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In just over one month's time, some of us space geeks will be hoisting a glass or several to mark this 40th anniversary. I was only a three-year old toddler when Messrs Armstrong and Aldrin climbed out of the craft and onto that dusty, sun-blasted place called the Moon. 40 years. Popular Mechanics has a good look at what it all meant.

I think a good place to mark the occasion would be down at Greenwich, London, near to the Royal Observatory.

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Via such blogs as this one (see the list of recent postings on other blogs), and this one (the previous list being how I got to that blog), I today encountered a video of someone called Ian Plimer plugging his latest book, which is called Heaven and Earth. Watch it here.

And here (via this posting) is a piece about an Aussie politician who seems to be following Plimer's lead.

I am no scientist, and politically I am heavily in favour of the free market capitalism that the Green Movement wants to shut down or at least castrate. So I would say all this. But I can honestly say that I find Plimer more convincing than those persons who talk about climate change as if the urgent need now is to stop all climate change (impossible) of as if those who doubt their prophecies of apocalypse (such as me) believe that climate is not now changing. The climate always changes.

Plimer is eloquent, and relatively brief. Even pro-AGW greenies would find this, I think, a quite useful short compendium of all the arguments against their views, in fact they already are using it this way. That's if they are interested in answering arguments, as some are.

The clearest insight that I personally got from this video performance was Plimer's claim that the AGW (as in anthropogenic global warming) people are all atmospheric scientists (insofar as they are scientists at all), who are plugging their apocalypse without looking at any other kinds of scientific evidence, or much in the way of historical evidence either. He also says that this particular evidence is itself very threadbare, but that is a distinct argument that I have long known about.

I was also interested that Professor Donald Blainey [Correction: Geoffrey Blainey], an Australian historian whom I have long admired, is in his turn an admirer of Plimer's book. Big plus, for me.

Plimer is optimistic that the current economic woes, woes that really are now being experienced by our entire species if not our entire planet, together with the little bit of cooling that has recently been happening, will concentrate people's minds on what a load of humbug the AGW scare is. No doubt pessimists commenting here will say that the damage has already been done, and will take decades to undo. I'll pass on that argument.

I now guess that the next argument for AGW here in Britain is going to be that since the BNP also says AGW is humbug, it must be true.

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There is a certain kind of libertarian-stroke-free-marketeer intellectual whom I hold in particular esteem. I'm talking about the specialist consensus breaker. I gave a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society last year in which I mentioned two of my favourite intellectuals of this sort. I talked about James Tooley, who says: education for the poor doesn't have to state funded and it's better if it's not. And I talked about Peter Bauer, who said: government to government foreign aid does more harm than good. I could also have mentioned another such consensus breaker: Terence Kealey.

Happily, my failure to inform the Oxford Libertarian Society of Terence Kealey's existence and stature did not do any lasting damage, because by some means or another they still managed to hear about him. Better yet, they invited him to talk to them about the consensus he has been busy breaking, the consensus that says that science is a public good which has to be government funded. Kealey says: not so. As with education for the poor, it's better for science if the government doesn't fund it. And even better yet, the Oxford Libertarians filmed Kealey's talk.

The talk was given on May 22nd, and the video of it was posted on the Oxford Libertarian Society blog on the 23rd, so sorry for only just noticing it and mentioning it here. But this is not one of those arguments where a couple of weeks will make any difference. I've only watched about a third of it so far, but am confident about recommending all of it. The talk I gave to the OLS is here.

See also this recent Kealey book and this earlier one, both of which I have read all of and much enjoyed.

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In the days when UFOs were big news, someone - as usual I have forgotten where I read this, but it might have been in something by Arthur C. Clarke - once put forward a very good reason not to believe that the US military were concealing alien visitations: "If there really were UFOs," said a military man, "all us captains would be majors."

And so they would. The proven existence of alien spaceships buzzing around in our atmosphere would prompt a vast expansion of the armed services. No doubt the governments of the world would also pour resources into the sciences. Administrators, too, would need more power and money in order to deal with the dramatic changes to our accustomed mode of life that might be necessary. The alien threat, scary though it would be, would be so good for so many people in receipt of a government salary that I am quite surprised that no one of any significance propagated it. In fact, according to believers in UFOs, the military-industrial complex went to great efforts to pooh-pooh the whole idea. Given the benefits it would have brought them, maybe I should revise my cynical views about bureaucrats.

That was then. This is now. These days the threat of global warming rather than flying saucers is good news for many people getting a government salary.

Some people will read this as meaning that I take climate change to be a group delusion, as UFOs were. Not so. I believe it is happening a little less strongly than I did in 2006 but I do not know. Back then I said, "The consensus convinces because there is no good reason to suppose that so many eminent scientists are lying or deceiving themselves when they say climate change is happening. But if you give me cause to believe that departure from the consensus gets a person ostracised, then there is a good reason." I still think this, but I have become equally aware of another incentive for scientists to believe that global warming is happening.

Via Tim Blair and Benny Peiser comes a beautiful example of how the words "climate change" have come to be seen as the key to the government strongbox.

In the Guardian, Tariq Tahir asks:

"Changing behaviour will be as vital as new technologies in tackling climate change. So where is the funding for linguists, anthropologists and sociologists?"

The red things you see everywhere are tongues hanging out.

"If we were asked as institutions to help solve major global challenges, and asked what is the 'dream team' that we would want to field for doing that," says Wellings, "as soon as you start to put that together, there are engineers, technocrats and very often people in the humanities and the social sciences."

and

He points to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a member of the 1994 group. "I don't know what the future of geopolitics is, but I do know that in the future we are going to have to turn to people such as those at Soas, who are experts in languages and anthropology from that part of the world. It will be an inevitable response that we will need a world-class centre of excellence of the sort that we already have there."

In the meantime, Wellings, who is also vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, fears there will be less money for academics to engage in speculative research in social sciences and humanities.

and

Diane Berry, Reading University's pro vice-chancellor for research, echoes this argument. "It is clearly important to protect funding for Stem subjects and medicine. However, we cannot afford to conceive our science base too narrowly - we must protect our wider research base.

"This is because addressing current and future global challenges depends on the successful interplay of all subjects. Furthermore, the boundaries between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities are becoming increasingly fluid as research at the frontiers of knowledge becomes increasingly inter- and multidisciplinary."

The fact that people believe something because they have incentives to do so does not make their beliefs untrue. But it is a reason for caution.

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I have been somewhat quiet of late as I am on the road again, going from job to job to keep cash flowing sufficiently to keep me alive until my aerospace startup can keep me busy and paid full time. In the last 30 days I have worked jobs in Manhattan and north of DC; at the moment I have one day of business in Pittsburgh and am staying with the other half of "Browning and Amon" (or vice-versa), a duet from my younger days as a fixture in the Pittsburgh music scene.

Mark Browning, besides being a fellow singer-songwriter and guitarist who shared many years and several bands with me, is also a Pittsburgh zoo-keeper and has used his knowledge of birds and his fertile imagination to invent a product for a market most of us would never have imagined existed: housing for Barn Owls.

An Owl ponders the possibilities of Mark and dinner.
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Browning

Sound strange? You might think so and you would be wrong. Barn Owls, beside being large, gorgeous and fascinating predators also happen to be exceedingly effective controllers of small mammals. Since I long ago shared a flat with Mark and assorted birds and vipers, I realized immediately how useful it might be having some living about your farm field. What I did not realize was just how big the potential market is. To be truthful I still do not know how gargantuan it may be, but it is simply huge. There is hardly a farm in the Anglosphere world (and perhaps later elsewhere) that would not profit from the free service provided by these birds.

His boxes are selling like hotcakes in the California wine country. Sales are accelerating rapidly. Barn Owls love his nesting boxes and growers are packing them into their fields as closely as the Barn Owls will go along with. I would say there is every chance Mark will make his million from warm blooded flying predators long before I make mine off rapidly flying objects of the manmade kind.

Mark with his box and the Pittsburgh skyline behind him.
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Browning

You may wonder what is so special about these things. I cannot give out details I have been told over a few beers (well, not just a few. A lot actually) until his patent is through, but it comes down to a design which lasts and is naturally cooling. It gives barn owls a cool nesting place even if there is direct sunlight. If one happens to be flying around in the neighborhood it will make a beeline for one of these boxes because large enough hollow trees are rare and their old wooden barn homes are rapidly disappearing.

A proud homeowner surveys his cool new pad.
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Bornwing

I would not be at all surprised to turn on Autumn Watch in a year or two and see Bill and Kate talking with Mark about the increase in owl population these boxes have brought about.

I am sure our own Editor Perry deHavilland will also appreciate this advance in Barn Owl housing...

Perry with his familiar, Cadaemus, during his Hogwarts days.

If you are interested you can find out more from The Barn Owl Box Company web site.

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A US stealth aircraft, photographed while breaking the sound barrier. I don't know why, given that Man has achieved the feat of breaking Mach 1 for more than half a century since the great Chuck Yeager officially did it first, but stuff like this still gives me a buzz.

(4)

Lawrence Berkeley Labs has a movie here that shows Carbon atoms in live action movement in a sheet of graphene. That is the stuff you make when you drag your pencil across a sheet of paper and it may be one of the more important materials of the 21st Century.

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Reader 'CountingCats' reports that the next developmental stage of the Polywell fusion device has been funded.

Now let us cross our fingers, and perhaps the more religious among us do their thing, that the next scale up version continues to show positive results. If it does, then we will have plenty of cheap energy at the top, from small local power stations, as well as at the bottom.

God, this is an interesting time to be alive!

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We are approaching the days of magic, the long ago predicted days when computing and electronics technology ceases to be visible and vanishes 'into the walls'. One of the key solutions required for that disappearance is in the process of being solved.

If you are going to have an 'intelligent environment' around you, the computing elements involved must not only be small but they must have a source of energy. If we are truly talking about ubiquitous computing, there will be thousands of nodes in a home, millions in a neighborhood, billions in a town or city. You cannot feasibly wire them to external power and you can also not have thousands of folk running about changing a billion batteries every week or two.

That is where environmental energy scavenging comes in and it is not a future technology. It is here and several different types are purchase-able off the shelf from AdaptivEnergy, Texas Instruments and others. The systems work by picking up small amounts of energy from vibration, tiny amounts of ambient light, temperature differences and even the broadcasts from the local TV station.

Some applications are already in use for sensors in factory environments but the threshold is nigh where applications will move into businesses and homes. Tiny gadgets that you install and then forget about because they just keep doing their job for year after year with no maintenance, no battery changes, no replacements and no attention. They will effectively become invisible adjuncts to daily life.

According to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". We are just about to cross that threshold.

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Even I had believed the oft repeated mantra that integrated circuits were a result of a spinoff of the Moon Race. According to George Guilder, at the end of Chapter 5 of "Microcosm":

Like TI before it, Fairchild achieved its breakthroughs with virtually no government assistance while its largest competitors -- chiefly the vacuum tube companies -- were receiving collectively hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But when the government needed a way to miniaturize the circuitry for its Minuteman missiles and its space flights, it did not use micromodules or any of the other exotic technologies it had subsidized. It turned first to Fairchild rather than to its early favorites and beneficiaries. Fairchild's lack of military entanglement in the late fifties finally allowed the company to get the bulk of military and aerospace contracts in the early 1960s.

