now will be hard to recognise.

Perhaps that is just stating the obvious but for me at least it is the very fact I am now so blasé about all the things the internet makes possible for me that makes it is useful to sometimes stand back and marvel at what an astonishing thing it is. Of course just as we take electric light as a given and only appreciate it when the power goes out, I might be unusually appreciative because at the moment I do not have my usual 24/7 broadband access and there is nothing like withdrawal to make you value getting a 'fix'.

That was the question sung by Dr. Alban, the one hit wunderkind, who, if my poor memory serves me, washed up on the shores of Sweden in the mid-1990s. However, a more interesting answer to this conundrum has been posed by Dr. Paul Davies, an Australian astrobiologist. Davies argues that the primary quality of life is the ability to replicate information, and that this process can be viewed as a quantum phenomenon.

Viewed this way, the problem of life's origin is switched from hardware to software. The game of life is about replicating information. Throw in variation and selection, and the great Darwinian experiment can begin. The bits of information have to be physically embodied in matter somehow, but the actual stuff of life is of secondary importance. There is no reason to suppose the original information was attached to anything like the highly customised and evolved molecules found in today's living cells.

Therefore, the origins of life are no longer reserved for chemical structures or the complexities of single-celled organisms. Life is defined as a process for the replication of information and is not limited to one particular source.

All it takes to get life started is a quantum replicator - a process that clones bits of information attached to quantum systems by allowing them to interact with other quantum systems in a specific way. The actual system could be anything at all - the spin of an electron, a meta-stable atomic state, or a molecule that can flip between two conformations. The uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics provides an in-built mechanism for generating variations.

The leading question from this speculation is why did replication shift towards larger and more complex structures. We are a sturdier and more stable foundation for data storage! No wonder many think that our mind children, with better memory capacity, will replace us.

All hail the Bugatti Veyron, the world's most expensive car that you can drive on a road, as opposed to a circuit. From nothing to 250mph in less than a minute. The audio system alone costs $30,000. Have you got $350,000 to spare? Then go for it. That will cover the deposit if you want to place an order.

And all hail to Jeremy Clarkson for featuring this mighty vehicle on Top Gear. It is this evening's repeat, of the show first shown on December 11th, which I am now listening to.

Clarkson also wrote in the Times - on November 27th, but I doubt (see below) if any faster car has appeared since then – about the Bugatti Veyron, and the struggle to make it go as fast as it does:

Somehow they had to find an extra 30kph, and there was no point in looking to the engine for answers because each extra 1kph increase in speed requires an extra 8bhp from the power plant. An extra 30kph then would need an extra 240bhp. That was not possible.

The extra speed had to come from changing small things on the body. They started by fitting smaller door mirrors, which upped the top speed a bit but at too high a price. It turned out that the bigger ones had been keeping the nose of the car on the ground. Without them the stability was gone.

In other words, the door mirrors were generating downforce. That gives you an idea of how much of a bastard the air can be at this speed.

Volkswagen, the parent company, decided to make this Bugatti wonder car as a mere "engineering exercise", and they are apparently taking an enormous loss on each one that they sell. Clarkson reckons this is a car Concorde, and that what with "everyone twittering on about global warming", they might never again make another such.

Having, almost three months ago now, tracked down the latest Rolls Royce, this is my current must-photo car.

This afternoon I was in Newport in South Wales. I had half an hour or so to kill before my train back to London was to depart, so I went to a nearby pub and ordered a pint of ale. Due to the general lousy state of WiFi hotspot provision in Britain, I was not able to connect my laptop to the internet. However, I also had my PDA with me. The PDA in question is branded as an O2 XDA IIi, but the device is in fact made by a company named High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) of Taiwan, and is known generically as the HTC Alpine, as well as being rebranded by a variety of other companies under a variety of other names. It runs Windows Mobile 2003SE, which includes stripped down versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Excel, and a variety of other applications. The device also functions as a GSM cellphone, and in what is I think is the way of the future, the device has several different wireless technologies built into it - 802.11b (WiFi), Bliuetooth, and at that moment most importantly. GPRS, the usual packet switched data overlay of the GSM cellphone system.

What did this all mean? Well, it meant that I could connect my PDA to the internet via a GPRS cellular connection and check my e-mail and browse a few blogs. The limitations of this were that I was using a rather limited browser and I had a slow connection - in practice probably only around 20kbps. This means that I didn't want to view too many separate pages - each takes a while to load and as one is paying by the megabyte, one also doesn't want to download too much in the was of fancy graphics. Being asked to browse through six pages to read one article is something of an imposition. Lots of popups and flash animation is also bad. Relatively straightforward HTML is best.

After a quick trip to Samizdata, I went to Instapundit to see what was up. I scrolled down, and came to the observation that Time Magazine's choices as "People of the Year" were lame, and a link to a Michelle Malkin piece that had more to say about it. That wasn't terribly helpful in itself, because I didn't know who Time Magazine had chosen, but I followed the link.

Michelle didn't say precisely who the award had gone to either, but there was a comment about philanthopists, rock stars, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Okay, so at this point my guess (which ultimately turned out to be correct) was that the award had been given jointly to Bono of U2, as well as Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable efforts in the third world.

Actually I find the (joint) award of Man of the Year to Bill Gates is kind of interesting. I have long thought that it was an absurd oversight that Time had never given the "Man of the Year" award to Gates. I am no fan of Microsoft's products, but even I have to concede that that the man's career is an extraordinary one, and even that the argument that he was the most significant man of the 1990s is quite a strong one. One man came from nowhere and in 20 did a considerable job of seizing control of one of the most important industries in human history. That Time missed this and failed to give him the award at any time in the 1980s or 1990s was really lame. (Time almost got off to a good start in recognising the PC revolution with "Man of the Year announcements". They apparently intended to give it to Steve Jobs in 1982, but ultimately lamed out by giving it nebulously to "The Computer" instead after discovering that Jobs had a difficult personality. (Laming out is something they have been doing for a while).

Malkin does make some observations on this, stating that she thinks that Time's vaguely blah leftist politics are in play here, and that they wouldn't have given it to Gates in the 1990s when he was doing something significant because that was filthy capitalism of which they do not approve, and that they would now rather give it to him and his wife now that she has civilized him and he is doing something "worthy". Although Time does have a bit of a history of rewarding starry eyed "one world" stuff, and that certainly explains the Bono thing here, I am not sure it does explain the Gates award.

In truth, I think that Time is almost trying to apologise for not giving the award to Gates before.

It is a bit hard to give it to Gates for anything he has done for the world of technology lately. Microsoft makes all its money from two products, Windows and Office, and Microsoft has not produced significantly new version of Office since 1997 or Windows since 2000. (Yes, there have been three subsequent versions of Office and one of Windows, but the changes are superficial and cosmetic) . Microsoft has spent a lot of money trying to break into other markets, but has probably lost money in aggregate by doing so. Declaring Gates "Man of the Year" now in a sort of lame shared way is like giving Winston Churchill the Nobel Prize for literature: we want to reward the man in some way so how do we go about it?

In truth I don't think it was so much Time actively thinking that Gates was not worthy of the award in 1995 as their being too stupid to fully appreciate the significance of what was happening at the time, and they now feel really embarassed looking back.

Now, all this went through my mind in the pub in Newport. But, I still wasn't aware exactly who the "People of the Year" award had strictly been awarded to. More links. There was a link to Tim Blair, but all we got from him was agreement that Time's choices were lame. These sorts of links are fine when you have a big screen and a fast connection - you can open six links rapidly and you will eventually get to the information - but on a PDA under GPRS each takes too long.

But, there was one obvious way to find out, wasn't there. Yes, that's right. If I went straight to www.time.com, then they would undoubtedly have something on their award on their site.

But, as it happened, the only thing I got from time.com was this message, telling me that I needed to upgrade my browser.
After that, the Time server refused to render anything else. Of course it was impossible to do because there is no updated browser for Windows Mobile 2003. So I could not read the Time website. Period.

Presumably the Time Server observed that I was using a variant of Internet Explorer that it did not recognise, concluded that it was an "old browser" and thus shut me out. Time has decided that it will provide service only for people with a "minimum browser" level, and as it seems a browser that it deems too old, it rejects it. However, it also ends up rejecting browsers that are just different and unexpected.

This is a lousy way of designing a website and a lousy way of looking at the internet. Ultimately you shouldn't design for a particular browser. There are such things as web standards and standard forms of HTML, and you should design your website in such a way that it will render on any browser that supports a minimum version of these standards. There is no problem adding special features for advanced or late version browsers that won't appear on more limited browsers, but these should be added over the top of a page that supports standards. If a browser that supports these standards is not available, you should render something more basic. Even if you do this, you should render something. A browser that cannot support the advanced features might not then show the whole page, but it will render something. And you should not assume that a user can download a new browser. That depends what the user is doing and where and how he is doing it.

If you have only ever used Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows, it is easy to believe that the World Wide Web is consists of nothing more than this. If you are more openminded, it is still easy to think that the World Wide Web consists of nothing more than IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari (Konquerer anyone?) running on Windows, the Macintosh and Linux. (That is, it is easy to assume that the World Wide Web exists only in a PC ecosystem). A few years ago this was fairly true. But the internet's ecosystem is evolving rapidly. :Lots of people (such as myself) are accessing the internet on mobile devices. People are ripping pieces off websits and looking at the results through RSS readers. A few years ago the internet basically was the World Wide Web, but this is changing. Many of the most interesting things are now happening off the web, but the web as it exists remains a tremendous data repository and indexing system for those applications.

People accessing data on websites using non-standard methods and developing new ways of accessing and viewing are often the most sophisticated users and the most high-value users, and are often the people making purchasing decisions and selling equipment and services for people at other places on the chain. Shutting them out of your site is foolish. What's worse, if you do this, they will think you are lame and will tell this to all their friends and customers.

It is not necassary to cater directly to these users, although it is nice if you do. (If I go to Google, it checks my operating system as well as my browser, and gives me a version of the search engine customised for a PDA. Unlike Time, the BBC are exemplary in this way, also). All you have to do is adhere to standards, and not make assumptions about what they are doing. And you really, really, really, shouldn't look them out if they are not doing that. If you provide relatively dumb data and relatively dumb formatting, you allow your readers and your customers to be smart. Many people, more than you think, have perfectly good reasons for not doing what you expect them to.

Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair are right. Time are really, really lame.

"No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense." - Lord Salisbury (1877)

Hardcore computer geeks often rail against "HTML e-mails". These are the e-mails that use fonts and let you use bold, italic and different sized lettering. It is time to ignore the hardcore geeks and say yes to progress.

In the days of the traditional typewriter, we all wrote plain text documents. There was no italic or bold, but you could do underlining by going back and using the underscore character over text you had already typed (which is more than you can do with plain text e-mails). Then the word processors came. At first, they didn't let you use fonts, but that functionality was quickly added. Nowadays, if you look at a typewriter-written document, or a document from the early word processors, you probably think: "how primitive".

Progress has been a good thing. Proportional fonts, where the letter i character does not use the same width as the letter w, help make our documents look nice. Bold and font sizes let us make our documents easier to read. Colour is wonderful for headlines. No one would argue that we should go back to the old days of the typewriter.

In the early days of the web, there was a debate between geeks about what the web should look like. There were some people, the "ultra-geeks", who thought that websites should be about content and that it was wrong for webmasters to "force" readers to view the content in a particular way. Instead, the fonts and sizes used should be set by the visitor in their own web browser. Fortunately, everyone ignored the ultra-geeks, and the "DTP geeks" won (the geeks who thought that web pages should look like they've been desktop published).

Just as progress has been good for word processing and web pages, progress is good for e-mail. Geeks will give you a long list of charges against HTML e-mail. Ignore them, go into the Preferences window of your e-mail program, and tell it to compose HTML e-mail.

100 years ago, Albert Einstein formulated the equation E=MCSquared, that expresses Einstein's theory that as one accelerates an object, it not only gets faster, but gets heavier. I must admit it is not very often that I come across the anniversary of a theory like this. We normally mark dates of births, deaths, battles, elections or great reforms. Theories don't quite have the same resonance. I don't imagine that there will be grand parades marking Einstein's achievement.

I have read a bit about this incredible man and his life, and to this day I'll frankly admit to finding it pretty hard to get my head around some of the ideas of relativity. (Physics was never one of my stronger subjects, something I intend to fix at nightschool. Never too late to learn). But there can be no doubt at all about the impact this man has had on the subsequent 100 years, in terms of our understanding of the universe and of course in fields such as nuclear power, both in its benign and not-so-benign forms.

And Einstein of course is incredibly famous not least for personifying the "eccentric genius" with his mass of scruffy hair, wild-eyed expressions and casual manner. How often are scientists in the movies, television and theatre portrayed in this way (assuming that scientists are portrayed at all). More recently, the late great Richard Feynman continued the tradition for iconoclastic irreverence, famously deflating science establishment in a marvellous collection of books about science and public policy.

For those interested in Einstein's contemporaries in the science community in America, I can strongly recommend this book by Ed Regis.

Well it all seems a bit quiet around here. I guess all the other Samizdatistas have lives, at the weekend anyway. Today, even I have had enough of a life to have nothing much that I want to say here. (I was watching rugby internationals on my television.)

However, regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor does have a question:

Does anyone know of a good reliable (not Garmin preferably!) GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine and is also waterproof with a long battery life? None on the market seem to have this capability.

This question up at Julian's blog, Camera Anguish, for the last ten days. And do you know how many answers the so-called blogosphere – this mighty engine of knowledge, this magnificent organ of enlightenment, this aggregator extraordinaire of wisdom – has managed to supply? 0. This is not how things should be and I want to change it.

So, does anyone? Know of a good reliable GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine, and is also waterproof, and with a long battery life? Samizdata commenters are often rather good at discussing technology matters, so go to work, people.

I personally do not. I would need to be surer than I am now about things like what "GPS" stands for to be able to comment knowledgeably. Something to do with satellite navigation? My life seems to work okay without such knowledge. But surely others among us can do better. So get thinking, please, about those personal, reliable, waterproof, etc., GPSs.

But remember, not Garmin.

If you thought that going to the gym allowed you to burn off that stress and get away from the office, think again. A new hi-tech gym means you can type away on a keyboard and do an aerobic workout at the same time. Not quite sure this is going to work when it comes to pumping the weights, though.

I recall how, a few months back, during all the fuss about Making Poverty History by having a singsong, well dressed and articulate Africans were to be seen on our television screens explaining, throughout the week in question, that, actually, just chucking money at Africa would not really solve the problem. In fact, some of them said, it could well make things worse by making it less necessary for the governments that hoovered up most of the money to earn their money, so to speak, by taxing their own misgoverned and hence impoverished people. (I use the word "earn" in a very relative sort of sense here.)

Last night, the same thing happened again. Kofi Annan had been enthusing about that now quite famous hundred dollar laptop. And once again, well dressed and articulate Africans was summoned to the studios, and they said that, actually, if you are looking for a way to spend a hundred dollars on an African child, you could do a whole lot better than spend in on a laptop computer.

Victor Keegan also waxes enthusiastic about the hundred dollar laptop in the Guardian today, being understandably reluctant to enthuse about the other hot topic at the big UN shindig in Tunis where the hundred dollar laptop was being promoted, which is the UN plan to take over the internet.

But until the UN puts its own house in order by controlling member states imposing censorship on the web, such as China and Tunisia, it won't have the moral authority - let alone the management skills - to do the job itself.

Quite so, although I do not like that "until". My attitude to the internet is simple. It ain't bust. Don't unfix it by putting the UN in charge of it, ever. However, as it says here (you need to scroll past the woes of Sony):

The battle for control of the Net ended peacefully before the fight even began, but some are still unhappy with the outcome.

Me included. What they mean is that lots of people wanted more done on this front. I wanted less than they have already done, which is that they have set up a completely powerless talking shop to discuss "internet governance". And if you believe that the plan is for this talking shop to do nothing but talk for ever and be completely powerless for ever, then you will believe anything.

Although the hundred dollar laptop could not possibly be as big a catastrophe as the UN's planned strangulation of the internet, it could nevertheless waste a lot of money and cause a lot of grief. Imagine not having had any food for two days and being presented with one of these contraptions, as will surely happen to many wretched Africans if this boondoggle goes ahead.

As Tim Worstall explained at the ASI blog over a month ago, a posting that Kofi Annan has clearly not read but should have, that hundred dollar price assumes huge production runs, and also assumes that the various governments who are supposed to pay for these things will also bear the further costs of explaining to people how they work and of mending them when they go wrong. Worse, if these devices are to supply the internet connections that they are supposed to, these governments may have to contrive communicational infrastructure that does not now exist,. As Worstall points out, the kind of people now getting most enthusiastic about this gadget are also the kind of people who are most opposed to the idea of making aid conditional on things like that being done more sensibly.

Even at a hundred dollars, as the well dressed Africans were pointing out last night, these thing are absolutely not a bargain for an African child. Schooling for a year would make more sense. Better food would be nice.

On the face of it, making a kind of global Volkswagen of laptops is appealing. But the more usual method for making cheap stuff is for it to be made expensively first, and checked out by rich organisations and rich people, and then gradually - or, as often happens, not so gradually - cheapened. This is what is happening anyway with computers, and even more spectacularly with mobile phones, which already are hundred dollar portable computers with communication built in, if you think about it. Keegan mentions the success of cheap mobile phones in Africa, but does not seem to have absorbed the lesson of that success, which is that mobile phones are, it turns out, a whole lot easier to use in Africa than laptops. Ah yes, but those mobiles are being used to do business, not being given to the kiddies.

You get the feeling that Kofi Annan is really only trying to make the UN look necessary and useful, instead of a big pointless coagulation of corruption and foolishness which he is now unwilling or unable to clean up. Here, he reckons, is his chance to say that "Business isn't supplying this, but hey! – we can!". The truth is that they can probably not do this but that bad old big business maybe soon will and in many ways already is doing it. If it ever does make sense for Africa's children all to have laptops, this will surely not be until the price of them goes down to something nearer to ten dollars than a hundred. My guess is they will all have mobiles long before then.

Scientists eh? First they tell you all the things you have to do to stay in perfect health and be immortal. Then they tell you that that very things they have been recommending for the last three decades are what will kill you.

The latest health fad to get the treatment? Decaf coffee:

The US study looked at 187 people, a third of whom drank three to six cups of caffeinated coffee a day, while a second group drank the same amount of decaffeinated coffee, and the rest had no coffee.

Researchers measured the level of caffeine in people's blood, as well as a number of heart-health indicators, including blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol levels over the course of the three month study.

At the end of the study, the group drinking decaffeinated coffee had experienced an 18% rise in their fatty acids in the blood, which can drive the production of bad 'LDL' cholesterol.

Bad cholesterol. Bad!

There has only ever been one good reason to drink decaffeinated coffee, which is that you like it.

My nutritional recommendation just now is: Walkers Marmite Flavoured Potato Crisps. Mmmmm. (I get mine from the new Sainsbury's in Wilton Road, Victoria.) As it says on the packets:

Same great taste . . . now better for you.

We have been reducing the levels of saturated fat in our crisps so that now they contain 30% less saturated fat than in 2003.

This is because we carefully blend our vegetable oil with a special sunflower oil to produce a better crisp with all the same great taste.

Indeed.

In related news, I note with alarm that Alex Singleton appears to have eaten nothing since November 6th. Has he died of starvation? Perhaps. But Singleton Diet commenter Paul Coulam expresses a different fear:

Do the lack of blog entries indicate that you have fallen off the wagon and are lying in your bed, curtains closed, with crisp bags and pizza boxes scattered all over the floor and chocolate smeared all round your mouth?

So is it famine, or feast, or something else again, such as a moderate diet of marmite flavoured crisps, washed down with not too many cups per day of decaffeinated coffee?

The Research Defence Society, a body supporting animal research in medicine, has started a blog. They intend to use it to keep people up to date with their activities, to counter disinformation and highlight how animal rights extremists use terrorism against scientists, and to support staff involved in animal research.

Hark! Hark! It is the sound of Norman Lebrecht hitting nails on their heads, but also his fingers and thumbs, leaving blood everywhere:

Film has become fact on DVD. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation.

It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme's 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. But if anyone had foreseen that the original DVD would be around in the public hands, Demme's studio would never have raised the finance, let alone the enthusiasm, for an otiose update.

Lebrecht is right about DVDs having been a big change. As usual he has a nose for a big story. Read the whole thing, as we bloggers say. But the original Manchurian Candidate has been out for years on DVD. I owned it on DVD ages before the Denzel Washington remake emerged.

One of Lebrecht's several follies here is to imagine that all generations are like his generation, and that all generations will thrill to Bergman and Godard just as his version of his generation did. It is hard for old crusties like him, or like me, to imagine a world in which a whole generation has grown up neither knowing nor caring about The Manchurian Candidate, the original one, the proper one, with that woman who now does Murder She Wrote on the telly playing the Evil Witch Queen, but there it is, such a generation now exists, and there is business to be done. Curious oldies who want to see the remake or own the DVD of it, just to check it out and to be able to sneer at the new version having actually seen it, will add a few thousand bums on seats and a few hundred thousand in DVD sales. Meanwhile the plot is a proven entity, Denzel Washington is a proven star, and Meryl Streep, who brings an older following with her, fancies doing a turn as the Evil Witch Queen, knowing she won't come near the Murder She Wrote woman, but hypnotically drawn to the part nevertheless. So, the project can go ahead.

And millions of Young People These Days will actually prefer it to the original! It is, for starters, in colour instead of black and white. And Laurence Harvey? He was not everyone's Anglo-American cup of tea even the first time round, I can assure you.

I remember the same kind of moans about the Charlton Heston Ben Hur when that first came out, when I were a lad. An expensive and inferior rehash of the Roman Novarro original, said the culturati. I think it was Roman Novarro, but I really do not care and have yet to see that jerky, black and white, silent, and utterly absurd relic of a bygone age, which is what I assume it to be. What could possibly compare with Heston and Stephen Boyd going at it wheel to wheel, in grand technicolour panawidescreeneramavision, covered in orange blood?

Generations. They come. And they go.

I wondered if Lebrecht would mention computers. He does at the end, presumably when it occurs to him that some might imagine computers to have some kind of big future, with possible consequences for DVDs. Better answer that objection:

The DVD won't replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture. The internet, the I-pod and other new-tech marvels will challenge for precedence as entertainment carriers, but none can rival DVD for instant access and archival use. DVD has got the movies bang to rights and gives them equal status with music and printed arts. It is the medium of the Noughties, the remaking of our memories.

Oh dear. The DVD will hurt the audio-only disc? How? It has not done that so far, because they do different things.

The internet will challenge for precedence? "None can rival the DVD for instant access"? When they put me into an old people's home, will I have to listen to people saying things like that?

Lebrecht, you poor old thing. You seem to have just about heard of the computer, and presumably you even use one, to thrash out your half baked but often tasty notions. You could not possibly thrash out so much stuff with a mere typewriter. But do you have any inkling of what else computers can already do, let alone what they will soon be capable of?

We of the Lebrecht/Micklethwait generation love CDs and DVDs because they are so much better than 78s, LPs, cassettes, video tapes, etc., which even we could tell were technically imperfect and able to be improved upon. But the idea that future generations will amass vast collections of such pre-manufactured plastic discs, at many pounds or dollars a go, with each disc only containing one separate hour of music or one movie, and with each separate one-hour-of-music or one-movie disc encased in its separate (and in the case of DVDs absurdly vast) plastic casement . . . well, it is just daft, completely daft. Pre-recorded DVDs in boxes will in due course become about as bang up to date as silent movies are to me.

When I did amateur dramatics at university, I was in a play called A Resounding Tinkle, by someone called N. F. Simpson, an absurdist playwright in the Spike Milligan mould. Two of the characters in it were called The First Comedian and The Second Comedian. These two gents wandered about together in and out of the action, having pointless arguments with each other, being send-ups of Conservative and Labour politicians. (I played "Bro Paradock", who was a Whig, I kid you not. At one point he went out cavassing for them.)

Anyway, the First Comedian, the Conservative Comedian, was especially funny, I thought. His stock in trade was being crazily just or totally behind the times, madly enthusiastic about trends which to everyone else had been clear for quite a while, grabbing hold of every shiny new stick in sight, too late, and often at the wrong end completely. Some things never change.

At one point the First Comedian announced with feverish excitement that he believed the world to be, not flat, as most argued, but round, and that given a decent sailing ship he believed he could prove it, by circumnavigating the world!!

"Hasn't all this been gone into before?" muttered the Second Comedian.

I love to read Norman Lebrecht, because I share his fascination with the ongoing saga of classical music about which he often tells great stories and provides superb gossip, about mad conductors, greedy soloists, etc. But he does often remind me of that First Comedian. Which, or course, I also enjoy a lot.

The BBC has an interesting piece up about Sony being sneaky:

Mr Russinovich, a renowned Windows programming expert, came across the Sony BMG anti-piracy system when performing a scan of his computer with a utility he co-created that spots so-called rootkits.

Rootkits are starting to be used by a small number of computer virus writers because they allow malicious code to be inserted deep inside the Windows operating system, meaning that it will not be spotted by most anti-virus scanners.

Rootkits are used to hide malicious software once it is installed and ensure it is not found and removed by anti-virus programs

After extensive analysis Mr Russinovich realised that the "cloaked" software had been installed when he first listened to the CD album Get Right With the Man CD by country rockers Van Zant.

No mention of Rootkits, according to Mr Russinovich, in the licensing agreement he signed when he stuck the CD in his computer to play it.

My attitude to all such things is that the market will decide, aided by the internet, which will spread stories like this around. People copying CDs illegally, and now Sony putting intrusive software on their CDs, seem to me to be opposite sides of the same coin, the coin being the unviability – so it now appears to me - of the old way of doing things in a new time. Moralists may curse, and maybe they will, here, again.

What Mr Russinovich presumably wants the market to decide is that Sony are, as this guy would put it, bastard people! And maybe it will. But maybe, instead, it will decide what Sony and most of the other Big Content and Electric Toy companies presumably want them to decide, which is not just not to copy CDs, but not, as a general rule, to allow pre-recorded CDs anywhere near their computers. That way CDs never get copied, and we all have to have two lots of Electric Toys, one lot to compute, and the other lot to play music and stuff. Although personally I do like to keep entertainment separate from computing, largely out of habit but also because when one breaks down I still want the other to work, I cannot see such separation really catching on.

For me, there is a certain irony in Sony, notable pioneers in cheap music copying technology and now leading the way in do it yourself movie making - ideal for sneaking into cinemas – now trying to make disc copying especially difficult and dangerous. I guess they of all people know how easy copying has now become.

Meanwhile, Adriana throws interesting light on the digital info-habits of the kind of people who will be e deciding the future of all this.

It seems a Japanese company has invented a human steering device. It is external, harmless and affects the sense of balance.

The article suggests uses in gaming where tweaking the balance system helps make immersive gaming more realistic. One must wonder: how much time will pass before the porn industry picks up on this?

There are darker uses I am sure you can easily imagine. A company is already studying the use of the ideas for crowd control by affecting their sense of balance. One can imagine implants to control gulag prisoners of future Stalin's.

My dark crystal gets darker still from there.

It is not just that I dislike filling in forms. Worse than that, I am very bad at it. Which makes it nearly impossible for me to buy things on the internet. Last night I tried to buy some tickets for a comedy show. All I had to do was fill in about twenty boxes with what was required, and every time I tried, something went wrong, and when I went back to where I might or might not have made the mistake, that page disappeared. So I tried again and this time it said that I could not order twice as many tickets all in a row as I actually wanted. So, I gave up. This morning I tried again, and now the thing said that I cannot buy tickets even in the number that I do want. Last night I think what the original problem was was that I failed to tell them that London is in the UK, although that could be quite wrong. Maybe London is not in the UK. Maybe London is in England. Or Great Britain. Who knows with websites? So, now, I and my friends will not be going.

This is the secret reason for why shops still exist. Secret, because explaining this fact means admitting that you, like millions of other sensible people, are repeatedly confused beyond endurance by allegedly user-friendly but actually use-effing-impossible, interactive (i.e. you have to do it all) websites. You can go to a shop, see it, and if you can't do all the things they say you must do with your credit card or your address or whatever the hell details they want, they have to explain what you must do before they can sell you anything. All a computer does is repeat whatever gibberish it was that you did not understand in its tortuous entirety the first time around.

This is why banks still exist, instead of all inhabiting cyberspace. The banks all want, physically speaking, to shut themselves. But the people in them know that if they do not explain things face-to-face to actual people from time to time, they will lose out to more obliging competitors. This is why people love their Post Offices. One of the most useful services that Post Offices supply is the service of filling in forms for you. There is a wonderful tax office at the bottom of Euston Tower where you can take your tax forms, and where they tell you face-to-face if you have got everything right. Everything. And when the guy behind the desk whose facial minutiae you can actually scrutinise says that all is now okay, it is. (Apart from the fact that they have stolen thousands of pounds from you and will now do nothing with about half of it and harm with about the other half. Those are different arguments.)

This is, more generally, the reason why places - villages, towns, cities - still matter. This is why London exists.

This is also why live theatrical performances exist and will continue to exist. I recall reading somewhere that the Marx Brothers beta-tested all their movies by first taking them on the road to show to live audiences, to find out which bits really were funny.

The very gadgets – computers linked together by wires, the internet etc. – are time and again the things that only face-to-face contact can sort out for you. For as long as progress is being made in the storing, processing and transmitting of information, which basically means for as long as there is any progress at all, then for that long will physical places still be necessary for each new arrangement to be explained, face-to-face, until the procedure (a) actually does work properly, and (b) until it becomes as familiar to a sufficiency of people as using a telephone or reading a blog now is for me, or as writing for a blog is becoming.

That sufficiency of people can then explain it to the remainder (me), again, face-to-face, as and when they convince me that I really need whatever it is. Often they do. But often they fail, through, for instance, not getting the difference between doing something with no fuss once every few minutes (easy) or hours (quite easy), and doing something with no fuss every few weeks (very hard) or few months or years (impossible).

Speaking of telephones, those much hated call centres are really only hated because they are so often used to aggress and interrupt, to the point where they now threaten the efficiency of the phone system as a whole by making some vitally important real calls sound as if they are also fake interruptions. But I find that, when call centres are used to put me in touch with a living, breathing, knowledgeable and helpful human being – even if I cannot smell his breath or tell what country he is speaking from – they can be invaluable. Like the telephone itself, call centres are often an excellent compromise between total face-to-face-ness and total mechanical moronitude. Assuming, that is, that I do not have to convince a user-hostile computer system to let me talk to a human in the first place.

But, ask yourself this: why are call centres call centres?

When computers work - which they mostly do when I blog, for instance – then yes, I can do miraculous things at a miraculous distance. But I would never have had a hope of getting into computers in general, or blogging in particular, if I had not had friends and shop assistants who had showed it to me, with them sitting right next to me, explaining it, homing in on the bits that matter and reassuring me about things that looked as if they mattered hugely but actually do not.

Please do not misunderstand this posting as an attack on the whole idea of progress. I love progress and would be lost without it. I am just trying to describe an important part of what it actually is and how it is actually achieved.

PS: Just to be sure that I still could not make work the theatrical ticket system that I have here denounced, I tried yet again, just before posting this, and of course this time it did work and my friends and I will now be going after all. Typical. (London is in "UK", by the way. I guessed that right.)

Instapundit today links to Ralph Kinney Bennett's charming article about the history of shaving equipment. Anyone who still – even after being subjected to the cry of "dentistry!" – doubts that modern comforts are really as comfortable as all that, really should read this hymn of praise to just what capitalism and its attendant attention to detail can do for human happiness. I mean, imagine having to shave with an uneven, hand-made cutting edge. Bleedin' hell, as we English would say.

The heart of Bennett's article is a short account of the life and works of – and this really was his name – King Camp Gillette. Gillette was a salesman, and his achievement was essentially to ask a question. What if, he asked, you could separate the bit of a razor that gets quickly blunted, and needs to be either sharpened or replaced, from the rest of it? Thus the disposable razor blade.

Like so many creative endeavours, the Gillette empire had another guy heavily involved, an engineer who actually made everything. But here there was a problem.

A grateful Gillette wanted to incorporate both his and Nickerson's names into the company that was established. Nickerson felt his name sounded too much like what the new product was designed to avoid.

We are now deep into the age of three-bladed, four-bladed, and even, now, the five-bladed razor. But the first blade was the one that really made the difference.

Gillette himself, at any rate according to this, was himself some kind of socialist:

Gillette was part of a broad socialist movement in the USA in the 1890s, who wanted to use the profits from his safety razor to finance his beliefs in a new socialist system.

Which only goes to show that people who are clever at one thing are not necessarily so clever at other things.

The uses of nano-technology will be many and revolutionise pretty much everything. Micro-circuits? How about nano-circuits!

Good News. A new study, to be published in Environmental Science and Technology in November, has concluded that the manufacturing of specified nanomaterials such as buckyballs and quantum dots is safer than oil refining or making wine. This was based upon an actuarial model that Zurich based XL insurance have developed to assess risks in existing manufacturing processes. Using the model allowed an assessment of the 'environmental footprint' of potential nanomaterial manufacturing.

Using a method for assessing the premiums that companies pay for insurance, a team of scientists and insurance experts have concluded that the manufacturing processes for five, near-market nanomaterials -- including quantum dots, carbon nanotubes and buckyballs -- present fewer risks to the environment than some common industrial processes like oil refining. For two of the nanomaterials – nanotubes and alumoxane nanoparticles -- manufacturing risks were comparable with those of making wine or aspirin.

This study does not provide assurances that there may be unknown risks with these nanomaterials.

In developing their risk assessments, the research team developed a detailed account of the input materials, output materials and waste streams for each process. Risk was qualitatively assessed for each process, based on factors including toxicity, flammability and persistence in the environment...

Mark Weisner, one of the co-authors of the study, concluded that,

"We can’t anticipate all of the details of how nanomaterials fabrication will evolve, but based on what we do know, the fabrication of the nanomaterials we considered appears to present lower risks than current industrial activities like petrochemical refining, polyethylene production and synthetic pharmaceutical production"

Let us remind ourselves of Greenpeace's objective for nanotechnology - reseach directed towards their own chosen goals through government expenditure and a moratorium until the precautionary principle is satisfied.

Greenpeace believes that there may be some advantages in developments in some nanotechnologies. However, we are concerned that any value could be lost if the development processes governing nanotechnology does not prioritise environmental, public health and social goals, and is not sensitive to the needs and concerns of the public at an early stage. Indeed some nanotechnologies could become a real problem. At this stage it is too early to say what the specific problems or advantages might be - but the way nanotechnology develops will have a huge influence on whether the outcomes are good or bad.

We want to see a moratorium on the release of nanoparticles to the environment until evidence that it is safe (for the environment and human health) is clear. In the longer term nanotechnology could produce self-replicating 'machines' whose proliferation could be environmentally problematic.