I begin to wonder if the government is actually responsible for the introduction of anything whatever. About the only thing left are a few DARPA projects and on most of those, other than the Internet itself, it is too early to tell.

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Let us celebrate Human Achievement Hour.

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This (which I just had trouble getting back to - it was linked to from here today, top left) is very strange:

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

Very strange because it seems to me that with about five seconds thought one can easily arrive at an evolutionary advantage associated with a belief in eternal life, and accordingly an evolutionary explanation of it.

Tribes of ancient humans often battled each other to death – literally to death, the losers being completely wiped out – and in these battles, a willingness to die might be the difference between victory and defeat, between your gene pool spreading, and your gene pool being wiped out.

Tons of stuff has been written about the prisoner's dilemma associated with infantry battles. If you all stand together and fight, your side has its best chance of winning. Anyone breaking and running exposes all others to annihilation. Etcetera. Military cultures ancient and modern were and are suffused with ideas of honour and courage and self-sacrifice, all of which resulted and result in everyone in your army standing firm and holding the line.

In such a world, a belief in some kind of Valhalla of dead heroes is pretty much a certainty. Even now, effective military units do everything they can to ensure that their heroic dead-in-battle are treated with tremendous solemnity and never forgotten, giving them eternal life of a limited kind, and pour encourager les autres. Such notions have even greater force if eternal life is literally what everyone in the front line of battle believes in. I am amazed, absolutely amazed, that any academic could be unaware of such notions, or if aware, then unpersuaded.

It's as if this guy Scott Atran has never seen a war memorial, and never even read The Selfish Gene, which is all about how our selfish genes cause us, in certain circumstances, to become raging altruists, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of society.

You do not have to have to have any particular view of the truth of religion in order to see the force of this explanation. As an atheist, I am obviously on the look out for evolutionary explanations of the phenomenon of religious belief, given that I don't think such beliefs are correct - so why do people persist in believing them or in their absence, invent them? But religious people often use such genetically-enhanced-altruism notions to argue for religion, on consequentialist grounds. In a similar spirit they also argue, perhaps rightly, that religious people are more inclined to have children, and hence to outbreed us atheists, childbirth being, for a woman, not unlike taking part in a battle, especially in earlier centuries. Religion makes your society stronger, because it make you more willing to sacrifice yourself for the collective!

Notice that if you didn't care at all about the collective in the first place, the argument in the previous sentence would have no force for you.

It's somewhat off topic, but this is one of the many reasons why I am, although an admirer of her in many ways, not a devotee of Ayn Rand. Her stated plan of saving the world by abolishing altruism flies in the face of the known facts of human nature. The trick is to do altruism well, not to try to abolish it. Which is easier said than done, as our current economic troubles illustrate well, and which is actually, I would argue, what most of Ayn Rand's stories and heroic characters were really all about, despite what she and they insisted on telling us.

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It is tempting to imagine that a cause is so important to Mankind, so essential, that only a total idiot could object to coercing one's fellows into paying for said cause. And when it comes to science funding, even the most seemingly rational people fall prey to the notion that only wicked, selfish people, or religious nutters, could object to this funding. Take a recent article by Steven Mirsky, who writes for Scientific American:

"You’re not supposed to kick a guy when he’s down. Of course, in reality, when he’s down is the perfect time to kick him. He’s closer to your feet, for one thing. But the particular kicking I have in mind should be thought of as tough love. These kicks at the freshly defeated McCain-Palin ticket, as I write in early November, are an attempt to knock some sense back into the group of my fellow Americans who seem determined to ignore or even denigrate valuable scientific research because it’s something outside the realm of Joe the Plumber’s daily activities."

Ah yes, Joe the Plumber, the man who achieved prominence by asking The Community Organiser about the latter's plans to seize wealth from productive folk and "spread it around". What Mr Mirsky goes on to do is mock the comments of the McCain/Palin team who had mocked examples of high tax funding of various projects they think were silly or wasteful. Mr Mirsky gets very shirty about this, regarding the projects as obviously beneficial, and only an old fart like McCain and his crazy VP running mate could disagree.

The rest of the article lays out examples of how certain projects that Mr Mirsky thinks are useful were mocked by the GOP, and by extension, other know-nothings more concerned about protecting their wallets. But Mr Mirsky misses a rather large point. Which is that even if a science project is valuable, the question of value is meaningless unless one asks: of value to whom and in the eyes of whom? What Mr Mirsky want to do is to sustitute his judgement of what is right to spend money on for that of others spending their own money. No doubt he fears that without tax funding, financial support for science will dry up - a very dubious assumption, to put it mildly.

Timothy Sandefur - who is on a roll at the moment - has a collection of essays taking on the argument that science funding has to be, or should be, done at the expense of taxpayers. I urge regulars here who are interested to read all of Tim's pieces. They are the most comprehensive demolition job on such arguments that I have read for some time.

The trouble with people who do not think much in terms of principles, but who just take a sort of techno-managerialist view of public affairs, is that they cannot see why the great unwashed should object to paying for biotech research, or space flight, etc. And as I mentioned the other day, with the world of the arts, it is the same. It is just assumed by some folk that because a painting by Titian or Andy Warhol is marvellous, that the taxpayer should consider his duty to pay for it. The danger in such cases is when the expenditures are relatively small compared to the total size of public spending: the temptation is to shrug one's shoulders and wonder why making a fuss is necessary. Well, if we cannot take an axe to the supposedly more "benign" aspects of public spending, it will never be possible to make the broader philosophical case for reducing the state significantly.

As a side observation, the sneering, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone of Mr Mirsky puts me in mind of Thomas Sowell's recent superb attack on that sort of mindset, in his book, The Vision of The Anointed.

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I have just been reading an article in this month's Scientific American that has me smiling from ear to ear. One of the difficult problems for 'strong nanotechnology' has been cracked: how do you handle C3I with millions or billions of nanoassemblers? How do you program them? How do you tell them when to start and stop or do something different? How do they report problems, lack of raw materials, whatever?

University of California Berkeley physicist Dr. Alex Zettl and colleagues have built nanoscale radio receivers and transmitters using a single buckeytube each. One tube performs all the actions of an AM radio. Antenna. Tuner. Amplifier. Demodulator. Best of all this is not just theory. It already works well enough to communicate to and from the human scale at this primitive stage of development.

I might add that if you can turn radio waves into mechanical energy at the nanoscale, then you also have another tool in the nanoparts box for feeding energy to nanosystems.

This is big.

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Yesterday, while I was cleaning my flat (you asking for a medal, Ed?), I had the TV on in the background and it was running a series of programmes via the Horizon team at the BBC about various natural disasters, such as earthquakes, killer giant waves and tsunamis. In the latter case, the programme speculated that if there was a volcanic eruption in one of the islands in the group known as the Canaries, off the African coast, that it would trigger a huge slide of rock into the ocean, therby causing a massive wave, which would then run left across to the Eastern seaboard of North America, probably parts of the Caribbean also, annihilating all in its path. New York, Balimore, Miami, etc would be obliterated.

This guy is not terribly convinced by the thesis. But suppose for a second that the direst predictions are accurate. Part of the theory is that the eruption will be so violent because of the enormous pressure that is building up inside the active volcano. So a question that occured to me was why doesn't a team of geologists and engineers try to bore several large holes in the side of the volcano and let some of the pent-up magma come out, in a fairly controlled way?

I am not a scientist so feel free to mock this idea, but it occurs to me that given all the facts presented, this sort of idea might be a goer. I'd be interested to know what people think. There might be other techical "fixes" that spring to mind.

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Some time ago, I asked here, non-rhetorically: What use is handwriting?, and I got a lot of very useful answers, such as that techies can communicate very well if they can hand-write, in ways that just wouldn't work with any gadget more complicated than a pencil or felt-tip pen. By attaching labels to hastily sketched diagrams or graphs, for instance.

Now, for similarly pedagogical reasons I ask: What use is algebra? I refer to the most primitive sort of algebra, where you merely tiptoe into the swamp of abstraction and say things like: if a is 2 and b is 4, then what is a plus 2b? What is the specific value of writing out algebraic equations with small letters in them, and then either substituting particular values for those letters, or else deducing some of those values? Why go into letters, if all you then do is get out of them again, which seems to be the rule when you first start out at algebra.

I'm guessing – guessing because it is decades since I myself did any of this – that there is value to an equation, as a generalisation, quite lacking in the mere specifics of what happens in the particular case when a is 2 and b is 4. An equation specifies a general relationship, and one that is often worth understanding, and impossible to understand without this on-the-face-of-it peculiar and regressive diversion out of arithmetic and back into mere letters. But can the commentariat rephrase, correct, expand on that?

Ideally, they would do this in a way that might convince a twelve-year-old whose ambition is to get rich - perhaps by being a Something in The City (assuming there still is a City for him to be a Something in when he reaches his twenties) - and who now gets up before 6am every morning to do a paper round. By the time I get around to teaching him things like algebra, he is tired. What's the point of this?, he asks. I would like to be able to give him some better answers than I have managed so far. I both like and admire this boy, and would really like him to do well.

We meet every Tuesday night, so my next chance to pass on such things will be tomorrow evening.

UPDATE Tuesday lunchtime: Many thanks for all the comments, most useful. Lots to pass on and to think about, and not just this evening.

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I just watched this BBC Horizon programme, about cannabis.

Many who favour the legalisation of cannabis base their case on the claim that cannabis is less harmful than is widely assumed. It is less bad than you think, they say, in fact very good. For me, the case for legalisation does not depend on any claim about riskiness or lack of it, but rather on the idea that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves about the risks they take, and about how pleasurable the pleasures are that they take these risks to enjoy. Not myself having any plans to take cannabis, I have tended to remain rather ignorant of the details of the riskiness argument, because I just do not think that this is what matters, any more than I favour denationalised washing machine businesses (which I do), because of and following long years spent studying the internal workings of washing machines.

But being a libertarian, I inevitably come across screeds about cannabis, of which this splendid rant (linked to from here yesterday by Johnathan Pearce) is a fine example. Spurred on by this rant, I watch the BBC show. I dozzed off during some of it, but still learned quite a lot.

For me, the most interesting bit was about how cannabis contains several different ingredients, rather than just one key ingredient that makes cannabis cannabis, so to speak. There is THC, which stands for ... whatever THC stands for. But, there is also CBD, and according to this, lots of others besides, all of which seem to sound like television news organisations. And CBD, unlike THC, is anti-psychotic, according to this bloke that they ended up talking to on the telly, growing masses of cannabis courtesy the government, at an undisclosed location. The harm done by modern drug-dealer type cannabis is that it contains lots of THC, and very little CBD, if any. Interesting. (I seem to recall Dan Ayckroyd getting a stern lecture from a policeman about the evils of THC in Changing Places.)