The moratorium may sound innocuous until one realises that the standard of proof required by Greenpeace is never weighed against the potential benefits or lives saved with the earlier deployment of these technologies. The danger is that the tautology of social goals, governmental ownership and control of these technologies for the public good (as defined by Greenpeace), could hinder real progress such as private sector efforts to build the space elevator.

With yet another long international flight stretching ahead of me, I finally have time and boredom enough to write a good deal more on network security issues than I have in the past. I have been at least peripherally involved in the area (self defense of my own and customers business networks) for quite some time.

There has been a sea change in the threat model over the last few years. The underworld of the Gibson novel has come to pass although things are perhaps not so dramatic as in the stories. Reality does not fit neatly between two covers.

I recently wrote about a possible case of industrial scale industrial espionage. There is much evidence in security literature that this is occuring and KGB/FSB bugged Russian hotels are not the only place one need worry. Everyone is getting into the game. For those who might be interested in such things I recommend a Dartmouth paper "CyberWarfare: An Analysis Of The Means And Motivations Of Selected Nation States", Bilko And Chang, December 2004.

While reading Bilko and Chang a number of other strands of thought came together. It puts a whole new light on the recent move of major internet equipment suppliers into Chinese production facilities. Among these, two are of particular note.

• IBM Thinkpads: the laptop of choice of many network professionals.
  
• Cisco Routers: These are ubiquitous in the infrastructure of the Internet from major backbone to small office.

Then there is the Lynn debacle. Michael Lynn gave a presentation at DEFCON this last summer in which he showed beyond a shadow of a doubt Trojans can be inserted into Cisco backbone routers... and by extension most other brands as well. His slide presentation was not of a specific exploit but of a generic method.

Cisco and ISS, the company from which he had just resigned, went totally over the top. They sent a crew to the DEFCON to remove pages from the programs. Afterwards they threatened to sue Michael Lynn unless he agreed to allow their forensics people to cryptographically wipe anything to do with the the research from his disk drives. They sent nasty letters to all and sundry who posted his slide set. They tracked down and took possession of every bit of video of the session they could get their hands on. Despite their best efforts to pull a "1984", they failed.

It was not just failure, it was total, abyssmal, embarrasing, hang-your-head you idiot failure. Instead of a few interested hackers and security analysts with copies stored in dusty corners of the internet they made it a slashdot affair. Absolutely everyone has the document now. I will not post a link here because if you really are interested you already have a copy and if you do not you can find it easily enough.

Another reason these actions were foolish on the part of Cisco brings me back to the central point of this article. The Cisco heap smash attack described by Michael Lynn was only an improvement on already published literature... and it may have already been implimented... by Chinese hackers.

The Dartmouth report suggests the Chinese hacker community is at least partly state organized. Of particular interest is page 36:

In addition, with increased "out-sourcing" to China in recent years, there is the risk that software companies could deliberately embed back-doors in the programming code which would render the software vulnerable to intrusion. The presence of a software "time bomb" might not be detected until it is too late.

Do not get me wrong. I have nothing against China... at least so long as they keep their hands off Formosa. China is not the only player in this game. It would be difficult to find a global or regional power that is not.

The United States is one of the bigger fiddlers on the net: Cisco and others purportedly gave NSA a backdoor; and then there are the quite official and public FBI 'CALEA' wiretap requirements on all new hardware and software.

Whether an individual or a nation, the idea so many people are trying so hard to capture and archive your life is repugnant and something to be avoided if possible. The desire of States to force the equivalent of listening devices into commercial software is one of those risks which can be avoided... by using open source instead of closed systems. Actions have consequences and the result of statist meddling is to make proprietary software less viable in any market where the users are aware of and care about privacy.

This is not just personal pontification on my part. It is already happening:

Sensing a power shift, multinational companies and governmental bodies such as the European Union are beginning to insist that Microsoft provide open interfaces--that is, public descriptions of its software that let other programs interoperate with it. China, in particular, is determined to avoid dependence upon proprietary American software. It is concerned about trade disputes, about building its own software industry, and also about vulnerability to "back doors" that could be used for espionage. This last fear is not entirely irrational. Although there are no publicly known cases of espionage against China involving software, other technologies have been so employed. Five years ago China purchased a new, unused Boeing jet and hired U.S. contractors to refit it in Texas as China"s equivalent of Air Force One. Upon taking possession of the plane, Chinese security officers found that it harbored more than two dozen highly sophisticated, satellite-controlled listening devices, hidden everywhere from the bathrooms to the headboard of the presidential bed.

If the proprietary closed source of corporate entities have government backdoors, then any who care about privacy or security will migrate to open source. Backdoors will be found and removed. If any government tries to make such removal 'illegal', they will be ignored and there is nothing they can do about it.

Just ask the lawyers from Cisco.

References:

1. CyberWarfare: An Analysis Of The Means And Motivations Of Selected Nation States, Bilko And Chang, December 2004.

2. National Security in Network Age -- An Interview

3. The Internet surveillance cash cow

4. Exploiting Cisco with FX

5. Router Flaw Is a Ticking Bomb

6. Cisco tries to silence researcher

7. Cisco, ISS file suit against rogue researcher

8. Cisco Security Upgrades

9. Security researcher faces scrutiny, FBI probe

10. Cisco Seeks to Quiet Software Flaw Talk

11. Update 2: Cisco, Security Researcher Settle Dispute

12. How Linux Could Overthrow Microsoft

Correction: One of our readers pointed out that the conference at which Lynn spoke was the Black Hat conference, not DEFCON as I said above.

The political system tends to lag behind technological change, which is often a good thing. I remember attending a House subcommittee hearing in the 1980s on whether the U.S. should create a phone-computer system modeled on the state-funded French Minitel, a text-only network being promoted as the wave of the future. Fortunately, the Internet exploded – making Minitel obsolete – before Congress could fund such a project.

- Glenn Harlan Reynolds reviewing this book

The possible tenth planet, 2003 UB313, which takes 540 years to circle the sun, in a highly eccentric orbit, has now acquired a satellite. The new moon was discovered two months after 2003 UB313 by the Keck observatory on September 10th and the findings will be published tomorrow. The existence of a moon ensures that Xena will be seriously considered as a tenth planet, since it has the mass to acquire orbiting bodies.

"Since the day we discovered Xena, the big question has been whether or not it has a moon," Michael Brown, of the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "Having a moon is just inherently cool — and it is something that most self-respecting planets have, so it is good to see that this one does too."

The possible 10th planet moves in a highly eccentric orbit, tilted some 45 degrees above the orbital plane of the other planets. Its orbit is also elliptical, zooming in as close as 3.5 billion miles from the sun and moving out to as far as 9 billion miles away.

And, as you know, the self-respecting companion of Xena, could only have been called Gabrielle.

I was only a toddler when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went on that historic walk on the Moon (well, assuming you don't buy the tedious conspiracy theories that it was all staged in Madison Avenue or whatever), and have been interested in this period of post-war history for a long time. So, for all you space junkies out there, there is a 3-D IMAX documentary on the way, portraying how the whole Moon landings went. Excellent. Book the popcorn and the soda drinks.

The Science Museum in London - one of the greatest - is showing the film.

I do not usually bring my professional activities to the pages of Samizdata, but I have a very interesting little story to tell.

There are things going on out in Cyberspace of which most are little aware. Some will have heard reports saying Cyberwar backed by nation states will soon be able to bring down economies. Other reports equally vehemently say the idea is an over-hyped load of bollocks.

I can tell you from personal experience 'on the front lines' there are indeed goings on which I find difficult to explain without recourse to State backed Cyberwar activities as fact. I cannot give specific details: that would be violating customer trust. What I can tell is the broad brush tale of a rather interesting discovery I stumbled upon late one night.

I was trying to assist a 'Road Warrior' CEO in getting at his email. This was not my reason for being at the ISP working - I was there on a consulting job - but I was the only one available at that hour. Their customer was in Moscow on a business trip and was becoming more and more strident over his inability to read his office mail.

I began tracing the ISP's systems and trying to pull needles out of haystacks of system and mail logs. At first I thought he was appearing through a different address than he claimed to be using in his hotel. Proving this was made more difficult by the Moscow hotel not having its systems properly set up.

Someone was reading his mail and it was not him. Further more, that someone was in Beijing. Most disturbingly, it was from a Beijing network through which several years ago I had a near penetration of a firewall of mine. A friend who was a reformed 'black-hat' could not even explain what had happened. They were that good. So seeing someone on the same network repeatedly picking up this CEO's email was a nasty surprise. My investigation suddenly shifted from 'help the idjit customer' mode to defense and forensics.

I will not bore you with details. After conferring with some other network and security people I had a story that fit the facts. I cannot absolutely swear the following is what was going on, but I can make a fair case for it.

It seems old hardline KGB have a presence in China and they use Beijing as a cutout for some of their activities. Since the password had to get there somehow, I infer either in the Moscow hotel or somewhere in a nearby Russian backbone node there is a data mining operation going on.

Imagine you are a businessman arriving in Russia for a trade show or other event. You check into the hotel and immediately use the internet connection to pick up your home office email. As you are not a network security expert, you do not realize your normal 'pop3' mail pickup is sending a clear-text user name and password when your laptop connects to your office (or gmail) server.

Your poor, unprotected little password gets scarfed up before it reaches the border. Along with other captives it gets passed on to the cutout operation in Beijing. Someone then connects and reads your mail. Presumably all the mail then gets dumped into a huge database where it can be cross-indexed and mined for proprietary data, internal data security info, blackmail possibilities and other attack vectors into yours or other corporate networks.

I could be wrong. There are other scenarios... but not many. One must explain how a password journeyed to Beijing within no more than a day or two of the CEO's Moscow arrival. This does not happen accidentally.

I find this all quite disturbing.

As I predicted a few weeks ago, SUV-phobes need not get into a hissy fit. The market is changing people's driving habits:

Toyota Motor Corp. has seen a rise in demand for hybrid vehicles in the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as consumers seek more mileage out of $3-gallon gasoline, a top official said on Thursday.

"At the end of last month, we had a 20-hour supply of the Prius (hybrid sedan)," Jim Press, head of Toyota's U.S. operations, said at the Reuters Autos Summit, held in Detroit. "We no longer count in days."

Price increases change human behaviour. Who would have thought it?

How dangerous is nuclear power? Think about Chernobyl, all those people who have died from radiation as a result of that huge disaster.... A total of 59 over 20 years, it turns out.

The world's worst nuclear accident is significantly less dangerous to the general public of the continent of Europe than, say, Metropolitan Police drivers, never mind the continent's public transport systems and its oil refineries. I am unaware of any casualties caused by wind farms, but it is hard to build tall things without someone managing to fall off, or some heavy bits dropping off occasionally.

Buses kill. Ban them now!

I think the field known as nanotechnology just took another pretty major advance, judging by this story:

Scientists have made a breakthrough in nanotechnology which could hasten the development of molecular machines that could act as artificial muscles or drug delivery systems in the body.

Chemists at Edinburgh University said on Wednesday they had built molecules that can move objects larger than the size of an atom in an advance in the technology that deals with manipulating materials on a minuscule scale.

If nanotech can be harnessed to deliver potentially life-saving drugs to parts of the body, to deal with conditions such as cancer, for example, its impact on health care could be enormous. And knowing a few people who suffer from cancer, including a good friend of long standing, this is a very personal issue for me.

Americans are working on nanotubes. In Germany, they are making artificial diamonds that are tougher and denser than the naturally occurring kind.

Here in Britain, in Somerset to be precise, we are harnessing, as Ananova reports, hamster power:

We've often wondered for what purpose exactly hamsters were put upon this earth, and now we know: to charge mobile phones.

Sixteen-year-old Peter Ash, of Somerset, finally cracked this age-old poser after his long-suffering sister complained of pet hamster Elvis scuttling away for hours during his nocturnal exercise wheel regime.

Ash told Ananova: "I thought the wheel could be made to do something useful so I connected a system of gears and a turbine." He then patched the output to his mobe's charger and voila! – free hamster energy at around thirty minutes' talktime for every two hamster wheel minutes.

My thanks to Michael Jennings for emailing me the link to this important news. In his email, he noted the educational angle. Apparently this was a school project, but was not marked very highly.

Surprisingly - and considering all the current moaning about falling exam standards, etc, etc - Ash only got a "C" for this contribution to his GSCE science course and, undoubtedly, a clean-energy future for all our children. Perhaps if he'd knocked together a desktop cold fusion reactor powered by supercharged, neutron-emitting guinea pigs suspended in deuterium gas he might have earned himself an "A".

To be a bit more serious, I think the real story here is not just a new way to get power, but the fact that nowadays a little bit of power can go a whole lot further than it used to. Hamsters have long had it in them to crank out a dribble of electricity. What is new here, surely, is the "mobe" which makes such good use of it.

Over the weekend, Bill Oddie fronted a TV show about dinosaurs, in which, in order to learn how fast dinosaurs could run, an ostrich called Sharon was asked to run on an exercise machine. She apparently enjoyed doing this a lot. (The point was that ostriches have similar legs to what dinosaurs used to have. Work out how fast and for how long ostriches can run, with their legs, and you can calculate how fast and for how long the dinosaurs could run.) Maybe Sharon and her sisters and brothers could get jobs generating electricity.

Maybe gymnasia could double up as places where you can recharge your phone. By the sweat of your brow, I mean. Not just by handing it in at the desk and collecting it later. That way, you earn the right to spout rubbish over it to your idiot friends.

"Organic farming has been put forward as one of the major pillars of a new, more-sustainable human society that would be "kinder to the earth". Unfortunately, organic farming cannot deliver on that promise. In fact, organic farming is an imminent danger to the world's wildlife and hazard to the health of its own consumers."

Dennis Avery, quoted in Fearing Food, (page 3) by Roger Bate and Julian Morris.

Something for George Moonbat to ponder, I reckon.

Is there anything, anything, now going on in what used to be called, either with delicate euphemism or with a sneer, the "developing world", but which now really is the developing world, that is more encouraging than the rapid spread throughout said world of portable telephones?

I have just done a piece for the ASI blog about this process in Africa, linking to this New York Times article. And the Private Sector Development blog (whom I have just added to my personal blogroll here), in addition to supplying the same link today, have also linked to of a recent Economist piece on the same subject. Pablo Halkyard also links to this Wall Street Journal piece.

It is not all good news. It never is. Governments all over the place are now demanding extortionate connection taxes, to the point where the tax bill is starting seriously to outweigh what would have been the regular cost. Sounds like those cheap European air tickets that I sometimes buy on the internet for peanuts, where the government then charges me peanuts times four. Nevertheless, even there the news is partly good, because at least some governments are learning that if they cut connection taxes down to something more in line with the extreme cheapness of the service itself, people are more ready to pay such taxes. That is because illegal phones are more likely to go wrong and harder to get mended if they do go wrong. Is the unwillingness of people to pay big taxes good news or is their willingness to pay small taxes bad news? You decide.

The portable phone quote that made me smile the most this morning was this, from the Economist piece:

(Oh, and the "digital divide" vanishes, too.)

I especially like the brackets.

Until a day or two ago, I tended to regard the word "nanotechnology" as nerd-speak for it will never happen. But there really does seem to be a buzz surrounding this latest nanotchnological announcement:

A joint effort between the University of Texas and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization has created industrial-ready material made of nanotubes. The scientists reported this in the Friday edition of the journal Science.

The nanotubes are made of carbon and possess incredible strength. The sheets of nanotubes measure just a few times wider than the actual carbon atom, or 2 millionths-of-an-inch (2000 times thinner than paper). A square mile of this will could weigh as little as 170 pounds. The sheets are transparent, flexible and stronger than steel or high strength plastics.

Apparently that has applications to batteries, fast cars, flat screen TVs, and at least half a dozen other things I forget. Oh yes, it will make it easier to build those giant lifts that will take stuff into space for thirty pence per item, instead of for twenty zillion dollars per item which is what the Space Shuttle now costs.

This is the stuff that I find most impressive:

"Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible," says Ray Baughman, a chemist from the University of Texas at Dallas. The process starts "with a 'forest' of half-millimeter-long nanotubes sticking upright on an iron-based platform. Pulling gently from the edge of the forest with an adhesive strip, such as a Post-It note, uproots a row containing millions of nanotubes. As these nanotubes pull out, they tangle with the next row, and so on."

It sounds almost like something you could do at home, like spinning.

The point is: (a) this guy presumably knows what he is talking about, and (b) if he is wrong, he is going to be proved extremely wrong, extremely soon. He will not want that, so presumably he is on the level.

Most of the readers of this blog who care about this kind of stuff will already know all about this particular excitement. After all, Instapundit has already linked to it, and generally been all over the story. So has Tim Worstall. My point is not so much that hey, here is this techo-announcement. My point is that this particular techno-announcement does actually have a seriously historic feel to it. This sounds so very easy to do, and so very useful, for so many different kinds of stuff. This, in short, feels big.

Am I right?

It is hard for someone like me to tell how serious this plan for a completely silent aircraft is. This in particular made me dubious:

Environmental campaigners and people living on flight paths have already welcomed the campaign to build the jet.

"Campaign"? That makes me think that this design is as much politics as technology, a suspicion that is confirmed when I look at the website of the Silent Aircraft Initiative, which is the organisation that is promoting this scheme.

The initiative aims to improve competitiveness in the UK aerospace sector by changing the way research is undertaken, through extensive collaboration with a much wider franchise of stakeholders than ever before. By embracing this larger community, the Silent Aircraft Initiative seeks to produce a truly optimised concept design that contributes to the prosperity of the UK in an environmentally sustainable way.