I do have one prejudice about cannabis, which applies also to alcohol, and also to baked beans and to computer games, and in fact to just about anything, which is that different people react to the same things in often very different ways. This commonplace notion, strongly confirmed by this programme, often seems to be lost on the medical profession, and in particular on the more strident sort of medical amateur. Some people are clearly helped by cannabis, getting, for instance, otherwise unobtainable pain relief from it. (They did some filming in California.) Others get hours of innocent pleasure from it. Others go mad and hear voices, voices that they might in due course have found themselves hearing anyway, but perhaps not.

Judging by the size and splendour and apparent respectability of that huge but secret cannabis farm, it looks like cannabis may soon be legalised, but simultaneously nationalised. A bit like the Church of England with religion. This is the other way to discourage things, when outright banning has failed. As an agnostic about cannabis, I favour outright legalisation on libertarian grounds. As an atheist about religion, I have rather a soft spot for the Church of England.

The bloke doing the programme ended by saying that in his opinion the harm done by cannabis was not its dramatically bad stuff, like turning a few people into psychos, but in the form of all the lethargy it spreads. Because of cannabis, lots of people just loaf about doing very little, giggling inanely, he said. I do not really need the BBC to tell me that.

Besides which, I think the real encouragers of loafing are the Department of Social Security, or whatever they call that this year, and the Inland Revenue (ditto). They pay people to loaf about and do nothing, and fine them for working. If people suffered much more economically for doing nothing than they do now, and made much more dramatic gains from working by keeping almost all (all is my preferred arrangement) that they made, cannabis would not be nearly so popular as an encourager of negativity. It would still be used to achieve other benefits, such as pain relief, and for calming down after a hard day at the office. Just not for making a life spent doing nothing somewhat more pleasurable.

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I have never felt the urge to buy an iPod as I am really not that interested in music-on-the-move, but maybe it is time for me to reconsider... I feel another overdue hunting trip to Central Europe coming on.

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Life is always better when I have a book on the go which I can hardly wait to get back to. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is not quite going to be that for me. Too complicated. Not central enough to the things I happen now to be interested in, probably because I already agree with it far too completely for it to grab me by the throat. But, I have recently been dipping into this book, having finally got hold of a cheap second-hand copy of it, and yesterday I came across an argument in it which I found familiar, but in another context.

Dawkins criticises Bishop Hugh Montefiore (on page 38 of my 1991 Penguin paperback edition) for again and again resorting to the argument that he just cannot believe that this or that complex organ or organism could possibly have evolved.

For instance, Dawkins quotes Montefiore saying this:

As for camouflage, this is not always easily explicable on neo-Darwinian premises. If polar bears are dominant in the Arctic, then there would seem to have been no need for them to evolve a white-coloured form of camouflage.

This, says Dawkins, should be translated thus:

I personally, off the top of my head sitting in my study, never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar bear in the wild, and having been educated in classical literature and theology, have not so far managed to think of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being white.

Dawkins then adds a further objection, which is that even labouring under all these handicaps, Montefiore ought to have been able to work out that predators benefit from camouflage – from being invisible to their prey – just as a creature benefits from being camouflaged if it is, potentially, someone else's prey. The polar bear is not dominant anyway, whatever colour it is. It is dominant because it is white, and can thus sneak up on its targets unobserved.

But what interested me was the similarity between Dawkins' first objection to arguments from incredulity, that the incredulous one has simply not given it enough thought, and confused his own casual inability to come up with an evolutionary explanation for this or that puzzling or complicated biological phenomenon with the absolute inability of anyone to provide such an explanation, and above all of the inability of evolution itself to work the trick.

This reminds me a lot of how many opponents of a free market economy have argued with me in the past, and my repost was a lot like the Dawkins repost to Montefiore. My anti-free-marketeer would posit some problem which he alleged would crop up in a free market, such as: – I don't know – only rich people being able to get the kind of food they like, or: the chaos caused by a mass of conflicting standards for personal computers (I am old enough to remember that one), or (now): the problem of failing banks, or: whatever. And he gives his chosen problem about the same amount of thought, and with about the same lack of preparatory qualifications or relevant experiences, as Bishop Montefiore brought to bear (sorry) on the matter of the whiteness of polar bears. He fails to think of a free market, entrepreneurial, voluntarily funded, customer financed answer to his problem. And he immediately concludes from his own failure instantaneously to provide a market solution to his problem that nobody, however well (i.e. massively better) acquainted with the business in question, and however much longer and harder they try to devise an answer, will be able to crack it. Ergo, the government must immediately step in and sort it out. In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.

I am making a very modest point here, perhaps too modest given the length of this posting. I am just saying that these two arguments remind me of each other. I'm not saying that because Darwinism is true (as I think it is) it therefore follows that the free market is right (although I think that too). Nor am I arguing that if you agree with me about markets, then you should agree with me and Dawkins and the rest of the Darwinian tribe, about evolution, if you happen now not to. I am just, as many Americans are fond of saying, saying.

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Excellent, a new skycar prototype will be travelling from London to Timbuctoo, via ground and air. There is a nostalgic coolness about skycars as they reflect a legacy future where 1940s starlets are rescued by a world of modern skyscrapers and heroes in jetpacks. In reality, the car will be driven by the SAS and the Foreign Office provides its doleful advice that adventures are 'dangerous'. Couldn't they go to Cleethorpes instead and why can't we force them to, thinks the man from the FO?

As well as natural barriers, the team has been warned about the threat of kidnap in volatile parts of Africa and the car will have to negotiate a minefield in Mauretania - "I might fly that one," said 45-year-old expedition leader Neil Laughton.

When the need for flight arises - estimated to be for 40% of the journey - a ParaWing, a parachute of the type used by paragliders, will be dragged behind the modified off-road buggy and the propeller on the back of the vehicle will boost the Skycar down whatever happens to be serving as an improvised runway. When it reaches 45mph, enough lift should be generated to get the car airborne, its weight supported only by "a silk handkerchief, a large one at that", said Laughton.

The adventure is referred to as an element of "mad Brits", another phrase redolent of passing qualities. More details on the car can be found here, though one must accept that not all prototypes will be stylish Italian jobs. This one looks more like a souped up Dune buggy.

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Following on from my post earlier about what sort of things might be regarded as wrong or intolerable by future generations that are widely done now, this book by David Friedman (son of Milton F), which looks at potential future legal, scientific and ethical controversies, looks interesting. For instance, Friedman asks what might happen to inheritance wrangles where the "deceased" is in fact held in cryonic suspension and hence not technically dead, as might be defined in a specific legal code. Some of this stuff might appear pure science fiction, but SF has a way of sometimes becoming reality. After all, the very fact that many people can afford to not use animal products such as leather has been made possible by synthetic fibres and materials such as plastic, something that did not exist about 100 years ago. Other developments could also make certain moral controversies either irrelevant or shift the boundaries markedly, or raise controversies that no-one has to contend with now.

On the dystopian side, the developments going on in IT might raise such worries about how the state might try to do things like implant computer chips into people's bodies as a sort of ID system. Only the innocent have anything to fear...

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Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the arrival on Mars of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Despite a few problems to do with their age, both this rover and its identical twin Opportunity are in good working order and are still wandering around the surface of Mars and sending back interesting findings.

The obvious first thing to do is to congratulate everyone who had anything to do with these missions for a truly magnificent achievement. During my life, watching NASA's manned space program has been intensely frustrating. Huge amounts of money have been spent on overly expensive boondogles that achieve less than was achieved in the years around the time I was born, despite there being no shortage of new and exciting things that could be achieved. At the same time, though, and on vastly smaller budgets, the unmanned probes produced by and with NASA/JPL to explore the planets and the solar system have managed magnificent achievement after magnificent achievement. Since I was a child we have learned so much about the planets and the solar system, and I have found it hugely inspiring. Seeing high resolution photographs of the moons of Saturn, or the surface of Mars, or the Great Dark Spot of Neptune - who would have imagined such things.

And yet, one thing that amazes me even more is the strange way in which NASA planetary probes stretch and warp time. For instance, the two Mars rovers were sent to Mars on missions that were supposed to last for 90 days. Both missions are now at five years, which is a little over 20 times the original length of the mission. This is an extreme example, but these missions often dramatically outlast their stated lifetimes. A four year Mars Global Surveyor mission turns into nine years. The Cassini mission to Saturn has been there for the planned four years, has had its funding extended for another two, and may manage more than that.

One reason why missions are able to be extended for long periods is of course the extraordinary ingenuity of the people who run them. That software is being upgraded and hardware used in unplanned ways to fix all manner of problems with stuck robotic arms, failed high-gain antennas, wheels getting a little sticky, rovers stuck in sand-dunes, and that these things so often seem to work is another thing that amazes me.

Yet, I wonder further. Clearly, when these missions are launched the hope is that they will keep going a lot longer than stated in the "mission objectives". Clearly, also, in many cases the principal scientific goals will be achieved in the first few days or months after arriving at the destination, so what decides success is what happens shortly after arrival. Arguing that "everything else is a bonus" after the core objectives are achieved is probably fair.

How much of it is politics, though? I am sure it is easier to get funding for a five year old mission on the basis that "We have a rover on Mars that is still working and it would be a horrible shame to end the mission now" than asking for six years of funding at the beginning. I am sure also that when scientists are told that "You can't have funding for A, B, C, and D, but we will give you funding for A and B", they will find a way to include C and D while pretending that A and B is all they are doing, particularly if A and B are Jupiter and Saturn, and C and D are Uranus and Neptune.

And yet, when a 90 day mission is still going after five years, I cannot help but think that someone, somewhere, is taking the piss out of someone. All I can ask is that they please keep doing it.

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Scientists are planning to ignite a tiny Man-made star, according to this Daily Telegraph article. I wonder if the scientists or the journalists writing on their activities have seen the film, Sunshine, about which reviews have been mixed?

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Wired magazine has a neat item about ten species of creature that were discovered in 2008. Alas, as the comments in the article suggest, some people remain far more interested in the species varieties that have gone extinct this year. What perhaps needs to be stated is that in a constantly changing world, species are evolving and others are dying out, even without the allegedly malign influence of Man. What the deep Greens often do not seem ready to concede is that species have been wiped out before without the help of us naughty bipeds.

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I have just heard on an infrastructure mail list that India has lost much international bandwidth and the problem is due to failure on the SeaMeaWea3, SeaMeaWea4 and FALCON submarine cable systems at Alexandria.

There were multiple failures in Alexandria just a few months ago if I remember correctly.

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Less than an hour ago I cited Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz's work on Science Courts in a Samizdata discussion, and in one of those strange and in this case saddening cases of synchronicity, I have just received an email notification that he passed away on November 29 at the age of 95.

Dr. Kantrowitz was a true gentleman of Science and will be much missed by all who have ever crossed his path.

I am sure others will have much more to say about his long career in the hard sciences.

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A hat tip to Counting Cats for the report. Jeff Foust has the story here.

I have been waiting for this news, as have many others, for months. Peer review of the test results have shown no reason why the technology will not work, although Dr. Nebel is quick to point out that nothing in the results guarantees it either.

Now... onwards to the next set of tests!

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Reason TV has a very fine lecture by Bjorn Lomberg on global warming available. Bjorn is one of the few people out there who represent a position similar to mine. Yes, it is happening; yes, there will be winners and losers... but it is not the end of the world.

He shows in case after case how governments are throwing away billions upon billions of dollars, pounds, and yen for 'solutions' which will have virtually no effect at all.

It is well worth watching.

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I suppose it is a sign of advancing years, and having lost some close friends to cancer or having been scared by a close relative's condition that the notion of a cure for the gremlin should weigh on my mind a bit more than it used to. (You are definitely getting old, Ed). I cannot help noticing, when reading Instapundit as I do every day that Glenn Reynolds has been putting up regular links to the growing use of nanotechnology in delivering cancer-busting chemicals to the body with incredible accuracy. Here's another one. The more accurate the delivery of the drug, so the reasoning goes, the fewer the unpleasant side-effects associated with things like chemo treatments, and the greater chances of beating the cancer. The steady trickle of news items and articles has yet to become a flood, but I have this sense that the flood may be pretty close.

When I read Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler back whenever it was, the idea of tiny nanobots being used to treat cancer was, then, still on the edge of what folk thought might be possible. There is a way to go yet but it is a mark of how certain stories get below the radar of current events that nano-medicine has crept up on us so quickly, rather as the internet did about 20-odd years ago.

Faster please!

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In an electronics market in China last month, I found these intriguing items for sale.

Okay, "MP3" I understand. The MPEG-1 standard for digital media storage and transmission contained three audio formats. These were MPEG-1 audio layers 1, 2 and 3. Of these, layer 3 provided the highest audio quality, became the standard for compressed digital audio, and "MPEG-1 layer 3" became abbreviated to "MP3".

"MP4" is slightly more problematic. The successor standard to MPEG-1 was MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is very important, but mainly because it contains much more advanced video formats than MPEG-1. DVDs and most digital television applications use MPEG-2 video. In terms of audio, MPEG-2 contains the three existing formats from MPEG-1 (including MP3) and a more advanced format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Perhaps confusingly, AAC is very seldom used with MPEG-2 video, which is much more frequently paired with the MPEG-1 audio formats, or with Dolby AC-3 (which is not part of any of the MPEG standards).

However, AAC is also part of the MPEG-4 family of standards. (There is no MPEG-3). Due partly to AAC being the favourite audio standard of Apple, AAC is commonly paired with the video standards of MPEG-4, the two most common of which are the Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG-4 part 2) and the now favoured Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 part 10, known also as ITU-T H.264). This partnering between AAC and the MPEG-4 family of standards can mean that AAC audio is sometimes referred to as "MP4 audio", with "MP4" as an abbreviation of "MPEG-4", even though AAC as a format technically preceded MPEG-4. In addition, media of this form is often encoded using the MPEG-4 part 14 container format, which usually has the file suffix ".mp4". Thus it makes a certain amount of sense for an AAC or MPEG-4 capable media player to be referred to as an "MP4 player". In this case the "4" in MP4 means something different to the "3" in MP3, but there is some logic to it.

As to what an MP5 player might be, that is on a par with the European commission announcing that we must take steps to "put Europe into the lead of the transition to Web 3.0", I fear. Sadly, I think it is unlikely that they are selling these.

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I have still not seen any results from the testing earlier this year, but those results must have been at least passingly interesting, because the Navy is funding further development.

The Bussard Fusion device, the Polywell, uses pure electrostatic containment and has more in common with the old vacuum tube (or valves as they were know over here) than it does with the multi-billion dollar electromagnetic confinement projects most people are familiar with.

It is still far from certain the technology will pan out, but it has gone much further into the the real hardware realm than any other low cost fusion technology to date.

If this device does work, what can we do with it? What impacts do you think a device would have which could produce 10 MW of electricity from a 1.5 meter sphere and (initially) perhaps a truckload of auxiliary gear? Submarines, aircraft carriers, laser cannon power systems, entire towns with self-sufficiency in power, ion engines for outer planet exploration, power for lunar and Mars settlements...

What can you come up with?

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I just love gadgets, and this has to be one of the funniest. Ideal for bloggers at breakfast.

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Today I am going to do duty as a background extra in a short vampire movie that a friend of mine is starring in. I am to be one of a number of diners in a restaurant. I won't be paid but I will be fed, and I already know that it's a very good restaurant because I've already been there before.

Today I got a look at the email sent out by the production to all whom it concerned, about today's activities. This was, for me, a glimpse into a whole new world of complexity and managerial drive. Here, just as a tiny for-instance (there are three whole pages of stuff like this), is a list of the kit that will be used by the DOP/Grip/Lighting Department:

2 X Sony EX1 (with S XS cards) - 1X Intel Mac Book - 1X S XS card reader & firewire cable - 500GB EXT HD (or equivalent space for backup) - 1X Letus Ultimate Adapter & photographic lenses - 6 X Prime Lenses & PL Adaptor - 1X Manfrotto Tripod - 1X 32in LCD TC & Composite leads - 1X Steadicam Junior - 1X Manfrotto Fig-Rig - 1X 8in Camera Monitor with composite leads - 1X 25m BNC cable drum - 1X Mini-Jib with Tripod & Fluid Head - 2X Paglights and battery packs - 3X Redheads with stands, diffuser/gel kit - 1X Set of 3 dedo lights with stands - 1X 2ft 4-bar Kino-flo with stand - 1X 200W Handheld MSR lamp - Reflectors, gels, diffusers, clips and stands - Blacking for windows

I am looking forward greatly to seeing what this all looks like in practice. I suspect that, in reality, it won't amount to very much at all.

My favourite is the "Manfrotto Fig-Rig". Time was, when faced with a splendid name like that, you just read and wondered. What kind of Rig would that be? And why "Fig"? But this is the age of the internet, and I can immediately tell you the answer:

From initial conception to finished product, Manfrotto worked alongside director Mike Figgis, whose films include Leaving Las Vegas and Cold Creek Manor, to develop a hand held DV camera support system that offers the shake-free stability of a tripod with the framing flexibility of handheld shooting. A circular frame with a crossbar to mount most mini DV cameras, the FigRig mn595 becomes part of the body to produce smooth, steady travelling shots. It is this very fact which is the secret to the Fig Rig. As the operator walks, his/her muscles and tendons absorb all the shocks, transferring only fluid movements to the camera. As there are no straps or harnesses attached to the Fig Rig, quick and wide movements can be made within the same shot from ground-level to overhead, in one smooth movement. The camera, accessories and operator become one, allowing you to film scenes quickly and unobtrusively.

So hats off to Manfrotto, and it is called "Fig" after Figgis.

This piece of kit costs around £150 quid. I still don't quite get how it works, but here's hoping that I find out.

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These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening.

- David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars' meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday.

(Hat-tip: The Register)

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I had a look at this test and think I would do reasonably okay. The only flaw in PM's headline is that it refers to skills that men should know, but I would have thought this applies as much to women. As my wife likes to point out, she's much smarter at changing a tyre on a car than most men we know.

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Politics trundles on and the more you pay attention to it the more depressed you are going to get, so what I like to do instead is look at gadgets. Gadgets aren't everything. An affordable mobile phone is scant consolation if your ludicrously unaffordable house has just been repossessed. Flat screen televisions are only as good as the stuff that's on them. Cool cars only provide escape from the cares of city life in car commercials, not in cities.

Nevertheless, gadgets are still being done well, and every now and again I like to pick out a new one and praise it on Samizdata, both for its own beautiful sake, and because doing this makes the point that life would be so much better if everything (not just gadgets) was done like that, by grasping capitalists in competition with one another instead of by tyrannically pompous bunglers who are clever only at winning elections or at sucking up to such people. The last such gadget that I got excited about here was the Asus Eee-PC, which I now happily possess, and am gradually finding more uses for. And now, I offer you the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, which is a digital camera, which looks like this:

It doesn't look anything very special, or very different, does it? And for many people it won't be. For all those Real Photographers squinting into their optical viewfinders to get the perfect shot with their brick-like Canon or Nikon DSLRs, the G1 would be a severe come-down, because the G1 doesn't have an optical viewfinder. But for that vast tribe of cheaper and more cheerful digital snappers who prefer cameras that don't weigh so much, the fact that the G1 has no optical viewfinder is exactly the point. We Billion Monkeys, as I like to call us, look at all those Real Photographers with their clunky black contraptions and we say to ourselves, yes, I'd love my pictures to be as good as theirs are, and it would certainly be nice to be able to use lots of different lenses the way they do, but really, does a camera have to be that big to be that good?

The thing is - from where we Billion Monkeys stand, sit or crouch - DSLRs look like a relic of the analog age, like those weird early steam ships that also had sails on them. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex, and this refers to the fact - commenters will doubtless correct me to the degree to which I am, I am sure, somewhat-to-completely wrong – that in order for the optical viewfinder to be an accurate foretaste of the picture being attempted, the light that enters a DSLR has to be divided up and sent off to two different places, one of them being the optical viewfinder and the other being the magical electronic surface that turns the light into a digital picture. This process involves ... well, it involves a lot of space and a lot of complication.

So, the G1 does away with the the optical viewfinder. You can still squint through an eyepiece if you really want to, but what you see is a digital picture, not a merely optical one. More conveniently, you can see the digital picture beforehand on a small screen, which, as with the best little digital cameras, twiddles, and hence lets you take pictures that you can still see even when you are holding the camera way above your head or way down in front of your private parts. Most DSLRs still only show you the picture on their screens afterwards, but the latest ones also have these see-the-picture-beforehand screens, but this combining of optical and digital previewing all adds to the size and the expense. What the G1 does is put all its pre-viewing and post-viewing eggs in the one digital basket.

If the G1's screen were only as good as the kind of screen you already get on most small digital cameras now, such as the one on my current camera, that would not be a good decision. These small screens are now notorious for telling you that that is a fine picture while you are taking it and just after you took it, only for you later to discover, when you get home and see it on a real screen, that the picture is a blurry failure. Much effort has gone into making the image on the G1's screen, and the image you see through the G1's digital viewfinder, a lot better than such images have ever looked before. And the even better news is that the improvements already achieved in this department, being electronic rather than merely optical, are bound to be surpassed in the near future and surpassed again and again in the years to come.

Meanwhile, the G1 offers us digital amateurs all the things we really do want that only the SLR fraternity can do now. The picture quality will be far better, both because it just will be, involving as it does the exact same kind of picture making technology as happens in DSLRs now (only rather smaller), and because we will be able to use a growing choice of lenses instead of the one lens we are stuck with now. But, we won't have to lug a thing like a brick around with us to get all these delights.