Well, I suppose it could work. But it all smells to me a bit like a rerun of Concorde, in its very early stage, the stage when they were hustling up public money and political support. There is the same obsessive pursuit of one popular variable, in this case silence, to replace Concorde's equally narrow focus – with insufficient subsequent regard for either economy or cacophony – on speed. The thing even looks rather like Concorde.

I can find no mention of how extremely inconvenient maintaining this new contraption would surely be, what with the engines being on the top.

Comments anyone? Is this a serious scheme, or just kite flying? Or is it serious, but only at a very early stage? And is that BBC report wrong only in implying that the thing is nearly ready to be built?

Do all generic aircraft designs in their early stages have to be political, one way or another – either paid for wholly by a government or by governments in secret, or else "campaigned" for, out there in the public realm?

No longer are hearing aids just for people suffering from defective hearing. This article in Wired, the U.S. technology and futurism magazine, says manufacturers are now producing aids that even someone with "perfect" hearing can use to enhance the experience of certain sounds. An example of how a medical technology ended up becoming almost a luxury product like coloured contact lenses.

Sounds like a winner. I suffer from a permanent mild buzz in my right ear, the results of an ear infection. It sometimes is a little hard to make out what a person is saying in a loud party gathering. With one of these new, inconspicuous aids, I could listen in to comments across the room better than Superman. Thinking about it, it might make it impossible to whisper a confidential message to anyone without fearing that a guy with one of these hearing gadgets might pick it up. Shades of Q Branch fantasy turning into reality.

On the subject of enhancing human capacities via technologies, I have ordered Ronald Bailey's latest hymn of praise to developments in this area. Looks good from the initial reviews.

As a scientist and a practical man, I'm against manned-space flight; as a human being I'm in favour.

- Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, interviewed on Today this morning

There has been quite a bit of press coverage in the last couple of weeks about the discovery of an object in the outer solar system, which has been given the astronomical name 2003 UB313, but which has been popularly dubbed "Xena". In some circles this has been described as a new planet, and in others its discovery has been given as comprehensive proof that Pluto is not a planet and that there are only eight planets in the solar system. Personally I have two opinions here. Firstly, I think it should be "Rupert" and not "Xena". And of the two viewpoints given, I tend to agree with the second, which is that the new discovery reduces the number of planets to eight. Although thinking about it some more, I am not sure that either viewpoint is right. A better interpretation might be that it reduces the number of planets to four. Or perhaps to zero. It all depends on your point of view.

Why do I think this? In order to properly understand the question, an astronomical primer is in order. Many of our readers will already know this stuff, but this is all quite interesting and is nice to put it all down in one place.

Let me describe the solar system. For the moment, I am going to leave Pluto out, as it does not fit into what I am to initially describe. The solar system is generally considered to contain two types of planet. One is the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and Mars). These orbit the sun at distances between 50 million kilometres and 250 million kilometres, and have radii of between 2500km and 6500km. They have surfaces made of solid materials (ie rock) . The second type of planet is the "Gas Giants" (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). These orbit the sun at distances of between 0.75 billion and 4.5 billion kilometres, and have radii of between 25000 and 70000 kilometres. They basically consist of atmospheres that get denser and denser as the altitude gets lower and lower, and which gradually thicken until at some rather indeterminate point they go from being a gas to a liquid to a solid or to even more exotic things that defy simple classification. These planets are orbited by many small rocky moons, and planetary rings. Three of them (Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune) are also orbited by larger moons that would count as planets in their own right if they orbited the sun and were part of the inner solar system.

The orbits of these planets (of both kinds, but with one exception that we will get to) have two notable facts about them. First, they all circle the sun in approximately the same plane, known as the "plane of the ecliptic" or just "the ecliptic". As a consequence, if there are a number of planets visible in the sky at the same time, they tend to be in a fairly straight line. Secondly, the orbits of the planets are approximately circular.

But they are not exactly circular, and they are not exactly in the same plane. Mathematicians have ways of quantifying both these things. The first of these is relatively simple. Simply measure the angle between the ecliptic and the plane of the planet's orbit, and quote this number as the orbital inclination. With the exception that I will get to in a moment, the planets discussed already have small orbital inclinations of up to about three and a half degrees. See here for detailed planetary statistics of various kinds, including inclination.

While Copernicus was the first modern scientist to recognise that the Earth and other planets went around the sun, his theory did not quite successfully explain the movements of the planets in the heavens. That took someone with better mathematics.

Johannes Kepler managed to fix this problem in around 1620 by explaining that the orbits of the planets are not precisely circular, but are ellipses. Mathematically, the shape of these ellipses are described by a number called the eccentricity of each ellipse. This number has a a precise mathematical definition that falls out of certain solutions to Newton's equations of gravity and motion fairly naturally, but it is enough to explain that it is zero for an exact circle and it gets greater as the ellipse gets longer and thinner. When one end of the ellipse is stretched all the way to infinity the eccentricity becomes equal to one and the orbit becomes a parabola rather than an ellipse. (At this point we are digressing towards something called the mathematics of conic sections, which I will merely provide a link to rather than describe in detail).

So what is the exception? That would be Mercury, which has an orbital inclination of 7 degrees and an eccentricity of about 0.2. This makes it highly unusual, but as it is broadly similar in composition as the other inner planets and there are no other objects like it to be classified into a third class of planets, it is generally considered one of the inner planets.

As it happens, there is a simplification in the above analysis. While the orbits of planets around the sun are almost ellipses, they are in fact not quite exact ellipses. If a planet was orbiting the sun and was not affected by the gravitational pull of any other object, the orbit would indeed be an ellipse. But as it happens the planets exert gravitational effects on one another, and these cause perturbations from exact elliptical orbits. (In a strict sense, the orbit of a given planet is influenced by the gravitational pull of every other object in the universe, but in practice it is the gravitational pull of the other planets that matters).

Prior to the eighteenth century, planets beyond Saturn were unknown to science. Calculations were made by various mathematicians as to the effects of the gravitational pulls of the planets of each other. (Without a computer this is very difficult to do accurately). However, it seemed that it was not possible to explain the orbit of Saturn. One potential explanation was that another unknown planet was influencing the orbit of Saturn. The approximate location of this planet was determined by further calculations. Astronomers started looking for it, and Uranus was discovered William Herschel in 1781.

Of course, mathematicians then did another series of calculations, and discovered that they couldn't properly explain the orbit of the new planet Uranus. Once again the explanation was that there was another planet, and Neptune was discovered in 1846. By this point a pattern had been established. Calculations of the orbit of Neptune could not be properly explained and another planet further out was predicted. Astronomers looked, and in 1930 Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered a ninth planet. The name it was given, Pluto, was coined by an eleven year old girl in Oxford named Venetia Burney.

Except that the calculations that the discovery of Pluto was based on turned out to be wrong. The mass of Neptune used in the relevant calculations were incorrect, and Neptune's orbit could be adequately predicted without any need for an additional planet. It just happened that there was something where Tombaugh happened to be looking. That something was very peculiar by the standards of the other planets. Pluto has an eccentricity of 0.25 and an orbital inclination of 27 degrees. These are greater than any other planet, including Mercury. And Pluto has less than a tenth of the mass of any of the other planets, although it took a few decades for this to be determined.

Pluto was odd, yes. But this was not initially a huge issue. Mercury is odd, too. If there is an odd planet at each end of the solar system, so what. That just makes things interesting. But there was another possibility. Pluto was discovered because one small piece of the sky was being intensively examined. There were many other pieces of sky which were not being intensively examined. (Many pieces of sky a long way out of the ecliptic were and are seldom examined). What if there were other Pluto like objects, and rather than being lucky, Tombaugh had instead simply discovered one of many such objects. This does actually appear to be what happened, but we have only known this recently.

As well as the planets, the solar system contains many objects that orbit the sun that are too small to be classified as planets: these are known as asteroids and planetoids. The two terms are distinct, but overlap somewhat, and a third expression "minor planets" is sometimes used to describe them and other objects we will get to later. Most of the largest asteroids orbit between the inner and outer planets (ie between Mars and Jupiter).

But in recent years, a new class of minor planet has been predicted and discovered in the outer solar system

As knowledge of how the solar system formed has grown, then it has become steadily clearer that something called the Kuiper belt exists beyond Neptune. This consists of small rocky objects that have been ejected from the inner solar system by the gravity of Jupiter. These objects typically have high orbital inclination and eccentricity. Quite a lot of these objects have been discovered over the last fifteen years. It takes quite a lot of effort to find them because they are both quite small and distant and thus very feint, and also because their high orbital inclination means that they are further out of the ecliptic than are the planets. Interestingly enough, there appears to be an outer limit to the Kuiper belt, "the so called "Kuiper gap" or "Kuiper cliff", beyond which there are no further such objects. It has been postulated that there is a larger object (perhaps the size of Mars or the Earth) orbiting at that distance which interferes with the orbits of Kuiper belt objects and does not allow them to remain in orbits beyond this point.

In any event, the mathematical analysis that predicts the Kuiper belt also allows for objects in it the size of Pluto, and larger, up to about the size of the earth. Thus it has been the opinion of many planetary scientists for a few years that Pluto was just another Kuiper belt object. While it would be okay to keep Pluto in the list of planets (despite being very dissimilar from all the rest) it would not be okay to do so if it was just one of a class of other objects. It would not be possible to include the rest of this class of objects in the list of planets, because many of them are smaller than other objects (eg some asteroids) that we do not count as planets. Other scientists and non-scientists had argued that as long as Pluto was larger than any other Kuiper belt object (and closer than the vast majority) it was okay to keep it on the planets list, largely for historical reasons.

But this position would go from eccentric to deeply misleading if Pluto was not the largest such object, and if there were other similar sized objects roughly the same distance from the earth. And over the last few years that position has got steadily shakier. More large Kuiper belt objects have been discovered, and Pluto's status has become steadily less unique. In particular Quaoar was discovered in 2002, which was more than half the size of Pluto, although considerably further out. At the time there were a few calls to remove Pluto's planetary status, which were listened to but generally ignored.

And on July 29 this year, the discovery of three new objects was announced. Two of these was a bit less than the size of Pluto, the other, 2003UB313, the aforementioned Xena, is clearly larger than Pluto. It is a little further out than Pluto, but in cosmic terms not dramatically so. Xena's closest point to the sun is substantially further out than Pluto’s furthest point out, so in any meaningful way of looking at things they are neighbours. It is clearly an accident that Pluto and not Xena was discovered in the 1930s. (However, Xena has a very high orbital inclination - around 41 degrees). If Tombaugh had instead been looking in the direction of Xena, then he would have seen Xena. Xena can clearly be seen in many astronomical photographs going back decades now that people need to look at it. Incidentally, one of the other new objects announced last week, 2003 EL61 or "Santa", has a moon, so attempting to use "Only planets have moons" as part of your definition of a planet doesn't work. The truth is that we have reached the point where Pluto's planetary status is not something that can be kept if we wish to keep any kind of consistency. It might be possible to give planetary status to Xena for now, but almost certainly another object of Xena's size or larger will be found before long.

So, for now, we can keep some consistency by saying that Mercury is the smallest planet, and anything larger is a planet but that anything smaller is not. This is at least a consistent definition.

But even this presents us with problems, because there are clearly an awful lot of things that are orbiting the sun that we do not know about. What about that Mars or Earth sized object out at the far edge of the Kuiper belt? The chances are excellent that it is there, and I suspect that we shall actually see them before now. (Track the orbits of existing Kuiper belt objects, look at any large perturbations to their expected orbits, and narrow the positions down. Much more complicated forms of these calculations can be managed in these days of computers). Almost certainly such objects will be found that are larger than Mercury. At that point we either include these new objects as planets - something I think there would be a strong case for doing - or we change the definition of planets again, to something like, "objects that are orbiting the sun, that are the size of Mercury or larger, and that are no further from the sun than the orbit of Neptune. Or you could perhaps exclude Mercury, and work from "planets Mars size or larger, and....., and......

But it all perhaps gets down to a simple fact. Rather than just a few planets, there is in fact an immense amount of stuff orbiting the Sun. Any distinction between "planets" and "something else" is rather arbitrary. There are certainly distinct classes of object, including "Gas Giants", "Inner planets", "main belt asteroids", "Kuiper Belt objects". "comets" and more. Perhaps the very idea of a "planet", which is a category that includes at least two of these distinct classes of object, is an idea that has outlived its usefulness. In any event, we have to add an awful lot of qualifications to the definition make it work. I suppose one could narrow down the definition further, and say that only the gas giants, "Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune", are the only true planets, and that everything else merges into everything else with so little in the way of discontinuities that such a definition is the only one but makes sense.

But that leaves us with earth not being a planet, and as planets were originally considered to be "earth like objects", then this is also a bit of a problem. It may be time to drop the idea of a planet entirely.

South Korean scientists have cloned the first dog, succeeding at a project where laboratories and firms in the United States had been beavering away for years. This is a salutary lesson for Europe, more than for the United States, that research in biotechnology and stem cells is increasingly taking place in the 'Wild East'.

An Afghan puppy, called Snuppy, is now alive after this process:

The process of dog cloning remains highly inefficient, a reflection of how much scientists still have to learn about how to make mammalian offspring from single parents and without the help of sperm. Multiple surgeries on more than 100 anesthetized dogs and the painstaking creation of more than 1,000 laboratory-grown embryos led to the birth of just two cloned puppies -- one of which died after three weeks.

Animal rights activists were unimpressed.

Snuppy's birth announcement, published in today's issue of Nature, was greeted with scorn by some animal care activists, who decried the work as inhumane and wasteful, given the global glut of unwanted dogs.

"The cruelty and the body count outweighs any benefit that can be gained from this," said Mary Beth Sweetland, a vice president at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk.

Cloned pets remain unviable for some time yet.

In the debate on software patents, the defenders of patents use moral and theoretical arguments, but avoid using data or facts. Different people are good at making different types of arguments. I am a believer in the division of labour. So not everyone will use empirically-rooted arguments. But it seems a bit odd to me that I cannot find anyone who writes things like:

Because Microsoft did not have a patent on the graphical user interface, it made a decision not to invest in operating systems, but because it had a patent on X it increased R&D in that area by 582%.

Instead, the supporters of software patents concentrate on theoretical arguments. As an example, take this article by a patent lawyer writing about software:

In a market where inventions cannot be protected in order to yield a return on the invested resources, very few would be prepared to make those investments available.

I like theoretical arguments, and the argument in the paragraph above is a perfectly reasonable position to have. But if patents really do have a beneficial effect in software, shouldn't someone somewhere be able to give us some figures to back up that idea? Where is the empirical evidence?

About a year and a half ago, Terence Kealey gave a talk at a Hobart Lunch at the Institute of Economic Affairs arguing that a world without patents would be more innovative. Dr Kealey is a biochemist who is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham and the author of The Scientific Laws of Economic Research.

It was one of the most interesting events I have been to at the IEA, and the audience was very much split which made for an entertaining Q&A session. I disagreed with Dr Kealey at the lunch, but I recognized there was something to what he said. The lunch was something of a life-changing experience because I have subsequently moved towards his position, though I'm not there yet.

One of the most difficult aspects of thinking about a world with less or no patent protection is that it is so hard to imagine. When thinking about a Britain with a denationalized National Health Service, you can visit mainland Europe or America and see how systems work in other developed countries. Country comparisons aren't so easily available when it comes to patents.

But one market I have written about here recently - that of software - clearly shows that fast innovation can occur without patents, at least in the area of software. If software patents had existed in the US from day one, and if there had been a culture of patenting everything, we might live in a very different world today. We might sit in front of our computers today and see this:

And people would pronounce in public: "Thank goodness that we have software patents. Just as property rights in physical property enables economic development, software patents enable software development." And they would post articles to that effect on the internet, known in this alternative reality as The Microsoft Network, which might look like this:

And everyone would be thankful that we have a system that clearly and undeniably promotes innovation.

All of the major innovations in software have occurred without recourse to patents. From the creation of the graphical user interface to the word processor to the web browser, consumers and society have benefited from the same ideas being used by different competitors.

Some readers might point out that you can only patent an "implementation", not an idea. But, as Chris Bidmead points out:

In practice patent lawyers have always attempted to file in a way that generalises the implementation to the point where any practical use of the idea is covered by the patent - tantamount to patenting the idea.

Fortunately, we weren't locked into using WordStar, the first commercially successful word processor, for twenty years. Even though no one owned the idea of a word processor, companies still entered the market, and Microsoft has been able to keep investors very happy with the money it has gained through being better than the likes of WordStar and WordPerfect. The competitors in the word processor market kept copying each others' ideas, and that was great because it led to a race to the top. High spending on R&D was a prerequisite of staying in the market. Had WordStar owned a patent on the idea of computer-based typewriting of documents, or on important aspects of the word processor, we would all be worse off today.

Innovation in software occurs because of copyright, not because of patents. Copyright enables people to protect their work. But we are all better off - we all benefit from greater innovation - when companies are able to compete free from the shackles of (software) patent monopolies. Established, vested interests - most notably Microsoft - want to prevent competition. The European Parliament fortunately voted against EU-wide software patents. In order to increase innovation, surely it is time for software patents to be fully repealed?

The UN rears its ugly head again as an international political spat is brewing over whether the United Nations will seize control of the heart of the Internet. By ugly I mean those members of the UN whose rule at home has nothing to recommend them such as Syria, China or Ghana. They claim that the U.S. government has undue influence over how things run online. Now they want to be the ones in charge.

One of the things at issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming.

But this is the bit that opens the knife in my pocket.

Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, "consumer protection," and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for "universal access."

I know that there is not much love lost for ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, established to handle some of those topics, but these kind of noises from the UN represent a political challenge as they come from predictable corners. CNET news.com provides excerpts from a transcript of a recent closed-door meeting in Geneva convened by the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance that offers clues about the plot to dethrone ICANN. Please note the sophistication and understanding of internet and the related issues by the participants:

Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."

Brazil, responding to ICANN's approval of .xxx domains: "For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."

China: "We feel that the public policy issue of Internet should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework...For instance, spam, network security and cyberspace--we should look for an appropriate specialized agency of the United Nations as a competent body."

Ghana: "There was unanimity for the need for an additional body...This body would therefore address all issues relating to the Internet within the confines of the available expertise which would be anchored at the U.N."

So the usual 'control-and-destroy' approach of the UN scum. Can they do anything about it? Apparently there is the nuclear option .

Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN--but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.

Declan McCullagh, the author of the article, believes that such an outcome remains remote, but possible, which turns an obscure debate about Internet governance has suddenly become surprisingly important. I hope the US does not let go...

Story here about how mobile phones were felled by the terror blasts, with a huge upsurge in traffic. Not a great day for the mobile system.

I am glad they caught this guy.

Sven Jaschan is charged with computer sabotage, disrupting public services and illegally altering data.

The 19-year-old is being tried as a minor behind closed doors as he was 17 when he wrote the worm.

Sasser wrought havoc in many companies when the Windows worm struck in May 2004, swamping net links and making computers unusable.

How much high explosive would you have to let off to do as much damage as this little monster unleashed? And before you say that explosives kill people and all he did was screw around with a zillion computers, my guess is that actually, one way or anther, he did kill quite a few people. That much stress and grief must have ended a few lives.

I find myself thinking along these lines. And failing that, onwards and outwards to all those planets out there, so people like this can be transported to them, like in Alien 3.

Yup, they have jilted Motorola...just as the rest of world moves to AMD chips. Heh.

An attempt by two men from northern Minnesota to cross the Arctic Ocean to call attention to global warming ended this morning because of poor weather conditions.

Lonnie Dupre, 43, and Eric Larsen, 33, were forced to abandon their planned 100-day, 1,200-mile trek after encountering unexpectedly heavy snow storms, strong winds and unusual ice conditions, according to Jane Kochersperger, a media officer with the environmental group Greenpeace, which co-sponsored the trip.

Some things just speak for themselves.

As strange as it may sound, I still maintain a smidgeon of sympathy with all those wretched, deluded souls who sincerely believed that technology was going to liberate us all from the leviathan. I am but fearful. They, on the other hand, must be both fearful and crushed:

The British government acknowledged Monday that it would consider using implanted ID chips to track sex offenders, raising the specter of forced chipping.

While not yet a reality, implants that can remotely check bodily functions and location are just around the corner: Microchips are being developed for a variety of health functions, and a Florida company is planning to develop a prototype of an implanted GPS device by the end of the year.

When the Food and Drug Administration green-lighted the use of ID chips in humans last month, civil liberties advocates worried that people could be forced to get chipped as a condition of employment or parole. News that the British government may implant sex offenders in the future fanned those fears.

Of course, it will start with convicted (or maybe even suspected) child molesters. Who could possibly object to that?

The latest posting of my Internet acquaintance Adam Tinworth (we first linked because he is professionally interested in new architecture and I am an amateur fan of it) consists of just two paragraphs, and yet is full of insight into the way we live now. Either paragraph would have served well as a Samizdata quote of the day.

I could not decide which to pick, and in any case did not want to neglect the other, so here are both:

WiFi in airport departure lines is the mark of civilised countries. Free WiFi is the mark of truly civilised countries. Based on my experiences in Edinburgh and Washington, the UK is civilised and the USA is truly civilised.

In other news, I was reminded again today of the fact that pretty much the first thing people do when going for a meeting with someone new is Google them. If you Google me, you get this site. More and more people I'm meeting through magazine work have read this site before I meet them. I'd better be on my best behaviour, hadn't I?

There is indeed, I think, something very Jane Austenish about blogging. Simply from the point of view of good manners it seems to bring the best out of a lot of people, and to moderate their snarkier tendencies, in just the kind of way that Tinworth has registered.

It is understandable that the Mainstream Media have focussed, when discussing blogging, on the impact of blogging on the Mainstream Media. Is blogging another way, and a better way, and a more cost effective way, and a less politically choosy way, to do what they already pride themselves on doing, namely to rake muck and to make powerful people wish that the ground would open up and swallow them?

This is a very good question, but it misses the degree to which blogging may also serve to make regular people just plain nicer and more polite to one another.

The steady advances in cloning technology holds a great deal of hope the future of the species and the news from Korea and Britain has been pretty damn encouraging over the last few years. It now looks like we could be on the brink of being able to mass produce stem cells and that, boys and girls, could be the gateway to a new era of medical possibilities.

Xavier Méra has a piece up at Institut économique Molinari about the continuing and seemingly never-ending EU vendetta against Microsoft.

Concluding paragraphs:

That is not all. EU spokesman Antonia Mochan observed that the Media Player affair went "beyond the question of its name," which has now been settled. Indeed, Microsoft's rivals complain that the reduced version of Windows is not totally compatible with their programs. The EU's competition department has stated that tests are under way, and an EU source wishing to remain anonymous confirmed the plaintiffs' complaints about compatibility. It is perhaps this aspect, the least widely reported in the Media Player affair, which reveals the most about the validity of the charges made against the IT giant. In fact, if the commission ends up denouncing this state of affairs, it will once again be contradicting grievances it has put forward about Microsoft.

The point of the penalty is that the integrated version of Media Player allegedly damages competitors. Withdrawing it should therefore benefit them. If this is not the case, as they say and as the commission spokesperson suggests, that means these rival software writers are in reality third-party beneficiaries of the Windows Media Player system. It cannot be argued in the same breath that Microsoft both hurts and helps its competitors with the same product. It follows then that we cannot criticize Microsoft both for putting forward a Windows "N" that is "flawed" because it doesn't contain specific Media Player files, and for being an "unfair" competitor with its complete version.

In a trial where logic has not been taken seriously, arbitrary judgement has played a more significant role than reason and experience. As the accusation continues down the same path, the Microsoft case is coming to look more and more like a witch-hunt.

Well, it sounds to me more like that Microsoft, having been ordered to do business differently from the utterly reasonable and beneficial-to-all-except-rivals way that it wants to, may have introduced a little minor self-inflicted sabotage, Atlas Shrugged style, in order to make the EU regulators feel like the prats that they are.

Either that, or they are maybe indulging in that alternative version of sabotage that consists of doing everything you are told and nothing else, which always causes havoc. Few things ruin complicated technological systems more quickly and more completely than pure obedience. Okay, if that is what you bastards say you want, that is what you will get . . .

And I say that they have a perfect right to do all of that. I have always thought that bitching about Microsoft including Media Player in Windows is about as sane as complaining about a car company including hub caps on its cars, on the grounds that this discriminates against disappointed hub cap suppliers. Which it sort of does, but so bloody what?

By the way, the first version of this posting that I stuck up was entitled, in error: "The EU versus the EU (again)". (I decided to change it from "Microsoft versus the EU" to "The EU versus Microsoft", but only got half way.) But maybe this was not such an error. Self destruction is what the EU often seems to be all about.

This is interesting. Excerpt:

The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.

The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.

Dr Oreskes's study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser.

However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been "widely dispersed on the internet".

Well, they will be now.

I have for a long time wanted to know not just about global warming itself, but about the alleged expert consensus concerning its man-madeness. This should stir up a good discussion.

There is a tendency among free marketeers to say that global warming is all nonsense, not for the good reason that they actually think it all nonsense, but because they see it being used to establish a world government, which they oppose for other reasons. And I am sure that many who insist on the reality of global warming and of its man-madeness do so because they want a world government, which they favour for other reasons.

Yet there is no logical reason why one should not be a free marketeer who believes in the reality of man-made global warming, or a world governor who thinks it is all hooey.

Personally I am a free marketeer, and a sceptic on global warming, in the sense of not being persuaded that it is happening catastrophically, or that it is man-made. Note: a sceptic, rather than a disbeliever. I am a global warming agnostic rather than a global warming atheist. (And I think the religious vibes of this debate are all too real. The Environment seems to have replaced God for a lot of people.) I genuinely want to learn more about this alleged horror, on the off chance that I might be able to climb down off the fence, in one direction or another.

Question, what measures should a free marketeer who believes for sure that global warming is taking us all to catastrophe, is man-made, and is reversible, favour?

I say: develop technology more. Let us all get a lot richer. Meanwhile, devise a technical fix for the damn thing. And then rattle a big tin and do it. All the while arguing about it in forums like this one, and on the internet generally. (Interesting how the internet is undermining unacknowledged bias in the specialist science media as well as in things like CBS.)

But then, I favour most of that anyway, even if global warming and its man-madeness are hooey.

With the price of crude oil holding over $50 per barrel, how long will it be before the more flexible parts of the Green movement start arguing that nuclear power is actually not such a bad idea after all?

I ask this question because it seems to me that Britain, like a lot of other western nations, could be facing a Californian-style energy shortage fairly soon. It goes without saying that such an issue is completely off the political radar right now.

Comment away!

A couple of years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece called The collectivist alternative to blogs:

The millions of blogs in existence form a decentralized information source, which interact spontaneously and freely without top-down instruction. Each individual blog is very much private property with an author, or team, who post material. If you want to make an impact on the 'blogosphere', you have to go away and set up your own blog. If it's good, others will link to it.

Conversely, wikis represent a form of voluntary collectism. Like blogs, they let information be published on the web very easily. But, unlike blogs, wikis normally let the general public update them without the need for a password or even peer review. It is easy for people, anonymously from an internet cafe, to maliciously delete articles, or publish inaccurate or offensive ones. Using a Wiki is like leaving your front door wide open. Like other collectivist experiments, they have problems.

I still basically agree with what I wrote then. As I said, they have problems. I have doubts that Wikipedia is ever going to keep to the consistent high quality that the Encyclopedia Britannica does. And yet I hardly ever refer to the Britannica and quite often use Wikipedia. On contentious political subjects Wikipedia often suffers from contributors' biases, but on the more mundane, everyday subjects, it is actually quite good. A Washington Post article last autumn said that Wikipedia had 340,000 entries compared with only 75,000 in Britannica.

Having every article in Britannica carefully commissioned and edited costs a lot of money. The Wikipedia approach is a lower-cost approach. Free-marketeers are often critical of governments who try and regulate away lower-cost approaches in order to protect the public. Given the choice, many people prefer to keep their cash and read Wikipedia. Of course, no one is advocating government control, but I merely raise the analogy to remind readers of that free-marketeers are often the people who say that we individuals are clever enough to make choices about how much they can trust a particular solution.

Despite Wikipedia's low-cost approach, I am often surprised at how good many of the entries are on Wikipedia. It would not surprise me to hear, for example that university history lecturers are writing some of the entries. Maybe they are academics, early in their careers who have not built up the prestige to get invited to contribute to the Britannica et al, but nevertheless know their subject.

As regular readers of the GI Blog will know, I have started a wiki. A bit collectivist, you might allege. Well, yes it is. But I'm not against collectivism. I just think it should compete in a marketplace. Like John Lewis department stores.

The GI has scanned in a 1000 page biography of Richard Cobden. We want to encourage the study of Cobden and its works, and as the book is both out of copyright and out of print, it seems logical that we should have it online. So we have put up the scanned images of the book on our site as PDFs. The downside is that scanned images are less easy to read that text, and they cannot be searched or easily quoted from. If all we did was to let people have scanned images, we would get people complaining.

The difficulty is that when you put the pages through an optical character recognition program, there is a fair bit of editing work to do. Not all the words are recognised properly, and any text in the page margins gets mangled in with the rest of the text. I tried to work out how long it would take an intern to correct the text, and all I could work out was that it would take a hell of a long time.

So I decided to look at the problem in a different way. Why should the process be so centralised? If there are people out there who value reading the text, some of them are going to be willing to do some of the work fixing the text. There are going to be other people in other countries who, like me, think that this book should be online.

Thus, I decided that a wiki was the best, most effective way to go.

Our standing orders on Samizdata are to write not just about certain specific areas of thought and policy, but about what is on our minds. I take this as an invitation to stray beyond the obvious and beyond our core expertises, such as they are. Not everything here is even supposed to make complete sense.

In that spirit, let me tell you about two pieces of writing which, taken together, struck me as interesting. They are pretty interesting even separately, but together they get even more interesting. Anyway, see what you think.

The first piece of writing is a book called The Cradle of Thought, by Peter Hobson, who is an expert on autism, but not only on autism. Hobson's subject matter is not just the particular form of unusual thought and experience called autism, but also the light that this and other abnormalities throw on the processes of normal human thought. (One of the best ways to understand how something is supposed to work is to examine what happens when something or someone damages it or in some way interrupts its smooth working.)

What comes across from this book is that thinking, of the sort that most of us do most of the time, is an intensely social thing. It starts not just with me thinking about that. It starts with me thinking about that by learning what you already think about that. What you (typically my mother) think(s) is the thing that gets me started with my thinking.

So, if I am the sort of me who is especially disposed not to pay attention to what you (my mum) are (is) thinking, that changes how I think, about everything. I may become very expert, by default, about things, but remain permanently baffled by people, and in particular by the notion that other people have a point of view of their own which I can tune into, and by the idea that other people are accordingly very different from other mere things.

This book seems to be quite well known and quite highly regarded, so there is no shortage of further verbiage to read about it should you feel the urge, now that you have heard a little of my point of view about it.

The other piece of writing was this article and related discussion, about dogs, and about the differences between dogs and such animals as wolves and foxes, which I got to via the ever interesting and stimulating Arts & Letters Daily.

Dogs are, as we most of us know, intensely social and sociable animals, and they are particularly special in their willingness – nay, their enthusiasm – for socialising with us. If ever there was an animal who tunes in to our point of view, and who is willing to organise its own life and feelings around how we feel about things, that animal is the dog.

Have you ever heard of a dog immitating vocal exercizes? As a singer, I sometimes do this descending ooh sound, down an octave. I had a jack russell that copied me, and even could be prompted by a pitch pipe to do the exercize, and pretty in tune too! [Question from Tom Boyer to Adam Miklosi – very near the bottom here.]

And you can bet that the reason this jack russell was doing this was because that way it got to be involved, to socialise, to muck in with everyone and get lots of pats on the back. Hey! Whatever it takes! And besides, it's fun!

Dogs, in short, are absolutely not autistic. Not when they are, as it were, proper dogs, doing for us and with us what dogs are supposed to do. Dogs are so doglike that we instinctively understand that to deprive a dog of another point of view to share, whether that of another dog or of a human, is a definite form of cruelty, as real as beating it or starving it.

Wild dogs – such as foxes or wolves – are very different:

Two years ago, Ms. Virányi and other graduate students began hand-raising a group of wolf cubs. They coddled and hand-fed them, took them for walks and played with them, while other students raised dog puppies of the same age. Dogs descended exclusively from wolves some 15,000 to 135,000 years ago, according to genetic studies, and the researchers wanted to see if wolves could be socialized to communicate with people.

At five weeks of age, the wolf cubs were introduced to a room containing their hand-raiser and an adult dog, both sitting motionless, and the human staring into space. Mr. Miklósi shows a video of what happened: A gawky wolf cub stumbles awkwardly up to the dog, sniffs it a bit, then does the same to the human before climbing into the person's lap and going to sleep. No eye contact is made with its caregiver; the cub appears to treat the person like a comfortable piece of furniture.

No eye contact. The cub treats the person like a piece of furniture. That is very human-autistic.

That the differences between different kinds of animals, or between the same kinds of animals differently reared, might illuminate human differences and human behaviours is obviously not a new idea. Nor is the idea that the dog/wolf difference might in some ways be analogous to the human/autistic-human difference, and that the former might throw light on the latter, as the page at the other end of this link makes very clear. Talking of autism alongside talking about "feral" children and about feral creatures of other sorts is clearly a well-established notion.

All the same, I found it all very interesting. I could ramble on, but that is really all I want to say here on this subject.

Or, to summarise it rather more succinctly: woof.

Just going woof and adding a few links, is, I think, one of the things that blogging is all about. (Blogging, like dogs, and like normal people, is also very social and sociable.)

How do scientists work? Do they spend a lot of their time holed up in big buildings with lots of fancy equipment, work in large teams or mostly alone, with rumpled air and just a blackboard and lump of chalk trying to figure out the laws of physics? What sort of social lives do they lead and how do they handle the political, business and personal demands that come their way? How do they deal with hostility from jealous colleagues, skeptical review boards and college principals worried about expanding their budgets?

If you ever wanted to know some of the answers to these questions as well as have a rattling good yarn told, then this book, an old classic by Gregory Benford, fits the bill. I have been engrossed in it for the last few days and I won't spoil for any would-be readers by giving the ending or basic plot away. Let's just say that this book actually gave me the feeling of actually working and living in a science lab, of hanging around scientists in the early 60s and later, in a sort of crumbling, environmentally troubled 1990s. Strongly recommended.

Interesting story here that a firm which is said to be behind a lot of the spam messages hitting our mailboxes could go bust. Perhaps, just perhaps a corner might be turned in the current battle against spammers. I used to think that one man's junk mail message was another's piece of legitimate advertising, but the relentless offensive and downright moronic crud I have to sweep from my computer each day has made me change my mind. The effectiveness of the Internet as a business and social tool has been seriously blunted by this phenomenon.