All this is hearsay and conjecture, based on the reports of the lucky few who have already been allowed to actually see and play with this new camera. But the buzz that it has already stirred up around itself definitely reminds me of the buzz that buzzed around the first of those micro-laptops, of the Asus Eee-PC variety, a market that is now galloping ahead exuberantly. What this buzz already tells us is not that the G1 is definitely the wonder that its paid puffers and earliest reviewers are now claiming it to be. No, it tells us something more important than that. It tells us that this is what the market really really wants. I am most emphatically not the only cheap snapper who wants to trade up to something definitely better, without trading up to a big black brick that leaves little space in my life or bag for anything besides photography. If the G1 is what it promises to be, it will be a runaway hit. If its reach turns out to exceed its grasp, never mind. Rival capitalists will soon be delivering for real on the same clutch of promises that the G1 has merely advertised.

So I'm going to wait to see if the G1 really is this good, and I will also be waiting for the price of the G1, or of satisfactory rival facsimiles, to fall from the currently announced level of about £550. That's too rich for me. I'll also be waiting - although I don't think I'll have to wait long - to see if the G1, and the new market that it points towards, is the huge market that I think it will be, because only then will the lens-makers respond, in the way that they already have responded to the recent explosion of the DSLR market, which happened as it did because of already existing cameras that were merely SLR, without the D for digital bit. Not the least significant of the responses will be in the form of adapters, to make the small new G1 able to make use of the big old SLR lenses that lots have already invested in. Panasonic have already made such an adapter to allow the G1 to use their big old lenses.

You think that postings like this are frivolous, in these scary and portentous times? If so, I see what you mean, but I think you are wrong. Thank goodness that there are these frivolous things like little laptop computers and like small digital cameras, so frivolous that most politicians feel that it is beneath their dignity to take charge of them. That way we all get a chance to see how much better the world, all of it, would be, if the politicians could be persuaded to regard everything as too insignificant for them worry about. Think what a great world that would be, and think how rapidly it would, even now, be improving.

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These pictures are pretty cleverly done. (Via Andy Ross).

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Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC's television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London.

For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don't remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don't worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it's warming; when it gets cold, it's warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it's warming twice as fast.

Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition.

What does predict the weather we're having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit]

Here's a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008's weather than anything cooked up by the "capitalism causes tsunamis" crowd. Farmer's Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists.

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Recessions can be the tool of 'creative destruction', if governments get out of the way and do not prevent the next wave of entrepreneurial experimentation by 'softening' the impact of the recession and distorting the efficient allocation of capital. Gordon Brown, take note: companies and governments have to fail. George Gilder, always an enthusiastic prophet, writes of the coming possibilities in Forbes. He identifies four areas that the financial wizardry of venture capitalism can nurture: 'cloud computing', graphics processing, nanotech engineering and energy saving construction materials. Gilder is useful for identifying waves of start-ups and linking them to wider technological change.

A great line is where Moore's law is referenced as insufficient for our needs:

This vast expansion of the scale of computing across the network, however, renders Moore's Law doublings inadequate to meet the need for speed. A key answer is the movement of optical technologies to chips themselves by such companies as Luxtera, a venture startup in Carlsbad, Calif., technologies based on Caltech advances that link fiber directly to chips. Azul Systems of Mountain View is pioneering a combination of Java-based parallel processing with virtualization software to produce multitrillion-bit-per-second performance in data centers.

A contentious but thrilling point if we wished to measure the proximity of a singularity event. As a useful summary of tech developments, Gilder is hard to beat. Nanotech filters allow pure water to be sucked up from a fetid puddle and new construction materials allow towers to be lighter and stronger and more radical. Hopeflly we can welcome new radical architecture: wierd, wonderfu to live in and wandering off the set of last century's sci-fi cityscapes.

*One has to look elsewhere for exciting biotech, Gilder's blind spot here.

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Don't be gloomy because innovation loves a crisis. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun emailed his company pointing out that now was the time to go on the offensive. The necessities enforced by the credit crunch will be the mother of invention. To save money, companies will be forced to automate, innovate and think about how they sell in order to make that profit. Less capital means fewer customers means greater competition.

You're not going to hear from any of our customers, "let's stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work." They're going to default to the opposite - automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun - to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is - "how can I help?" I assure you, they'll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I'm reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help - I'd recommend you do the same.

At the end of the day, the public debates may not really matter. They are there for politicians and economists to weave a myth of control and pretend that they steer our lives, using our money to justify their drivel.

It is the private debates amongst companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that really matter. With less money to go around, there is a strong incentive to accelerate change and adopt business models that profit from the information revolution rather than kick against it. As an example, the mainstream media may enter its death rattle as consumers shift towards online business, because it is cheaper, better and quicker.

The downside is that a general downturn may cause research programmes which do not have an immediate or predictable return to falter, as sources of capital dry up. Therefore, the immediate consequences of this crisis could be an acceleration of information technology permeating everyday lives but a longer curve for the development of nanotechnology, stem cell research, robotics and other technologies.

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Instapundit:

I remember reading a Robert Heinlein essay from the 1940s on how absurd it would be to have your car hand-built in your driveway by a collection of artisans, and how homebuilding as practiced was equally absurd. I think he was right.

Rather than assume the rightness of this outsider's snap judgement, I consider it more interesting to think about why things haven't developed this way. When I was an architecture student, way back in the seventies, people had already been dreaming for decades of prefab houses. It didn't happen then, and it isn't, on the whole, happening now.

Here are some guesses as to why factory made houses are not happening.

Homes are not in themselves mobile. Cars, which are made in factories, are mobile. Cars have their own means of transport built in. Houses do not. Unless they are campervans or caravans. In other words, the question: Why aren't homes made in factories? is actually a rather similar question to: Why don't most people live in campervans or caravans? Because the engines and wheels mostly do nothing? They're terrible to live in? People can steal them? Regular homes are simply much cheaper to make? To be transportable, whether on wheels or on a lorry, home pods have to be able to hold themselves together when being swung around by cranes, shoved about by fork lifts, etc. This extra structure is wasted, once the pod is in place. All it then has to do is stay up and solid when immobile.

Homes, especially of the more industrial looking ones, often have to do another structural job as well as a life support job. They often have to be able to support more homes on top of them. Therefore they have to be different from the ones above, and they have to be different from the ones above, and so on. Unless you just stick pods into a structure. A really heavy home pod piled on top of lots of other home pods is a shocking waste of structure, because weight at the top demands more structure under it, and so on down to the bottom.

Actually, homes are, more and more, already made in factories, but it's the bits that are made in factories, rather than assembled into homes in factories. After failing as an architecture student I briefly worked in the actual building trade, as an ignorant sub-lieutenant "commanding" ("Carry on sergeant") workers in the trenches. I was struck then, again back in the seventies, by how complicated and intricate and clever lots of the bits were, and how fast they were developing. And this was in suburban mini-stately homes that looked impeccably hand made, once they had been covered up with bricks and tiles. Underneath they were getting more and more like airplanes. From what I now see on building sites, that trend has not stopped. The smaller an object is, the less of a structural problem it has. Ask the insects, and the elephants. Homes are more like elephants. It makes sense to build them, on site. Out of insects. So to speak.

Washing machines, microwaves, toasters, sinks, etc. are, if you think about it, home components. They are all made in factories, because that makes sense.

Besides which, isn't a building site a temporary factory, where it makes sense to have it? And is it really true that workers in regular factories are all morons by comparison? Surely, lots of them, more and more now, are "artisans" also. Having also done jobs at various times in my life that were supposed to be totally "unskilled", I came to believe that, actually, there is no such thing as unskilled labour. The factory made homes proposal is just an argument about where the home assembling artisans should practice their art.

I know, I know, buildings made with shipping containers. But these kinds of buildings are not really catching on, are they? I suspect this is mostly fun/concept architecture, rather than a serious spreadable idea. Like living in a sculpture (which is a trend, I do admit).

The relative cost of land and mere home-building must have something to do with this. Home-building means making the absolute most of each site, and each site is different, unique even, which makes mass production of homes less viable, as opposed to mass producing windows or drainpipes. Roads, on the other hand, are just roads, although even more expensive than mere land. A bit of road is a flat surface the whole point of which is to be just like all the other bits of road. Roads are also assmbled on site, rather than made in factories and then just unrolled on site, for similar reasons to why homes are assembled on site, only more so. Tanks and other tracked vehicles being the exception, because they do unroll the road in front of them wherever they go.

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There is a new computer game out there, called Spore, which takes up on the theory of evolution. Looks like fun and educational, as many such games are, a fact that critics of computer games rarely seem to take on board.

Here is another item about this game.

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In the late sixties and seventies I lived in DuPage county, Illinois. This was/is a county remarkable for the concentration of scientific and physical research conducted there. In addition to Argonne National Laboratories and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, there was the largest of Bell Laboratories many facilities, the one in Naperville/Lisle, Illinois that employed about 11,000 people. That period of time was the zenith of Bell Labs legendary status. In the seventies its employees received two of the six Nobel Prizes for Physics that have been awarded to Bell Lab's researchers.

It was with sadness and some sense of foreboding that I learned via Instapundit this morning that Bell Labs is abandoning basic research and instead "focusing on more immediately marketable areas". I say "foreboding" for the likelihood that Alcatel-Lucent will join the chorus (if it hasn't already) of companies demanding that tax-payers assume the sole cost of basic research 'for the common good'. I also say it because I believe it is the inevitable consequence of a long trend of companies being taken over by accounting priorities and run for short term profits. At least as recently as the late nineties, four Bell Labs researchers were awarded two Nobel Prizes for physics, one received his for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light and, three shared one " for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect ". No, I have no clue. If you must know, look it up. Bell Labs has been my number one example that it is possible to do pure research without being part and parcel of the state.

I encourage you to read in the Wikipedia entry some of the history of Bell Labs. Perhaps some commenters can cheer me up with information about other profit motivated corporations (or individuals) engaging in pure, no application yet visible, research.

(19)

... or so they say:

As IDF came to a close, Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, presented a keynote speech in which he explained just how close the outfit was to realizing "programmable matter." Granted, he did confess that end products were still years away, but researchers have been looking at ways to "make an object of any imaginable shape," where users could simply hit a print button and watch the matter "take that shape." He also explained that the idea of programmable matter "revolves around tiny glass spheres with processing power and photovoltaic for generating electricity to run the tiny circuitry."

What I want is a shower I can step into, only it is not a shower. You just press a button that goes zxzxzxzxzxzxzxz, and ten seconds later you step out, with both you and your clothes completely clean.

The way things are going, soon they will be printing houses!

(26)

I like this, from a blogger I have only recently discovered, Will Wilkinson:

Climate eschatology really is the ultimate in big lie crisis politics. The far-left has failed so comprehensively to make the case for its vision of society and economy that the only thing left to do is to brazenly and repeatedly assert that the world will literally collapse unless we implement this otherwise indefensible vision.

Well said. The rest of Wilkinson's blog, which goes by the name of The Fly Bottle is well worth a regular look also, in the event that you need telling.