I still don't really know whether spam can be best dealt with legally, economically or through some other means. What I do know is that I won't be shedding any tears at the demise of one of the most prolific producers of this stuff in the world.

Dale Amon is too busy to blog about this himself, but emails the rest of us with news about this, from Novosti:

Russia still leads the way in space exploration. Russia's Clipper reusable spacecraft will be unveiled during the 2005 MAKS aerospace show in Zhukovsky near Moscow. This spacecraft, which is developed by the Energia corporation, will seat six people. The Clipper, which can fly to the moon, can also be used for reaching the Red Planet. This was disclosed to Izvestia by Anatoly Perminov, general director of Russia's Federal Space Agency.

Quite where the Energia corporation now sits in the public-private spectrum, I do not know. I suspect that both state money (bad) and the desire for commercial gain (good) are involved here, a lot. But most of all, I suspect that the plain old-fashioned desire to (best of all) fearlessly and braving all dangers get out there and to courageously explore new frontiers and to ruthlessly (and whatever is the Russia equivalent) split infinitives, etc., is what is really going on.

Good for them. The Russians have not had much to cheer about lately. This kind of thing may be expensive, and "irrelevant", no answer to poverty, blah blah, but it will surely make at least some of them a bit happier.

It makes me think of that moment in 10 Things I Hate About You, one of the recent-ish Hollywood products that I did like a lot despite these Hollywood moans, when, after a surprisingly successful date with the object of his affections, that young guy who was also in Third Rock from the Sun, thinks about it all, and then grins hugely and smacks his steering wheel with both hands and shouts: "And I'm back in the game!"

John Quiggin of Crooked Timber has posted about a fascinating legal case. Two Chinese players of an online game acquired a valuable virtual sword. What happened next?

One of them borrowed it and sold it for about $1000. The other player went to the police without result, and eventually confronted his partner, and in the ensuing argument, pulled a knife and stabbed him to death. It’s sad that this happened, but the most interesting aspect for those not directly involved is the question of whether the seller had committed a crime, and if so what.

Perhaps some Samizdata readers who are lawyers or gamers or both can help him out. (Although F. Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter already have written a paper.)

Even more interesting than the legal question is the evolution of the game worlds in ways, good and bad, that the designers don't anticipate or want. A commenter to John Quiggin's post, Keith M Ellis, says:

But it strikes me that the game designers have some oddly familiar problems on their hands: they want a particular outcome, but people self-organize in ways that make it very hard to simply engineer that particular outcome.

The libertarian angle on that is obvious. Is the Hobbesian outcome that some (apparently rather a high proportion) of the players seem to go all out to make others have a bad playing experience a challenge to our worldview?

Yet another aspect is the interaction between the game world and the real world. Another commenter, "asg" says:

In World of Warcraft, there are two factions (the Horde and the Alliance). Players from the two factions aren’t allowed to communicate across faction lines—they can’t talk to each other, mail each other, group with each other, etc. Some enterprising players discovered that, while the game garbled their speech for players on the opposite side, it didn’t garble digits or punctuation, so someone developed a code to allow cross-faction communication. The latest patch put an end to that.

For some reason I thought of this from the point of view of the fictional game characters, not the players. The thought of the characters in the game world, forbidden to speak to their enemies, yet finding a way to communicate by going outside the bounds of their own reality, would make a story worthy of Philip K Dick.

The Guardian newspaper reports that two-thirds of the world's resources have been "used up", so with only a third left, the crunch cannot be far away for Planet Earth. (Let's hope Hollywood is on the case). The splendid Cafe Hayek blog nicely chews up and spits out this Malthusian argument here.

I have a question. If the resources of the Earth are finite and everything eventually succumbs to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then by the logic employed by the deepest of Greens, even if we recycle all our goods and live in mud huts, then at some point, the game is up, we are all doomed, the end is nigh. So my question would be that if this is so, then why not live life to the full and enjoy this "finite" world while we have it? Let's get those SUVs, build those spacecraft, take those lavish holidays, create those new technologies. It is all going to end anyway, so enjoy!

Of course, the idea that resources are finite has been challenged by the late and much-missed Julian L. Simon. The Ultimate Resource is his masterwork. And what is the ultimate resource? You probably have guessed - the grey stuff between your ears.

I nearly choked on my tea when I read in my news alerts that the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union wants to be given more influence over the Internet. I persevered and learnt 'interesting' things (interesting as in the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times"...) The Chinese connection is somewhat relevant - Houlin Zhao, the venerable bureaucrat who heads the ITU, is a former government official in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

So, we have a UN agency, run by a (former) Chinese government official saying that they should be able to run more aspects of the Internet. Zhao wrote in December:

Countering spam is just one of many elements of protecting the Internet that include availability during emergencies and supporting public safety and law enforcement officials... The ITU would take care of other work, such as work on Internet exchange points, Internet interconnection charging regimes, and methods to provide authenticated directories that meet national privacy regimes.

In an interview with CNET news, Zhao explains ITU's position:

ITU's situation is similar to the U.S. Constitution. ITU is very dynamic. We try to keep abreast of the latest development of the market and to give assistance to human society for future development. Remember, ITU was created in May 1865 to develop a system for telegraphs.

The US Constitution...well, isn't that nice? But then I read this and shudder:

One of the most important changes was the early stages, when the Internet started, when ICANN started in 1998. The purpose was to exclude governments (but that didn't work). People realize today that the governments worldwide have to play a role.

No, Mr Zhao, people do not realise that the governments have a role to play, especially given that internet has been the fastest developing, innovative and dynamic technological and social advance that humankind has even known. Brining governments into it is just going to put a big spanner into the works. If anything, people have learned that you can have an entire dimension of your existence i.e. online functioning just fine, if not better, than the offline.

People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service? If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.

What we have here is an example of authoritarian meta-context, Mr Zhao assumes that there are only two options - government opposition to internet service or complete control. Otherwise his statement does not make sense. How about no interference either way?

At the moment, my fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings is somewhere in South China. In fact, a few minutes ago, he crossed the border from the "Special Administrative Zone" in Hong Kong, and into the Shenzhen region(?) of China.

How do I know this? Well, he just sent me an SMS message saying so. Quite extraordinary that it is easy as pie to send a message from China to Australia in such a manner. Of course, it is amazing how blase one gets to modern technology. I have grown in the habit of sending him SMS messages to his phone when he's in Europe, without thinking about it. Usually we send sports scores and commentaries to each other; as cricket coverage is thin on the ground in China, I'm keeping Michael up to date with the latest scores from the cricket Test in Wellington.

A curious thought- there's a new "Star Wars" movie coming out soon, and I watched the trailer online last night. In the "Star Wars" universe, SMS has of course been rendered obsolete by holograms. It is all rather futuristic, but is it practical?

No doubt it is technically possible. One of the very bright engineers in the Samizdata.net readership might like to explain what it would require. But will it ever catch on? I am not so sure.

One technology that is here and now is video telephones, marketed here in Australia by 3 Mobile. A cousin of mine gave them a whirl, and I asked her how it went. She reported that it wasn't as good as she thought; too often, she was not comfortable with her appearance or did not want to have her caller identify her exact location. Although she found the technology quite clever, she found it intrusive, and not as useful as she had hoped.

I think if a clever engineer ever developed a hologram means of communication such as we see in the "Star Wars" movies, they might be dismayed by the lack of interest shown in it.

I will tell you why. Like many bloggers, I blog in my pajamas, and I would shudder to think of letting anyone seeing me in such a state. Especially since, with today being Sunday, I've not the slightest of intention of dressing up. I can send SMS messages to South China and no one need know how badly dressed I am. This relatively simple method of communication will be with us for quite a while yet.

Much has been written about the recently opened Millau Viaduct in the south of France, both here and elsewhere. It takes the form of statistics: 245m from the foot of the valley to the deck, 343m from the foot of the valley to the top of the towers, 2.5km long in total. A cost of €394m to build.

Going out of my way to see the great bridges of the world is something that I do, and after reading all this I was struck by a strong urge to go and see the bridge for myself. So, I flew to Toulouse this last weekend. I rented a car, and headed for Millau. I was in no hurry. I stopped for a pleasant lunch in Albi, and rather than going up the main road, I then wound along the litte roads following the Tarn valley. One thing became obvious quickly. The Tarn valley is a huge gash through the south of France, going for hundreds of kilometres. There was clearly no easy way to build a motorway across it, anywhere. The immensity of the new viaduct was clearly out of necessity.

I had some thoughts of following the Tarn river valley all the way from Albi to Millau, with the idea that I would appreciate the scale of the valley, finally glimpse the viaduct in the distance when I was a few kilometres from it, (or maybe tens of kilometres, depending on the geography), and then approach it and eventually drive under it.

As it happened though, this was not quite what happened. The drive up the valley was spectacular, but it was a difficult drive, due to a narrow road (with some very lengthy narrow tunnels from an earlier era of engineering), and some awkward driving conditions. (It was very cold. Much of the river valley and even some of the road was covered in snow). And I kept stopping due to the fact that the scenery was beautiful and at times remarkable. (The small village of Ambialet, built in a truly extraordinary curve in the river, kept me for some time, as did a few other places).

This part of France had an odd feeling of abandonment about it though. There are a lot of small villages along the river, containing beautiful old stone buildings, but these contained very few people and. I get the impression that the valley was a (fairly marginal) agricultural location a generation or two back (potatoes I would guess) but that is now gone. There are a few shops in the villages but these were mostly closed. The permanent population of these places appears to be small, and demographically not especially young. The buildings are generally in good repair, however. I get the impression that this place is highly seasonal. Tourists and owners of holiday homes probably come in summer in huge numbers for canoeing, kayaking, hiking, hang-gliding and various other activities, but not in the winter. Which is a shame, because in winter under the snow the valley was beautiful. But to attract people in winter you need to offer skiing, and this is not skiing country.

But on to the bridge.

After several hours of driving slowly and stopping regularly, I realised I was a bit fatigued and it was getting late, so I ended up diverting to the B999, the main road to Millau, which detoured over a couple of ridges rather than winding up the valley.

And oddly, this turned out if anything to be better than the original choice. For as it approaches Millau the B999 swerves back into the Tarn Valley and goes under the viaduct into Millau. But it doesn't do so at the foot of the valley but along one of the sides of the valley, probably about halfway up in altitude.

As it happened, I didn't see the viaduct until I was quite close to it when I came around a curve in the valley. I could only initially see a small portion of it, but it was a long way above me. I drove closer, and more of the viaduct became visual. Directly under it was a visitors centre, so I parked the car and looked around me. I looked down at the river, and one of the supports of the viaduct receded a huge distance downwards. I looked to one side of the valley. The viaduct receded into the distance.

I looked the other way. The viaduct receded a long way into the distance that way, too.

The legs of the viaduct are thick and emormous, but the deck looks somehow very slight, still somehow being held in the air when it probably shouldn't. The materials from which this bridge has been built are vastly stronger than anything that existed even 20 years ago. I have said this before, but this is in my mind the defining characteristic of modern post materials revolution structural engineering. Structures are then, flimsy. They almost look like spider webs. The defining characteristic of industrial age engineering was bulk. But now we are in this virtuous circle of stronger and lighter materials allowing a much thinner deck, allowing the other parts of the bridge to be lighter and less substantial too, allowing still more economies elsewhere, and a rapidly dropping cost of projects like this.

And this is why this viaduct has been built. One upon a time there was only one way for a road to cross such a valley, which was to have a road going down a steep winding pass into the valley, crossing the river, and then coming up another steep winding pass on the other side. And this isn't compatible with a motorway.

To build a straight motorway across such a valley there are two options: you dig tunnels through the cliffs on either side of the river to bring the road down to something close to river level and have a low level bridge, or you build an immense high bridge. Until recently, the cost of both options was prohibitive. Building tunnels probably still is. But due to the materials revolution the cost of a high bridge has been plummeting.

And here is the deal. Given the immensity and magnificence of the structure, the €394m that the viaduct cost to build actually wasn't very much. Given that this is the main road from Paris to the south-west of France and to Spain, one feels that toll collection will pay off the construction cost fairly easily, even if the toll (€6.50 in summer, and €4.90 at other times of year) seems cheap.

In any event, I drove into Millau, stopping at a vantage point for another view.

But to really get an impression of the size of this thing, it's worth standing at the very bottom, as I did the next morning. This is high. (It's unfortunately very difficult to take a photograph that captures both the length and the height of the bridge. It tends to be one or the other.

It's easy to make smaller structures look like this with a camera and the right lens, but I am not doing this. If anything, these photographs understate the scale of the bridge. I actually took these photographs from the bottom of the bridge at around 10am on Sunday morning. As I was standing below the bridge, it appeared to start raining. This was odd, as the sky was completely clear. It took me some time to figure out that the "rain" was in fact overnight frost that was melting on the bridge way way above me and that was falling onto the floor of the valley.

But of course a bridge needs to be crossed. I like to walk across bridges, but it is not really possible with this one. It is long, and the starting and finishing points are too inaccessible. So I paid the toll, and drove over it. No doubt I broke several French laws by taking photographs while I was driving, but I did.

The towers and cable stays are surprisingly small given the size of the bridge. Also, on most cable stayed bridges the stays connect the towers to both edges of the bridge. Here, there are a single set of stays connecting to towers to the median strip between the two traffic ways. The deck is clearly stronger and more rigid than decks were even five or ten years ago.



And to make sure people are not spooked by the height that they are travelling above the valley (and presumably to also stop people from jumping) the barriers at the edge of the bridge are pretty substantial.



Impressive, yes, but get used to this kind of thing. Of the various computer driven technological revolutions that have been occuring in recent years, the revolution in materials is one of the most important and yet this one has received less publicity than most. Which is a shame, as this is the one that is about our control of the physical world. Architecture has become more playful in recent years, very much because engineers are suddenly less constrained by the tolerances of materials than they were. Structures of unprecedented size and length are becoming possible, at dramatically reduced costs. Some of the structures we will see in the next twenty or thirty years will boggle the mind. It's a very exciting time to be alive.

A few decades ago, the curse of malaria, which for centuries had made large parts of the world uninhabitable and killed millions, had been largely eradicated because of the pesticide DDT. However, as many will know, this chemical was banned after a long campaign by environmentalists, concerned that the substance worked its way through the entire food chain, possibly causing cancers and other ailments. The writer Rachel Carson, in her famous, or perhaps infamous, book Silent Spring, helped focus Greens' righteous anger on DDT.

The outcome may have been splendid for the mozzies, and possbily may also have had beneficial consequences for various species of flora and fauna. However, its impact on those awkward beings known as humans has been drastic. Millions are now dying at a high rate as malaria stages a virulent comeback.

I like to be a charitable chap and imagine that a lot of environmentalists feel worried about this, but I suspect that a good deal of do-gooders who had argued for the abolition of DDT feel not a nano-second's qualm about the impact of what has happened.

Malaria is not a subject that may get pop singers like U2's Bono all excited, as is the case with AIDS, but the death toll is huge, and it is growing.

For the last several weeks I have been watching with growing pleasure, every Monday night from 8 pm to 9 pm, two episodes at a time, one of those Channel 5 TV series that tend to pass without much comment or many claims of significance, called Massive Engines.

Last night saw the airing of the final two episodes, number 9 about massive pumps, and number 10 and finally, about the massive jet engines that enable modern airliners to ply their trade. The presenter was Chris Barrie, who is probably best know for comedy-of-embarrassment characterisations like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, or Brittas in The Brittas Empire, and in Massive Engines there are occasional Rimmer/Brittas style, self-send-up moments of leaden humour. The impression you get is that Barrie is not as sure as he would like to be that he is keeping his audience's attention.

For myself, I absolutely do not think Barrie need have worried. Whenever, which was most of the time, he forgot about being comical and concentrated on explaining the whys and wherefores of his various massive engines, often while himself operating them and with every sign of knowing pretty much what he was doing, I was held, and fascinated.

I learned all kinds of things I never knew. For instance, in the last show, about aircraft engines, I learned that on an early aircraft engine, not only did the propeller rotate, but the cylinders also, firmly attached to the same bit of the engine as the propeller, and rotating along with the propeller. To keep them cool. Amazing. Well, you probably knew that, but I had no idea. You probably also know that whereas petrol engines work with regular explosions, diesel engines (names after a German bloke called Diesel) do not feature externally induced explosions. The pressure caused by the cylinder coming back up again is enough to set fire to the next lot of fuel. Well, I sort of vaguely did know that. But now I know it a little better.

In general, throughout the run of the show, Barrie's quick and clear explanations of the principles behind all the mechanisms he was describing were, well, amazingly quick, and amazingly clear.

The only episode which I found a bit weak was the one about motorbikes, which featured rather too much footage of Barrie trundling about rather pointlessly on a motorbike, in between the serious explanatory stuff. The trouble with motorbikes is that frankly, they are not massive. They got as big as they will ever be many decades ago, and anyway, the point of them is speed, plain and simple, rather than speed (or anything else for that matter) achieved through massiveness.

That episode aside, all the engines on show got steadily bigger and more effective throughout their history. They are not necessarily massive any more. The pumps, for instances, that shift water hither and thither used to be a lot bigger, when they were steam engines, than they are now, now that they are diesel or electrical engines or whatever. But a good few of the engines Barrie talked about with such enthusiasm are huge right now, and getting ever huger.

The earth moving kit they now use is unbelievably huge, as was proved with a trip to a massive open cast coal mine in Germany, where there were also earth-shifting lorries with wheels the size of terrace houses. The machines used to dig tunnels are now as massive as they have ever been. As are those aircraft engines of course.