One of the things that irritates me about propagandists on my side is that they are often reluctant to spot a great victory, even when they have just won one. Wilkinson's point is not just that climate chaos-ism is nonsense, a claim that I increasingly find myself agreeing with completely, not least because the now undependable notion of "global warming" has been replaced by the idiotic phrase "climate chaos", or, even more idiotically, "climate change". When was there ever a time when the climate did not change? What Wilkinson is also noting is that the hysteria whipped up around the changeability of the climate was whipped up because these lunatics came to realise that they had no other arguments against a more-or-less capitalist, more-or-less-free-market world economy. They have now conceded - not in so many words, rather by changing the subject - that capitalism works, and the only nasty thing they have left to say about it is that it works so well that it ruins the planet.

I do not want to suggest that this is a dazzlingly original observation. I merely thank Wilkinson for clarifying something that most of the regular writers of and readers of this blog all know, in the sense of agreeing when they are told it, but which they might not have said to themselves with absolutely clarity before. One of the reasons I noticed this posting of Wilkinson's was that I had made precisely the same point in something else I was recently writing, about how well I think capitalism has been doing lately, both in practice and in the ideological enthusiasm sense.

Wilkinson continues:

I think the point is that the clock really is ticking. If we don't "do something" soon, we'll probably see that we don't really need to do anything really dramatic, and then the window for radical social change will be closed. So I expect the volume to get much louder.

Exactly. As and when it comes to be agreed that capitalism is not now ruining the planet, that will be another huge victory for the forces of sanity. Two-nil to us, that will make it. What idiocy will the lunatic tendency think of next, I wonder (comments welcome), to take everyone's minds off that huge defeat?

I know I know. The incorrigibly pessimistic part of our commentariat will now want to say that the damage has been done, etc. Maybe so. But although ideological shifts do not necessarily have immediate consequences, they do have consequences, and these shifts will have good consequences. They already are, I would say.

However, I do agree with the point that Johnathan Pearce makes from time to time that it would be good for us to ponder what would be the least-worst arrangements for if and when capitalism ever does start ruining the planet for real. I favour technical fixes rather than global regulations, but then I would, wouldn't I?

(34)

A few days back, I watched a programme, or least about 15 minutes of it, that speculates on what the Earth will look like once humans disappear. There is lots of stuff about how houses, roads, bridges, airports and sewage systems start to crumble, how rats and other animals take over. There are lots of photographs of wrecked cars with plants growing out of the windows. On one level, if you are into wildlife or the study of botany, some of this is pretty interesting. The programme is very slickly put together.

There are two ways to view this film. Perhaps it taps into a very powerful theme amongst what I might call the dark Greens - the idea of Homo Sapiens as a disease, almost a curse, on the "pure" Earth. While the narrator has a civilised tone of voice, it is hard not to miss a sort of gloating at the demise of humans and their artifacts.

On the other hand, it is quite useful to be reminded of what happens once the basic infrastructure of modern civilisation goes into decline, such as electrical power, clean water, mass transportation, and so on. Which is why it matters a great deal if we forgo important sources of power generation, for example, all because of coming to the wrong conclusions about supposed Man-made climate change, for example. So maybe one perhaps unintended consequence of this sort of film is to sharply remind us of what happens when we take our modern civilisation for granted and flirt with "going back to nature".

(8)

This story will not come as a surprise to the techies that read this site, nor many other bloggers, but I was still struck by a report from TowerGroup, the research firm, that says that the day is approaching when millions of people on low incomes living around the world will be able to switch funds to their relatives and friends over the mobile phone with as much ease as downloading tunes on to an MP3 player.

This is big money, when gathered together. The market for remitting money is worth about half a trillion dollars, although goodness knows quite how one quantifies this accurately. Existing middlemen will be cut out of the equation.

“Ultimately, TowerGroup expects mobile phones will do for financial services what Apple iPods did for music – spur a sea change in the way consumers access services and suppliers deliver them,” one of executive said.

Just think what this will mean to parts of the world like Africa, already a continent where it has been easier to put in mobile phones than bother with the traditional wire-based stuff.

As far as I can see, the key issue to get right is security. But then that applies to Internet banking already.

(41)

Science writer John Tierney - one of my "must-read" columnists - has a good post which gets us to consider why it is considered so terrible for sportsmen and women to take performance-enhancing drugs, or have special surgery done to make themselves stronger, faster, more flexible, and so on. In years to come, suppose that say, a footballer has a knee operation and as a result, he is able to ride over a tackle, pass the ball more swiftly. Or a fast bowler at cricket has the same operation done to make it easier to send down a delivery to a batsman (bowlers often get injured because if they are big guys, the strain on their knees and back can be large). It seems to me that the key issue is disclosure. If you had an "anything-goes" games, with sports folk free to do what they wanted, there could be no complaints about cheating. And the boundaries between what is and what is not considered okay are not clear cut anyway, but they are more readily solvable than just adopting a puritanical zero-tolerance approach on enhancements. I cannot also help wonder whether some of the constant sniping at sports folk for taking drugs is not so much about cheating per se, as about taking the drugs in the first place. There is a sort of desire for "purity" in sport which is a part of the more general puritanism in our culture.

Like I said, the key is disclosure. If any cyclist, swimmer, footballer or for that matter, F1 motor racing driver takes drugs as part of their sport, then it should be okay so long as they disclose it. One could always use a handicapping rule anyway. For instance, if a motor racer is taking a drug to enhance his concentration during a race, maybe the race organisers can impose a 5 second penalty.

As medical technologies progress, this issue is going to become more pressing. Rather than continuing to hold out against any of this, the sports world should focus on disclosure and be adult about it.

(24)

Ronald Bailey at Reason has a nice response to the Prince of Wales' latest attack on GM foods. The Reason comment thread is also pretty good too. One thing that does not seem to cross Prince Charles' mind - not a long journey - is the fact that by using disease-resistant strains of crops, it will reduce the need for pesticides, which surely any "Green" should support, right?

The Telegraph seems to have a strange indulgence for this sort of fogeyish/Green/oh-god-this-science-stuff-is-ghastly sort of thing. I wonder if snobbery has anything to do with it - "organic" food tends to be more expensive, after all. But to be fair, that newspaper has carried robust defences of modern science and farming, such as this article by Bill Emmott a few months back. Worth re-reading.

Update: Stephen Pollard thinks Prince Charles should shut up. That seems a bit excessive. I do not think that Charles is overstepping some sort of ancient constitutional rules by saying what he thinks. It seems a bit odd for an opinionated fellow like Stephen to be telling people in public life to put a sock in it. If he were King, and had to deal with tricky political issues, then Stephen might have a point. But let's face it, being heir to the throne for decades is a pretty desperate situation to be in. If Charles wants to hold views on archicture, the teaching of English or the environment, why not?

(18)

Says the man from the Devil's Kitchen:

Bishop Hill has pieced together the full story of the hockey-stick graph and it is, in the opinion of your humble Devil, fucking dynamite.

Pardon his French. Unlike DK, I have not read this posting of BH's yet, although I most certainly will be reading it very soon. But the Bishop has for at least the last year or so been one of my favourite bloggers, and Devil's Kitchen is a regular favourite of mine too. This posting looks like it will confirm – no, strengthen - my high opinion of both of these bloggers, one for writing it, and the other for flagging it up. I came across the Bishop's posting under my own steam, but soon after noting it, I noted Devil's Kitchen noting it also.

Assuming that DK is approximately right about the excellence of this piece of writing by Bishop Hill, here is a fine example of one of the many things that the best bloggers are now doing very well, namely pulling together lots of postings on the same general topic (in this case all by the same person) and summarising them for the benefit of anyone who is interested, but who lacks the time or the inclination to read all those original postings.

(27)

The Bussard 'Inertial Electrostatic Confinement' (IEC) Fusion test device has been built and tested. The team is being very tight lipped about precise results due to the terms of their funding. The group leader, Dr. Nebel does seem rather positive about the device which would lead one to believe they are getting good results:

The last time Dr. Nebel was interviewed he offered that the company could prepare and ship workable research units of the current model. This time he’s considering the building of a medium sized machine in the 1-½ meter range that would be large enough to make net power at a theoretical projection of 100MW. In the course of the forum discussion Nebel wrote, “Our contention is that since our projections for a power producing device only require a machine 1.5 meters in diameter (that) would in theory be able to produce something around 100MW of net power. (W)e might as well build the next one in that size range and accept the risk. The machines just aren’t all that expensive.”

The emphasis is mine. I have read elsewhere that the WB-7 has been running stably for many weeks and is churning out much data. Whether there is actual energy output or signs of it is something we do not know yet as the data is under embargo for the time being.

This is definitely one to watch.

(13)

Lasers for shooting down mortars bombs and missiles... sounds great and has potential to change battlefield quite fundamentally... if it actually works in practice out in the messy real world. Remember Patriot? Much cheered at the time but it turned out to be a wildly expensive but only occasionally effective weapon system designed to shoot down rather cheap and only occasionally effective Scuds.

I suppose it all comes down to it is this another a vastly costly to operate system designed to shoot down various cheap-as-chips weapon systems? I suppose time will tell because potentially this is revolutionary as battlefield lasers could eventually mean the end of a great many forms of indirect weapons. Potentially.

(4)

It is a bad idea to run Windows XP on your internet connected coffee machine, as it will of course be vulnerable to various nasty exploits. The potential risks of this are horrendous. Imagine what could happen if nasty Eastern European hackers managed to take control of the strength and consistency of Gordon Brown's coffee. On the other hand, perhaps they already have? It would explain a lot.

(18)

A story here which says that fans of computer games are not all weird. I have never quite understood this whole media fixation with games just because they are on a screen rather than face-to-face. A lot of games draw on all kinds of creative energies and are arguably far better for cognitive development than just passively watching TV. As for the arguments about various social pathologies, well, this book is an excellent corrective to the social scolds, pointing out that games involving superheroes and vanquishing monsters is actually a very healthy thing.

Coming next, research shows that people who like to play poker with their mates on a Friday night, play tennis on a Sunday afternoon, do the Times crossword, are also normal. (Sarcasm alert).

Of course, by some yardsticks of social behaviour, gamers, or other hobbyists, are "weird", but then what counts as normal, exactly?

Personally, I think the world could use a bit more eccentricity, not less.

(13)

Could we bring back a Dinosaur? It is a fascinating idea. After watching a documentary on the 'Dinosaur Mummy' found in the badlands of the Dakotas I was forced to ponder the idea once again, Since last night I saw adverts for a Discovery documentary on this very topic that will be on next week I decided I should record my ideas on the subject post haste.

Pretty much everyone has seen the movie 'Jurassic Park' where scientists find strands of dino DNA inside assorted biting dino-pests preserved in ancient amber. The problem with this scenario is no such viable DNA has ever been found. It is highly unlikely any has survived intact over the many millions of years seperating us from the end of the Cretaceous when dino-kind had a very bad day.

Given the unlikelihood of finding a T Rex blueprint, one might think the idea of bringing them or any of their relatives back is an idea well and truly dead. "Time to consign the idea to the pages of fantasy stories!", one might say... but not so fast!

There are other approaches to the problem. Researchers are churning out genomes of many, many species per year even now, including that of the Mammoth and the Neaderthal. The rate at which this happens is expected to reach a species per day per machine in less than a decade. That opens up a whole new possibility: reverse engineering.