I expected the airplane episode with which the show ended to be a commercial for the Airbus A380, but actually it was a commercial for the Rolls Royce Trent Alphabetsoup engine. No Airbuses were mentioned, but a Boeing was, the two engine 777, which is apparently almost as huge as the four engine 747.

I recall no mention whatsoever of the wickedness of massive engines from the environmental point of view, which was most refreshing. On the contrary, massive engines got massive because they were used, again and again, to solve massive environmental problems, such as the environmental mess that the London sewage system had become towards the end of the nineteenth century, or the massive problem of travelling vast distances across the damn environment, most especially the sea. (There was an episode devoted to massive ships.) The entire show was a continuous hymn of praise to the God of the Technical Fix. You have a problem? Building a massive engine to solve it.

I cannot claim to remember all the technical details that were laid out before me on Massive Engines, but when they were being laid out I recall very, very clearly that they did make perfect sense, at the time. Had I written the stuff down, I am confident that only my own handwriting would have then stopped it making perfect sense now.

What I am really saying is, if I come across DVDs of this show at a suitably miserly price, I would definitely consider buying them, and watching the whole show again, repeating the quick and clear explanations and fast forwarding through the motorbike trundling.

As a potential interester of intelligent and intellectual curious children, boys especially of course, these shows would, I feel sure, prove excellent.

And Chris Barrie's Rimmerisms might even help from that point of view. By the end, even I was enjoying the rest of it so much that I found myself smiling instead of wincing when Barrie started up yet another massive engine not with a "right let's start this thing up", but instead by shouting rather self-consciously: "let's rock". Very embarrassing dad. But when you really like the serious work that someone is doing, you can put up with mannerisms and foolishnesses that would drive you insane if it was just another pointless idiot doing them. And when they are gone, you even find you miss them.

So, an outstanding show, and particular proof of the value of having lots of different TV channels, allowing lots of different points of view besides the official one, which as far as massive engines is concerned is now that massive engines are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, just plain evil.

I am just back from supper with Perry, Adriana and co., and now just about, before sleep overtakes me, have time to report – and to expand upon the fact – that before I left I had another drool over Adriana's portable computer, with its look-at-it-from-everywhere screen. This time, instructed to feel how light it is, I picked the thing up, and did so with considerable ease.

Earlier in the day, I chanced upon this item of techno-news about something called FOLEDs. FOLEDs are even better than OLEDs. OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes, and FOLEDs are Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In English, what this appears to mean is … well, put it like this. When I bought my digital camera recently there was a film of transparent plastic to protect the camera's little screen which shows what the picture is going to look like or does look like. What all these acronyms appear to mean is that in a few years time, that thin film of plastic will be the screen.

Over the last couple of decades, mobile computing and communications have changed the way we act – and interact. Notebook PCs, PDAs and cellular phones make it easy to carry information with us whenever and wherever we go. Yet, despite enormous advances in form and functionality, today's devices can still prove clunky and challenging to carry on planes, trains and automobiles.

However, if researchers have their way, we will soon be able to bend the rules of physics. Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diode (FOLED) technology could pave the way for notebook computers with roll-up screens, toys that show vivid images on their surfaces, even clothing with displays woven into the fabric. "Within the next decade, flexible displays will open up all sorts of possibilities," states Mark Thompson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. "It will change the way we access information and entertainment."

Manufactured from transparent plastic films or other ultra-lightweight materials filled with special polymers, these devices could lead to less expensive and far more convenient consumer electronics. Already, researchers have developed prototype roll-up displays, and more basic Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) technology has been built into display screens of a handful of cameras, DVD players and mobile phones. "It is only a matter of time before OLED becomes a predominant display technology," says Steve Van Slyke, a research fellow at Eastman Kodak Co. and one of the inventors of the technology in the early 1980s.

What makes active-matrix OLED technology so appealing is that it provides a few more vivid image than LCDs and other displays; offers a viewing angle as high as 160 degrees without backlighting; and requires far less power than today's mainstream display technologies. The latter is particularly appealing for those using battery-powered devices, such as notebook computers. "Any incremental gain in battery life is a significant issue," Thompson points out.

And so on. I am not sure how long this piece will stay up on the www, so I have quoted it at some length.

When all this comes to pass, Adriana's portable computer will then seem like my very first portable computer, which was called an Osborne, and was only portable in the sense that your holiday luggage is portable (if it is), or that my mum's ancient sewing machine is portable.

And how about clothes that change colour and pattern like a movie?

I realise that there will be more to the good life in the future than better gadgets, and that better gadgets might coincide with worse life, but better gadgets are still very, very nice, and I am impressed. Not even the fact that the EU has backed it can suppress my interest in and enthusiasm for this technology.

As regulators impose more onerous capital adequacy and reporting requirements on the Western world's banks, investment firms and brokerages, demand surges for increasingly sophisticated computer infrastructure to keep track of all the new systems deemed necessary to make the regulations work. As a result, demand is rising, according to this Financial Times article, for graduates with science degrees, especially in the field of physics. And it does not come as much of a surprise to learn that Britain's mostly state-run education system is not doing a very good job at churning out young physics students. I am shocked, shocked to hear this!

I would greatly prefer it if clever folk with scientific knowledge were engaged in the potentially fruitful areas of nanotechnology, biotech, aviation and civil engineering, all fields likely to see continued rapid growth, than working to make increasingly Byzantine bank regulations work better. It looks like a waste to me. We want our budding Isaac Newtons and Richard Feynmans working on spacecraft, not greasing the wheels of the latest EU banking directive.

Dale Amon is Samizdata.net's man in the know about this stuff, but I link to it also, if only because the enemies of freedom (see the first paragraph of the first comment on this posting) seem to hate it so much, and write attacks ("Among their sacred causes are the decontrol of gun ownership and decriminalisation of all drugs...") on Samizdata.net that could not be bettered if Samidata.net had paid for them.

Like SpaceShipOne, the homebuilt rocketship that claimed a £5.2m cash prize for twice reaching suborbital space, Rutan's next creation will travel beyond Earth's atmosphere as well.

SpaceShipTwo (SS2), however, will have more than a single occupant.

Rutan is toying with designs to accommodate up to eight passengers at a time, with enough upgrades to warrant a ticket in the £104,000 (£200,000) price range.

"I think anyone who had the chance to go would want to go," said Trevor Beattie, a British advertising personality, who already has booked a flight.

Rutan, who has been averaging better than one new aircraft design every year for the past three decades, says he is finished with airplanes for a while.

The mission now for his Mojave-based company, Scaled Composites, is to create 3,000 new astronauts a year – per departure point, Rutan adds, and per ship.

"Mojave is not going to be the only place in the world where there will be a place to buy tickets and fly a spaceflight," Rutan said.

Not everything in the world is good just now, and that would have been true even without that terrible earthquake. But some things are going very well.

The little iPod portable sound system that allows you access to thousands of your favourite tunes is likely to be flying off the shelves this Christmas. No wonder. The device is a marvel and one of those trendy "must-have" items that our modern capitalist system seems to excel in. Apple's sales growth has gone up tremendously over the past year partly as a result of the gadget.

Interestingly, this emblem of shameless materialism is also finding uses in the field of medical science, if this story, which I came across via libertarian author Virginia Postrel, is a guide. Medical researchers use the device to help them keep records of medical data and relay it back. Clever. It shows how certain types of technology that start off in a supposedly frivolous field like portable music gadgets can accomplish something more serious, as Postrel points out. Side point: I wish she would increase the font size of her blog. It is killing my eyesight. As I pointed out a week or so ago, another product of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, the eBay auction site, has been used by buyers as unusual as the London Underground for the purposes of getting obscure spare parts.

I think what this demonstrates in general is the yawning gap between the dynamism and creativity of the private sector and the plodding performance of all too much of what goes under under the aegis of the State. It also reminds us a bit I think of the good news that continues to be out there, if we want to look for it. Let's be honest, a lot of what we have written about lately, such as the ID card issue and free speech infringements, makes for dark reading. Let's not lose sight of the ways in which free enterprise is still on the march.

On that cheery note, have a very merry Christmas and happy 2005, and hopefully, a prosperous and peaceful one too. Thanks to my fellow contributors for making this blog so much stimulating fun.

Yesterday President Chirac proudly opened the Millau Viaduct, to universal acclaim, not just in France, but from anyone in the world who has seen any of the photos.

It is a truly magnificent structure. Yesterday I foolishly speculated that they might have saved billions had they been been willing to build something smaller and wigglier, but since this bridge in fact only cost an amazing €394 million that is flat wrong. And what is more, the entire cost of the bridge was paid by a private company, the same one that built the Eiffel Tower.

This bridge gives the world perhaps its biggest and juiciest taste so far of just what a huge impact on road transport the era of road pricing, now getting seriously underway, is destined to have. At first, environmentalists favoured road pricing, because they thought it would discourage cars. Alas for vain hopes. Road pricing make it possible for the private sector to build more and more magnificent roads. This bridge could never have been contemplated, let alone built, had the French not long been in the habit of paying to use their fastest roads.

It also illustrates perfectly just how amazingly bridge technology has progressed in recent years. The French had long known that they needed this bridge, and that it needed to be this high and this direct. It was just that until now, bridge technology did not permit its construction. And then … it did! With truly wonderful results.

The only tiny doubt concerns the fact that the architect (whatever exactly that means of what is essentially an engineering triumph) is the same architect as presided over the construction of the (aesthetically very pleasing) Millenium footbridge, in London. That famously wobbled when it was first opened. This was quickly fixed of course, and it was only a wobble, not a catastrophe. But I bet when that happened, the clients for this new whopper felt a teeny bit of a wobble themselves. I so assume, however, that all is completely well structurally with the new bridge.

The Internet is now quite properly awash with imagery of this masterpiece, and I have linked to many such views. In addition to all the regular pictures, I particularly like this one.

I was trawling through an ancient b3ta.com newsletter, as you do, earlier in the week, and came across these profundities. But since the profundities concern cats, I saved them until today, Friday being catblogging day, or so I seem to recall reading somewhere. Anyway, this is what b3ta.com says, so profoundly:

We can't imagine anything worse than being allergic to cats – it'd be like having an allergy to life itself. However, help is at hand for sufferers. Boffins are busy meddling with nature to create a moggy that won't provoke an allergic reaction, and the first kittens are due in 2007. A snip at just $3500. BTW: When people claim they're allergic to cat fur, what they mean is that they're allergic to cat urine, cat skin or cat saliva that's become airborne by being secreted on the fur.

And b3ta.com then supply this link to allerca. Says allerca at the top of its website:

WELCOME TO ALLERCA. ALLERCA is working to produce the world's first hypoallergenic cats. These cats will allow some of the millions of people allergic to cats to enjoy the love and companionship of a household pet without suffering from allergy symptoms.

If you obsess only about the doings of politicians, you are liable to miss good news stories like that. Name me one politician who ever did anything as splendid as inventing a non-allergic-type cat. Actually, do not name any such politicians, because there may have been one or two. But you get my point.

Boffins meddling with nature, enough to make you purr, eh? Remind me to return to this topic in 2007, because strictly speaking it has not yet been done.

My apologies to all those readers of samizdata.net who are allergic to catblogging. Also, it seems that I am about six weeks late with this happy announcement. But, it is the kind of thing you can miss, so never mind about that.

Instapundit supplies two interesting (at first I thought that was about bloggers deep under the earth) recent links (among the usual zillion other interesting links), which in their different ways both illustrate how difficult it is being a Big Business person these days.

The first is to this Wall Street Journal piece, about how big business is now using the buzz on the Internet, blogs, etc., to find out what people really thing of their latest products.

People who rave online about their favorite new gadget – or gripe about the products they hate – are turning heads in the business world.

The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.

For more than a year, car-maker Volkswagen AG has used a service by Techdirt, Foster City, Calif., to find out which new technologies are generating the most buzz online, with the aim of integrating some of them in new automobiles. "I think [Web sites] are very important as a source of unfiltered information, but there's too much information out there already. Frankly, we don't have time to keep track of all these things," says Daniel Rosario, a senior engineer in Volkswagen's electronics research lab in Silicon Valley.

There is no link to Techdirt in the piece, but presumably they mean these guys.

As I understand it, what Techdirt supplies to each of their customers is a kind of bespoke e-newspaper (to replace the daily pile of off the peg newspapers and magazines that you had to make do with before). And as I further understand the situation, there is only so much that you can do along these lines automatically. To really get the full flavour – the buzz - of what the Internet is saying, about you, and about things relevant to you, you need human beings to pull it all together. To edit it, in other words. Interesting.

Also interesting is the other piece Instapundit links to, which is an example of just such a little buzz of comment, and not very polite comment, about a new corporate product, namely Microsoft's new blogging software, MSN Spaces.

I have always understood that version 1.0 of anything produced by Microsoft should be avoided like the Black Death, but that version 3.4 might end up being really rather good, not to say market sweeping, and the fact that Microsoft reckons that there is a market out there to be swept (eventually) is the important fact here is the other important fact embedded in every big launch they indulge in.

So, does that prejudice still hold good? Part one certainly seems to apply still, according to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. Alerted by a reader to the effect that …

Microsoft's new blogging tool … censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url.

… Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing continued:

… If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one? This demanded a full investigation.

So Xeni Jardin investigated, and basically, she found that it was true. My favourite idiocy that she turned up is that if you entitle a blog posting "Pornography and the law" (not unlike this posting title here), you are told to stop being profane. Also, literary people need to be careful of any mention of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. On the other hand, other even more profane (so profane, one assumes, that Microsoft did not even conceive of them – a bit like Queen Victoria and lesbianism) titles like the one Instapundit links with "Butt Sex is Awesom", is allowed.

I assume that there must be some way to switch off this absurd nannyism, but maybe that assumption is wrong.

ZDNet UK has this to say:

Getting an amusingly named blog past the MSN Spaces controls may be fun, but it also illustrates the tensions between the traditionally free and open world of blogging, and the more corporate approach of a software giant like Microsoft.

…

These tensions are also apparent in Microsoft's approach to blog content. Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to "use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat" their blog postings.

Bloody hell. In fact: buzz, buzz, buzz. Will version 3.4 actually be any better than version 1.0?

Finally, I find this conclusion to the WSJ piece very poignant. It seems that the Ford Motor Co. was stung by the buzz:

Some companies, though, have been less successful in their attempts to find useful information in online chatter. Ford Motor Co.'s European unit last year hired a firm to help it watch the Web, but the trial soon ran into trouble: It was receiving information more rapidly than ever, but found that it couldn't act on the new data fast enough.

"To make full use of real-time information, you need to develop an internal structure that can react at the same speed," says Tim Holmes, executive director of public affairs for Ford in the United Kingdom. Three months after it began, Ford discontinued the project.

Ouch. It is not enough to know what is being said. You have to be able to do something about it.

NOTE: In the first edition of this I put that Xeni Jardin was, in the words of a commenter (to whom thanks), a "dude". My apologies to Ms. Jardin.

I am confused (as Americans often say when they are about to be nasty in a very unconfused way – but I really am rather confused) by this BBC report about a scheme to make spammers wish that their parents had been further into birth control than they were, at about the time when they, the spammers, were actually born.

Here is the first paragraph:

A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control.

But from what I can grasp of the rest of the article, what the BBC calls "getting out of control" is what the rest of use would describe as "working extremely well".

Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.

But...

...which seems an odd word to use here. I would have gone with "And"...

...analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way.

As that Sergeant Major (played by Windsor Davies) in It Ain't Half Hot Mum used to say; "Oh dear. How tragic."

But monitoring firm Netcraft has analysed response times for three of the sites the screensaver targets and has found that the campaign is being too successful.

What was that? Too successful?

Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.

Too successful. Too successful!!! Sounds like for once the punishment has fitted the crime perfectly.

But yes.

The campaign has come under fire from some corners of the web.

Many discussion groups have said that it set a dangerous precedent and could incite vigilantism.

"If you do manage to swamp the spammers then you set yourself up for more attacks in return," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos.

Which, I suppose, would make this Cluley man a Sophist, twice over. This is like saying that if you use force against a burglar, he might get angry and burgle you even more ferociously in the future. As he might, I suppose. Best roll over and surrender. But I reckon that Cluley does not understand economics. I mean, if you were a spamster, would you make a point of picking a fight with people clever enough to have swamped your entire site?

This corner of the web (the corner that consists of me) is extremely attracted by the whole idea of what Lycos is doing here, and wonders what the downside of it is, if any. This corner of the web is in favour of what other corners of the web call "vigilantism". To this corner of the web, this all sounds absolutely splendid.

But is this corner of the web missing something? What does this discussion group think?

The only real problem in what Lycos is doing seems, to this corner of the web, to be that the state, in all its various geographical manifestations, is minded to make it illegal. What is that thing that Perry keeps saying?

But so what? Even if this process is declared illegal, something resembling it could still proceed, could it not? If enough people wanted that? No? But at this point I really am rather confused.

Time for some good news, in the form of a classic piece of techno-ingenuity that looks like turning a classic problem into a classic solution.

You know how, when you take photos with your cheap digital camera (everyone has cheap digital cameras nowadays), and when you use flash (everyone uses flash), you get that horrible dark shadow behind and to one side (depending on exactly where the flash thingy is situated next to the camera lens). A problem, right? I think so. When I take digital photos, I am prepared to endure agonies of bad lighting and blurriness rather than resort to flash and its pictorial indignities.

But this guy has turned this problem into a solution. Solid shapes give you annoying little black lines do they? So why not, he said to himself, have four flash guns, all around the lens, not just one, and that way, get yourself black lines everywhere, wherever anything sticks out?

The multi-flash camera captures real life images and renders them in a non-photorealistic line-form. …

So what use is that? A lot, it turns out.

The multi-flash camera's non-photorealistic images look like line drawings, but have an advantage over hand made line drawings for they are able [to] depict real-world scenes with precision and, most importanly, speed impossible for the human eye/hand. …

Think of all those instructions manuals where, in order to explain things properly, they cannot use photos, because photos are not clear enough, and must instead resort to laboriously created line drawings. Well, this gadget creates line drawings like that automatically.

Multi-flash imaging promises to facilitate and pioneer complicated rendering of mechanical objects, plants, or internal anatomical parts. Because of its ability to detect depth discontinuities, it may render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive. For instance, a car engine could easily be captured in a non-photorealistic image and then superimposed over an actual photograph of the engine resulting in a superior manual illustration (see example below). Alternatively, a skeleton with complex network of white bones could be efficiently reproduced for instructional medical visualization. Additionally, an endoscopic camera enhanced with the multi-flash technology promises to enhance internal anatomical visualization for researchers and medical doctors.

I wonder if the kind of cheap digital cameras you can now buy for $200 will soon have this kind of facility. Personally, I look forward to a time when cheap digital cameras have far more, and more flexible, flash devices on them than they have now. My first digital camera had only one flash device of course, but it was such that I could take pictures from one direction and point the flash at the object of my attentions from a quite different direction. Too bad it never worked properly. You can get flash devices for a digital camera like this now, but they cost far more than I care to pay. If this new device draws attention to the good things that digital flash can do, that might change.

Which is all rather incidental. My main point here is: what a brilliant idea.

UPDATE: By the way, as a commenter reminded me by asking about this, I should have said that this camera is a whole lot better than anything Photoshop can do along these ... lines! (Ha!) Follow the second link above, scroll down a bit, and you come to a set of six pictures. These show this difference very clearly, and it is all the difference.

Despite the miserable weather, a reasonable audience turned up at Conway Hall in Holborn to listen to Aubrey de Grey, at the monthly meeting of Extrobritannia. The speaker sounded as if his life was already ebbing away, given the fast bullets assigned to each argument. Powerpoint presentations are far less interesting.

Aubrey de Grey campaigns for practical approaches to anti-aging medicine, and uses the acronym SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He is one of the few people on the planet actively attempting to help the general population live longer and healthier lives. As he argues, one without the other is pointless.

One of the strategies for promoting this goal is the Methuselah Prize, a reward designed for prestige rather than money, which will (hopefully) promote philanthropic investment in these research programmes. To those familiar with this structure, this is designed to emulate the success of the X Prize.

The talk today included the recent changes in the structure of this Prize. There are two components: an award for postponing the aging process and an award for reversal. The aim is to award those resaerchers that succeed in extending the lifespan of the laboratory mouse and, even better, reversing the aging process.

The goal of capturing the imagination of the public is best achieved by a very simple prize structure, in which money is awarded simply to the producer of the world's oldest ever mouse. This should be restricted to the species used in virtually all laboratory work, Mus musculus , but no other restrictions should be placed on the way in which the mouse's lifespan is extended, except for ones that fail to maintain its cognitive and/or physical well-being. This is analogous to the situation with boxing, for example: the heavyweight championship is the one that gets by far the most publicity and money.

A major shortcoming of this simple structure exists, however. Our main purpose is to find interventions which are effective when initiated at a late age; it is very likely that interventions that are applied throughout life will always be ahead of those initiated late.

Hence, we are running two prize competitions:

- a "Longevity Prize" (LP) for the oldest-ever Mus musculus ;
- a "Rejuvenation Prize" (RP) for the best-ever late-onset intervention.

Although the United States and Europe have placed cultural and regulatory obstacles in the path of longevity science, cutting edge research continues to take place in the Far East. Only yesterday did South Korean researchers claim that the injection of umbilical cord stem cells had allowed a woman paralysed from the waist down to walk again. The question on concerned minds: can this result be reproduced?

These scientific goals are no longer the dreams of writers; they are the goals of academics and the content of research programmes. This is all progress. Faster please!

Austin Meyer, author of the X-Plane flight simulator, has posted a picture showing a mockup of a home computer from 1954. I particularly like the "easy to use Fortran interface". But then I would... I started off as a Fortran hacker.

I must admit thinking this is what the (one, only) home computer of 2004 would have looked like had it been a government operation as space flight has been.

Ooops: I got taken in, as did Austin: Snopes had it. Found out minutes after hitting the publish button. We catch things fast here on the net! But it is a cute image and my final point does still stand, faked photo or not.

I yield to no-one in my enthusiasm for space flight and in my admiration for men like this guy who are now so magnificently pioneering it, but I yield to anyone who challenges me on the technicalities of it. However, I do wish myself to challenge this man (thanks to Instapundit for linkage to this argument). Alexander Tabarrok, in a recent TCS article questioning the immediately future of space tourism, put, among other things, this question:

The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety – it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?

I would not have noticed this very rhetorical question had Rand Simberg not also singled it out, so particular thanks to him also.

As I say, I know next to nothing of how quickly the costs of space travel are going to plummet (other than that they will plummet, just as Simberg says) as more people want to get in on it, but one thing I do know is that if those are now the death odds you face, the queue is going, contrary to what Alexander Tabarrok says with his question, to be a very long one.

Tabarrok has a very limited idea, it seems to me, of what a millionaire is these days. Presumably when he typed in his question, he had in mind a rigidly rational calculator of odds, sitting at his dull desk, wearing a dull suit, fully 42 and more than usually plain for his age, who spends his entire life looking at boring safety graphs (Tabarrok features a boring safety graph at the bottom of his piece) and who never so much as sets a foot on a water ski, let alone anything at all seriously risky. But what of the millionaires of a more fun loving and risk friendly disposition? Has he never met any of those?

Above all, what of the millionaire sons of the world's now really quite numerous billionaires? This is a notoriously risk embracing group. These people are famous for taking hair-raising risks, if only to impress all the girls they so like to chase after. They cannot out-earn dad, but they can at list out-stunt him. The now highly established (and now insufferably safe) sport of motor racing owes its entire existence to a couple of generations of nineteen thirties and nineteen fifties (they spent the nineteen forties killing each other) young tearaways with more money than sense, or to put it another way, with a bit of imagination when it came to spending money. What on earth makes Tabarrok think that death odds of a mere five per cent a pop would put off young men of that sort, and what makes him think that the world is not now massively fuller of such wacky racer types than in was in the nineteen thirties? One in twenty are the kind of odds that will actually make the queue longer. They certainly will not shorten it much.

Hell, a one in twenty chance of a quick and glorious death (already, I would surmise, far more dignified and far cheaper than a long spell of Alzheimer's), but a nineteen out of twenty chance of one of the great Bragging Rights of the early twenty first century, would be enough to entice me into space, if only I could afford the ticket.

Tabarrok's headline is a similarly timid pseudo-question: "Is space tourism ready for take-off?" Damn right it is.

What distinguishes libertarians from other political obsessives is that our goals are rather more long-range than merely the next round of Senate elections or the fiscal policies some mediocre politician.

The presentation of the X-prize today to Burt Rutan is the portender of greater things to follow than the inauguration of either a President Bush or a President Kerry. The launch of an annual contest (the X Prize Cup) is a sign that the rate of private space technology growth could be about to grow exponentially.

Those who might reasonably argue that without the right policies in Washington, commercial space flight would never happen are missing the broader picture.

It is no longer a question of if, but when and where the launch sites will be. The USA could almost close down tomorrow, the technology is out there and people will get out of this planetary orbit. One could almost say that the US has achieved its historic purpose. Once spread out among the stars, it will take centuries to bring all the colonies to a statist heel, if ever.

I do not believe that this excellent rant against clueless corporate drones' plans for the internet can be linked to enough. There is lots of juicy goodness there, and the entire thing should be read, but this is certainly worth keeping in mind:

If you actually had even the faintest glimmering of what reality on the net is like, you'd realize that the real unit of currency isn't dollars, data, or digicash. It's reputation and respect.

Learn it, live it, love it. As the author says, If you don't understand right now, don't worry. You'll learn it the hard way. We'll be there to help you learn, you filthy corporate guttersnipes.

And for those who are reading this and scratching their heads, wondering what a Samizdatista might have against big business, here is some worthwhile background reading: Big Business is often the enemy of capitalism.

Portable phones are wonderful things, but not, it is widely agreed, wholly wonderful.

Have you ever been at something like a church service or a classical music concert, and found your attention diverted by portable phones ringing?

Help is at hand.

MONTERREY, Mexico – It was the reporters who noticed first. Unable to call their editors while covering the weddings of the rich and famous, they asked the priest why their cell phones never worked at Sacred Heart. His reply: Israeli counterintelligence.

In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the Madonna and statues of the saints.

The jarring polychromatic din of ringing cell phones is increasingly being thwarted – from religious sanctuaries to India's parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains – by devices originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart phone-triggered bombings.

Jamming other people's portable phones is one of many practices where you need strong property rights in place to enable disputes about the rights and wrongs of it to be easily decided. But even in an age of weakened property rights, this device will surely prove to be a great boon in protecting the rest of us from compulsive communicators and their irritating noises.

Human problems are hard to fix. So instead, fix the machines they are using to cause the problem.

Is Microsoft throwing away the web browser market? It has ended development on a Macintosh browser, it does not have anything for Linux, and has stopped fixing Internet Explorer's problems for users without Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP. The estimated 200m people using Windows 2000, Windows 98 et al are stuck with Internet Explorer's security flaws. Future versions of the browser will only be able by buying an upgrade to the newest Microsoft operating system rather than available as a free download.

But why should Microsoft bother to develop browsers to run on its old(ish) operating systems? Microsoft doubtless thinks its sales of Windows upgrades will improve if it ceases to give the browser away separately.

The principal problem for Internet Explorer is Firefox. It is a new product, though descended from the first popular browser, Netscape Navigator. Firefox is widely regarded as faster and inherently more secure than Internet Explorer. It has a lot of useful facilities that Internet Explorer lacks, like tabbed browsing, a way of having lots of web pages open without cluttering the screen. It is also an open-source product, available for free. And the result is that Internet Explorer's market share is starting to decline. Microsoft could bring out an improved version of Internet Explorer before the next Windows upgrade (likely in 2006), but it says it will not. Is it end of the line for Internet Explorer?

I get paid to write the occasional article about environment issues. One story which intrigues me is the often repeated claim that "Half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within 200 or 300 years". The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the source of much of this garbage.

Because half of all the world's mammal species are supposedly in Australia, this equates to five species of mammal becoming extinct every year, or one mammal extinction every 2.4 months.

Not only can I find no reports of five mammals becoming extinct each year in Australia, but in 2003 a previously extinct species of wallaby was re-introduced to Australia from New Zealand. The UNEP media releases site contains no references to species becoming extinct, concentrating on announcements about hiring bureaucrats and how they spend money on studies. At least UNEP is honest about its priorities.

Are there really no mammals becoming extinct in Australia these days?

This is a great story:

British researchers have trained dogs to detect bladder cancer by sniffing human urine, opening up the possibility that dogs – or electronic noses modeled on their snouts – may one day be used to detect the disease.

The study, published in the British medical journal BMJ on Saturday, is the first to demonstrate scientifically that dogs can detect cancer through smell, its authors said.

Animals. Diseases of the rich. What more could you ask for in a news item? I agree that sex, celebrities, bad behaviour by an American Presidential candidate, Nazis and football are all absent, but several of these themes could be woven into this yarn in due course.

At the risk of being accused of saying that Chinese people are dogs, which is not at all what I am trying to say, I have long understood that Chinese doctors use smell – of urine, breath and so on – as a major diagnostic tool. So it does not surprise me a bit that dogs, with their famously keen sense of smell, might have a lot to contribute to medicine. This is not a "How very odd" story. It is not odd at all. I am only surprised that no one has thought to study this possibility sooner. I suppose such research depends on moderately cheap diagnosis by other means to be researchable without enormous expense. On the other hand, if the other diagnostic methods were already very cheap, there would be no need to bother with dogs.

My favourite bit of this New York Times report is this one:

In an intriguing side note to the British study, all six of the dogs detected cancer in the urine of a man who was thought to be cancer-free and was used as a control. When he was tested further, he was found to have a kidney tumor, and his life was saved.

That is the best sort of scientific evidence: the killer (to use a wildly inappropriate metaphor) anecdote.

More here, with links to the BMJ article and to a BBC report last week.

I will be the first person to admit I do not greatly enjoy driving a car and trying to map read at the same time. I am one of those folk who get on a lot better in a strange place when I have a passenger with the intelligence to give me decent directions. So one of the great boons of technology for a chap like me has been the developing use of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) navigation technology.

I have just returned from a terrific holiday in the USA. During the first week - staying at the northern California home of long-time pal and libertarian blogger Russell Whitaker - I rented a nice big saloon complete with GPS. It was a Magellan device and in my opinion, worth every cent. You can choose from a menu of different languages and the machine either enables you to take the fastest route home, or the most scenic, as well as pinpointing interesting places to visit. On balance I estimate I saved several hours that would have been otherwise spent trying to use a map. On only about three occasions did I get lost. In one case the GPS was wrong footed by a roadwork, and in another by a bad traffic jam. (And er, human error is not removed by GPS). But on the whole, my message to anyone who wants to avoid getting lost is to get GPS.

GPS is now widely used, not just by motorists but also by hikers, bikers, yachtsmen and powerboat users, as well as by the armed forces. GPS started out as part of the US Defence Dept's satellite system to make it easier for America's military to identify and hit targets. This point will of course be mentioned by those who want to argue that GPS would never exist without Big Government backing. However, given that launch costs can be radically reduced if only we let that happen - as suggested by the CATO Institute, it seems to me implausible to argue that a system like GPS can only get under way in the State sector. It strikes me as entirely plausible to imagine a rich businessman like Bill Gates, say, launching a few satellites and creating a luxury product of GPS that could eventually drop radically in price while also extending its range. GPS, like other breakthrough technologies, could have started as a high-end luxury good and gradually expand in scope and fall in cost like pocket calculators, DVD machines or jet travel.

There are also civil liberties issues to do with the government use of GPS, and I recommend that it is probably not a good idea for users to programme their individual street address into rented GPS machines if they can avoid it. And also do not imagine that this technology renders older methods redundant. For example, any yachtsman who puts to sea without the right charts, compasses and knowledge of navigation is asking for trouble. Oh, and remember that handheld GPS machines run on batteries, which run out.

Okay, anyone want to buy me a machine for Christmas?

I have been doing more chucking out of old paper today, mostly of old newspaper and magazine articles that were vaguely interesting, but not interesting enough to be worth the bother of keeping them for another decade and a half. My life having worked well enough without me having read any of them during the previous decade and a half, out they went. Demand for black plastic bags in the Pimlico area has definitely surged lately. I am that surge.

The irony is, however, that much of the space thus liberated is going to be used to store … books. Remember them? Piles of paper in little heaps, glued or sewn together at one side. I find that the difference between an actual heep of articles just piled up, in an almost random order, and articles joined at the hip, so to speak, and then – and this is absolutely crucial – labelled at the edge, and on the outside, is: all the difference. Books do not merely contain lots of printed verbiage. Crucially, they also include their own automatic filing system built into them. Books still matter. Why, we even review them here, from time to time. Come to think of it, my last posting but one here was about a book. And nobody thought that odd for a blog to be publishing. (My next posting here could well be about another book.)

The mere disembodied article, like all those Libertarian Alliance articles that I chucked out a week or two ago, has now almost entirely migrated to the Internet. It may have a brief paper infancy, but then it enters the world of virtuality, only to return to print if a computer owner decides to print it out. But this print out soon dies. But books refuse to hide among the electrons. They remain, stubbornly, on their shelves, this being one of the most famous Internet businesses on the planet.

What this leads me to want to learn more about is not just the history of the printing press as such, but about the history of book binding. Who worked that out? And who invented the idea of books having a spine at the side, and having a title on the outside? When were hard cardboard covers decided upon, so that books could be stored vertically, in shelves. I did some googling a day or two ago, and got to this generic piece about what a wonderful advance books would be if they had only recently been thought of. But I could find nothing about the details of who sorted out binding, spines, outside titles, etc., and where, and when. My googlincompetence, no doubt.

The person I would normally ask about such things is my friend Sean Gabb, who writes this. But he is away just now. So instead I ask the Samizdata commentariat, a group of people who are, I believe, at their best when asked exact, technical questions about matters of fact, preferably technical or better yet technological fact.

And when we have sorted all that out, we can discuss whether the compact disc has any future. (I have been making new CD shelves also.) If the CD does have a future, it is, I think, because the CD is rather book-like. It has a spine, pointing outwards, and stores easily, vertically, and can be found with relative ease, especially when you consider that, unlike books, CDs are all the same size and thus do not cry out to be sorted into clumps that are merely the same size (as happens with books – mine anyway) but can instead be ordered rationally and hence retrievably. No, I am not really serious about that. But if the CD (and its proposed higher-tech successors) does stagger on for a few more years before it is engulfed by all our hard discs, it will be because it is like a book. And that is an entertaining irony, I think.

Having recently completed Edward O. Wilson's flawed tome on updating the Enlightenment: "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", I was struck by the passages that he wrote on colour perception. To summarise Wilson's description, there appear to be four basic units of colour if a wide range of languages are compared: red, yellow, green and blue. However, these units are either incorporated or discarded within the range of human languages.

Human cultures are so diver