Let us say we have the genomes of most living dinosaurs sequenced and sitting in databases on our computers of the 2030's. "Living dinosaurs? Where?", you say.
Open your window. Listen to those little dinos chirping, cheeping, singing and in general making a racket as they fly about. They are direct descendants of the dinosaur Raptor clade. Not a side shoot: a direct, bona-fide descendant.

So for a start let us run our AI programs and use our species genome data base to work our way backwards through bird ancestors. The results will not be a full dinosaur genome but we will be getting closer. We might even find some 100,000 year old bits of DNA from dead species in the Russian tundra with which we can cross check our calculations.

We can work the other direction to some extent as well, if we work backwards in the mammalian, crocodilian and reptilian trees until we get to the common ancestor between each of them and the dinosaur clan. It will be rough and full of holes, but it adds constraints and that is what we need.

It is still not enough though. The next step requires we that we understand how DNA and DNA regulation actually builds a creature. If we can infer the DNA required for a feature we can tweak our model genome to fit. Now the coup de grace: if you have seen a documentary called 'Dino Lab' you will know where I am going. We now have the ability to roughly model the entire animal and to use AI learning programs to understand how it moved and what its metabolism was like. We have fossilized stomach contents. We have examples of skin and organs fossilized in the 'Dino Mummy'. With a few more orders of magnitude of computing power, we might run Monte Carlo simulations of entire sections of ancient ecosystems until we find the best match to fossil evidence.

With those constraints on reality we will, before the end of this century, be able to infer with reasonable confidence the genome of a dinosaur and, if we wish to do so, bring it back. It will not be a perfect reproduction but it will certainly be good enough to make a day at the zoo a rather exciting affair!

(19)

Let us welcome the work of John Harris, (Professor of Bioethics, University of Manchester) in popularising the potential of enhancement in relation to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill would allow for inter-species embryos that will not only enable medical science to overcome the acute shortage of human eggs for research, but would provide models for the understanding of many disease processes, an essential precursor to the development of effective therapies.

Whilst I support many of the liberal arguments promoted by Harris in favour of enhancement, and understand that the limitations of an article in The Times circumscribes argument, the points that he raises point to his wider positions. They also denote a more political argument on how they should be debated at a popular level.

The first concern is Harris's timeline for the future: with the replacement of homo sapiens sapiens with a posthuman speciation, that is more intelligent and better adapted than we are. This sits at odds with a picture of radical technologies that would allow the enhancement of existing individuals.

Darwinian evolution has taken millions of years to create human beings; the next phase of evolution, a phase I call "enhancement evolution", could occur before the end of the century. The result may be the emergence of a new species that will initially live alongside us and eventually may entirely replace humankind.

There is an uncomfortable Darwinian ring to this replacement theory. It will discomfort many and undermines liberal arguments for enhancement at an individual level. Enhance now, die later. The solution is that we may indeed, as individuals, bridge the transition from old to new species, from human to posthuman: and that the inspiration for this concept is Moravec and Kurzweil, not some future genocide that we should welcome with open arms. If it were not, why should this differ from those green anti-humanists who support a dieback of our species.

Harris uses some extraordinary examples in support of his argument: and there is a neatness in looking back to simple but radical changes when supporting self-enhancement without restraint from the state.

Before fires, candles, lamps and other forms of man-made light, most people went to sleep when it got dark. Candles enabled social life and work to continue into and through the night and conferred all sorts of advantages on those able and willing to benefit from it, at the expense of those who couldn’t or didn’t.

Contemporary and future biological enhancements may create problems of injustice both in that they provide a means for some to gain an advantage (those who read by candlelight gain in a way that others do not), and because they may create unfair pressures as a result of the capabilities conferred by enhancement (like the pressure to stay up late and read or work because one can).

The solution is establishing "fair" working hours and provision, at public expense if necessary, of sources of light – not banning candles. The solution is a combination of regulation and distributive justice, not a Luddite rejection of technology.

Whilst disagreeing with Harris's solution, which favours state regulation over market distribution, the clear thrust of his article is to open up the potential opportunities and benefits that could be denied to us by social democratic governments in the name of social equality. For further exploration, you can pick up his book here. One looks forward to an age of bootstrap enhancement.

(5)

In a piece of character assassination on Cherie Blair in the Observer (one so comprehensive that she would almost certainly describe it as 'misogynistic', if it came from a male writer), Catherine Bennett makes at least one palpable hit. Forget the inane boastfulness and obsessive self-justification against every suggestion of venality:

She complains how the Daily Mail 'ratcheted up its attacks on me', demanding to know - though Mr Blair could have answered just as well - if Leo had had the MMR. Doctors were also keen for the Blairs to help subdue a scare which threatened public health. Now she discloses that Leo had, indeed, been vaccinated, though she would not save lives at the time if it gave 'the press chapter and verse'.

I wonder, though, whether it is not even worse than that. It is possible that the Blairs might have withheld the information, not out of genuine concern for their family's privacy (effectively discounted by the present revelation, as Bennett points out), nor out of pique at the press, as in Cherie Blair's current account, but for political reasons: that they preferred to keep silent, and thereby to encourage the spread of dangerous infectious diseases against which they had quite properly protected their own infant, in order not to cross the noisy anti-vaccination lobby.

Since we saw them use family events to political purpose at much the same time, it would be entirely consistent with their known behaviour. The Blairs have never avoided telling other people what to think when they stood to get a tactical political gain, or when they believed it necessary for their great projects for the world. But concealing an actual belief in vaccination looks like sacrificing other people's children to calculation of the most self-regarding kind.

(66)

John Derbyshire, who writes for National Review, the conservative publication, is not a man I always agree with. On the issue of creationism, however, he is wonderfully scornful of some of its advocates. In commenting on the movie, Expelled, put together by Ben Stein, he has this to say:

Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility - from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A "thank you" wouldn't go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world - that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: "Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!"

Update: Ben Stein has lost it totally.

(67)

I am not certain whom I should pity the most: the Intelligent Design advocates of Homo Sapiens or the future Scientists of the next technological species on our planet.

Much of what we know of the past is built on the fossil record and most of the rest upon the exponentially increasing DNA databases of fully sequenced life forms. For us it is an easy matter, in a relative manner of speaking, to follow characteristics through the billions of years of the fossil record and to compare DNA of long diverged species for commonality. In all cases it is the downright bad engineering of life forms that screams out to the designer that these things just grew and developed by a series of random local optimizations.

This will not be true for our future brethren. When they dig up their rocks they will find a point in the fossil record at which there is an explosive radiation of new and interesting lifeforms that have total disconnects with past life forms. They will see a discontinuity in life itself. Geneticists will see the unmistakable evidence of engineering perfection in the deep past of critters of their day.

What will they make of it? Will they accept that a prior technological species lost in deep time re-engineered life? Will their theologians believe in a universe that created itself and then had a God descend and set it right? Or a God that created things imperfectly and came back to fix His screwups? Will they expect Him to return to Fix Things again? Will they have a Cosmic Tinker in place of a Cosmic Watchmaker?

Just a few thought for a Sunday afternoon...

(35)

I am not sure if there is an upsurge in what the BBC inaccurately refers to as

part of a popular trend in some Muslim societies of seeking to find Koranic precedents for modern science.

The impact of scientific theories upon Islamic beliefs has not acquired attention from the media. There are strands of creationism in this religion, and an unsurprising bout of natural theology has come to the fore. This differs from arguments concerning design in the nineteenth century, since these accepted and celebrated the successes of natural philosophy, the forerunner of today's sciences.

Indeed, the attempts of Islamic scholars is to wed Quranic and scientific authority with some perverse results:

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice. One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

The odd combination of divine jurisprudence and natural authority is welded by the Islamic scholar in a bizarre Copernican alchemy.

A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim "qibla" - the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.

It is called "Ijaz al-Koran", which roughly translates as the "miraculous nature of the holy text".

The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicise the textual evidence.

If Islamic scholars attack scientific knowledge, they will sound backward and primitive, reducing their own influence over a society that becomes more literate and educated year after year. The other strategy is to co-opt this power, a power required to strengthen Islam, yet ensure that it does not undermine the truths of the Qu'ran that they perceive as poor.

Science will go hand in hand with awkward manifestations of Islam. But the premutations can amuse:

The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim.

The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth.

(24)

Tyler Cowen, the US economics writer, ponders - in the course of responding to a column by the US leftist economist Paul Krugman - whether modern industrial development would have reached its current pitch had it been forced to deal with today's levels of regulation. On the face of it, had the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 18th Century, had to deal with 21st century levels of state bureaucracy, health and safety rules, and the rest, we'd still be using horses and carts and there'd be no blogging. Or would there? The trouble with these kinds of assertions is that there is no counterfactual universe against which to check it. The best we can reasonably do is to look at those societies that have imposed heavy restrictions on entrepreneurship and technology, and those that have not done so, and see if there are any consistent patterns to give us an idea. I suppose one good example is what happened in China about 600 years ago, when the rulers of that nation decided they'd had enough of all that exploration business and turned inwards. Another might be the extraordinary rise of Hong Kong in the 1940s under the benign laissez faire policy of UK colonial administrator, Sir John Cowperthwaite.

The other point that Cowen and Krugman deals with is the idea that the pace of development in the field of energy and industry has slowed down. Well, up to a point. When the late Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 was made in to a film by Stanley Kubrick, people who watched in the 1960s were led to think that travel from Earth would soon be a relatively normal event. We have not got there yet. Maybe the problem is that there are sometimes periods of history of enormous change compressed into short periods, followed by longer stretches of time when not a lot appears to happen, but actually the incremental changes are quite big. We just need to get used to this rather than become unduly depressed that we are in a holding pattern rather than moving forward.

Note: I appreciate that not everyone accepts that the Industrial Revolution "started" in the 18th Century, but from my own readings, that century is when the critical mass of scientific, technological and economic forces came together, starting in the UK. For a marvellous account of the men who helped shape that revolution, I recommend this by Jenny Uglow.

On the pace of scientific advance in the West, and how it has arguably slowed since about 1950, this Charles Murray book of a few years back is a good read and is absolutely packed with statistics. I am not a professional statistics man so I am not sure I can comment all that intelligently on the rigour of his methods, but they look pretty robust.

(11)

Belatedly, I joined the craze and had a go on one of my friend's Wii games the other weekend. Terrific stuff: I played the golf, tennis, ten-pin bowling and shooter games. Bloody marvellous. You do need to get a large-enough television to make it work; unfortunately, I don't really want to mess up my sitting room by putting a huge plasma screen on the wall, but some of my friends seem to be less squeamish.

The main downside, I find, is that if you are playing this game and have not stretched and warmed up properly first, you can actually do a bit of damage. The next morning, when I woke up, the left side of my back was quite painful. This is what happens to a 41-year-old wealth management geek who has not spent enough time doing sport for real. Time to turn off the technology and put on the training shoes.

A link to some Wii-related injuries. I wait for the first politician to try and bleat about the "Wii menace".

(23)

Some members of the life-extension fraternity, such as Ray Kurzweil - whom I enjoy reading - have been challenged head-on over the argument that taking vitamin supplements does any good in terms of enhancing overall health or warding off cancer. Here's today's lead story in the Daily Telegraph website:

Popular vitamin supplements taken by millions of people in the hope of improving their health may do no good and could increase the risk of a premature death, researchers report today.

They warn healthy people who take antioxidant supplements, including vitamins A and E, to try to keep diseases such as cancer at bay that they are interfering with their natural body defences and may be increasing their risk of an early death by up to 16 per cent.

Researchers at Copenhagen University carried out a review of 67 studies on 230,000 healthy people and found "no convincing evidence" that any of the antioxidants helped to prolong life expectancy. But some "increased mortality".

The story concludes with the usual call for sale of vitamin supplements to be controlled, blah, blah. Even so, the supplement advocates have just been given a serious challenge. What I do not quite understand, however, is why 'natural' vitamins are okay but artificial ones are not. The article does not really explain this point.

Full disclosure: I take multi-vitamins occasionally if I feel under the weather and I have felt slightly better as a result. That is not, of course, proof that they are going to seriously add years to my life.

(18)

The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.

- Hu McCulloch

(8)

If you want to know why Bishop Hill is one of my favourite bloggers just now, you need look no further than this delightful posting today, which I now reproduce in its entirety:

There's a lovely anecdote doing the rounds of climate sceptic blogs about Sir David King, the climate alarmist and former chief scientific adviser to the British government.

It seems that President Putin asked some of his leading scientists to meet Sir David when he went to Moscow as part of the entourage of the foreign secretary. King apparently launched into his standard spiel about how we're all going to fry, but was a bit taken aback when the assembled scientists told him he was talking rubbish. When they had the temerity to list all the scientific evidence which refuted his claims of impending armageddon, our man was left looking a bit of a ninny and turned on his heels and stormed out of the room.

The story is doubly interesting because it's related by someone called RCE Wyndham in a letter in which he tells Robin Butler, the master of University College, Oxford, that the college can expect no donations from him this year because the appointment of King to head Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The letter can be read here.

Fascinating. But then I googled Sir-David-King-Putin, and came across this, from about two months ago (you need to scroll down a bit):

Sir David King, who as the Government's Chief Scientist played a key role in the investigation into Litvinenko's murder, has accused the Russian president of masterminding the murder of nearly 300 of his own people in the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999, which Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists.

"I can tell you that Putin was responsible for the bombings," Sir David claimed to Mandrake at the Morgan Stanley Great Britons Awards. "I've seen the evidence. There is no way that Putin would have won the election if it wasn't for the bombings. Before them he was getting 10 per cent approval ratings. After, they shot up to 80 per cent."

I am not sure which came first, the mass murder accusation or the environmental ambush. I think it was the ambush that began all this. But either way, they really don't like each other, do they?

It might make a rather good play. It's always best when appalling people fail to get on. Imagine what the world would be like if they were all on the same side. I know, I know, not that different.

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The late Arthur C. Clarke would have been impressed by this discovery, I reckon:

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that's not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it.

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Al Gore, call your office:

Forecasters are predicting a cold and windy Easter weekend, with snow, gales and heavy downpours in some regions. With snow expected to blanket the north, temperatures will drop as low as -8C in some areas, with particularly treacherous conditions possible over the Scottish mountains.

From the Independent newspaper, ironically one of the most vociferous advocates of the idea that the Earth is doomed from global warming, killer bees or whatever.

Of course, as Dale Amon said the other day, it makes sense to think how free marketeers should address the question of "what if man-made global warming really is a problem?" rather than just poke fun at it, as I am doing here. Dale is right, of course, just in the same way that advocates of civil liberties need to recognise that we face a terrorist threat and not, as one or two libertarians of my acquaintance can do, deny it. Changing ocean currents, caused by movements in the Arctic ice shelf, might, for example, explain why the Gulf Stream is not working its balmy magic on the British climate this time of year. But you can see how perplexing all this must be to people constantly harangued about the need to drastically cut down on carbon usage. The earth does not seem to be getting hotter, at least not around here. It is bloody cold, in fact. But then, my parents and grandparents will point out to me that Easters have often been terrible in the past; they can even remember it snowing in late April.

(15)

Sometimes I wonder whether the news editors in the media "join the dots", to coin a phrase. Scanning my Bloomberg machine this morning (part of my day job), this headline was prominent:

Chicago's Snowiest Winter Since 1979 Depletes Budget

Then, on the same Bloomberg front page, is this:

Gore Invests $35 Million for Hedge Funds With EBay Billionaire

Gore has, of course, made himself a mint and also burnished his Green credentials with his film, An Inconvenient Truth, a film that has had great influence in encouraging the idea that the Earth is at serious risk from man-made global warming, although others remain to be convinced. Fair play to Gore: if he has managed to make a lot of cash by producing a film and persuaded enough paying customers to see it, well who am I, as an ardent capitalist, to complain? If he wants to invest in those mysterious-sounding things called hedge funds, even better (they are not all that bizarre, by the way, just a form of investment fund with a few tricks). But if the city of Chicago is running short of cash to pay for all the snow clearance, maybe the councillors should phone up Al and ask for a donation. After all, the current freezing weather in so many places must be er, Man's fault, right?

(45)

It sounds like one of those three decker jokes where part three brings you down to earth with a bump, which is presumably why it got written like that. Hedge your bet by hinting that the story could be all rubbish, and then tell it anyway. Because, maybe he's right:

BOSTON - He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He predicted the explosive spread of the Internet and wireless access.

Now futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years.

There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs, he says, and the technology needed for collecting and storing it is about to emerge as the field of solar energy is going to advance exponentially in accordance with Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. That law yields a doubling of price performance in information technologies every year.

Tell me more:

... advances in technology are about to expand with the introduction of nano-engineered materials for solar panels, making them far more efficient, lighter and easier to install. ...

Is anyone serious now interested in this, other than singularity prophets?

... Google has invested substantially in companies pioneering these approaches.

Okay, but I would have preferred an obscure venture capitalist with a boring name, rather than the overmighty corporation which is, for now, flavour of the decade, and which has, for now, more money than God, to the point where hundreds can have full-time jobs spending it, without making a visible dent in money mountain. How "substantially" has Google invested?

The reason why solar energy technologies will advance exponentially, Kurzweil said, is because it is an "information technology" (one for which we can measure the information content), and thereby subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

"We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy," he said. "It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we'll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years."

So, could any of this be true? If it is true, what follows, economically, politically etc.? Beyond the obvious in the shape of disconsolate arabs. Instapundit doesn't have comments, but we do. My first thought: batteries for laptops and mobile phones are going to be replaced by infinitely powerful black patches on the outside (that's already happened with calculators, has it not?). Second thought: will big black patches on the roof in due course be enough to power cars? Trains? Lorries? Airplanes? Spaceships?

Third thought: the greenies will absolutely hate this, because there's nothing they hate so much as technical fixes to their precious and previously unfixable problems. Predictions for what they will say: "The sun is a finite resource! It is running out! Stop consuming Our Fragile Sun! ..." And, suddenly they will fall in love with oil industry workers, because they won't be needed any more.

But, first things first. Is it true?

(0)

I do not normally like receiving emails selling me products, but I thought I would have to make an exception for this:

Dear Antoine,

Virgin Galactic is delighted to announce a new destination... space. Climb to 360,000ft. at a cruising speed of almost three times the speed of sound, in unprecedented levels of safety and comfort. See our beautiful planet from 63 miles up and experience the magic of weightlessness.

Redeem 200,000 miles to receive 10% off the cost of a spaceflight, that's an incredible $20,000 saving!* Join our future astronauts and book your place in history.

I look forward to the Nigerian version:

"My name is Mr.Moses Odiaka. I work in the credit and accounts department of Union Bank of NigeriaPlc,Lagos, Nigeria. I write you in respect of a foreign customer with a Virgin Galactica ticket. His name is Engineer Manfred Becker. He was among those who died in a plane crash here in Nigeria during the reign of late General Sani Abacha.

Since the demise of this our customer, Engineer Manfred Becker, who was an oil merchant/contractor, I have kept a close watch of the deposit records and accounts and since then nobody has come to claim the airmiles in this a/c as next of kin to the late Engineer. He had only 18.5mllion air miles in his a/c and the a/c is coded. It is only an insider that could produce the code or password of the deposit particulars. As it stands now,there is nobody in that position to produce the needed information other than my very self considering my position in the bank."

(9)

Somewhat over a week ago I did a posting here about maths. What use, I asked, is it? I always knew there were plenty of good answers, but the quantity and quality of what the Samizdata commentariat came up with amazed and delighted me, as it did a number of those same commenters. Someone even suggested we have other postings here about what use other educationally controversial things are, like poetry, Latin, and so on (I am thinking: media studies, which I definitely do not assume would have to be useless).

At the end of that piece I mentioned that Michael Jennings and I were about to record a conversation on this subject. Its been up and listenable to at my Education Blog for a while now, so apologies for the delay in mentioning it here, but far better a week late than never. This is not the kind of thing that will be going out of date any time soon. Here is the link to it.

I did most of the asking, and Michael did most of the answering, and it must be admitted that Michael is not what you would call a hundred per cent fluent speaker. It sounds like he suffers from the mild remnants of a childhood stutter, which means that he would not be the ideal choice to perform on Just A Minute, a BBC 4 radio show where your mission is to talk uninterrupted nonsense and where you get penalised for the slightest suggestion of hesitation or repetition. For, on the plus side, Michael does not do nonsense either, which is part of the reason why he still often hesitates. He wants to get things right. Basically, the man just knows so much, about so many things, which means that when he answers a question he is as likely as not choosing between four or five equally relevant facts that he might then serve up. You can see why the people in the City of London get so rich, if they have people like Michael keeping them informed about the world and its business. I strongly urge anyone who resents even the hint of a lack of verbal fluency to, as the Americans say and pardon my split infinitive, deal with it. I found my talk with Michael about maths and its uses absolutely fascinating. Word of mouth already tells me that others have liked listening to it also, and I know that many more will if they click on the above link.

The delay in telling Samizdata readers about this recorded conversation enables me also to mention here another such conversation involving Michael Jennings that has been more recently immortalised by another of London's libertarian recording angels (so to speak), Patrick Crozier. This time, the subject is aviation, landing slots at Heathrow, international aviation treaties, and the like. If you have any doubts about Michael's credentials as an expert on this industry (which of course could never have got off the ground without the relentless application of mathematics), then do what Patrick Crozier suggests and have a(nother?) read of this Samizdata posting from way back, on this same subject. Sadly, there was a mix up with the first attempt to record all this (might Patrick perhaps benefit from a media studies course?). The first conversation got stopped in mid flight through a wrong button getting pressed, and a separate concluding recording was done. But here they both are, and they are both well worth listening to. Patrick's brief bloggery about them is to be found at Transport Blog, here and here.

By the way, Patrick Crozier and I seem to have very divergent ideas about what is the correct volume at which to record these things, so be ready to do some nob twiddling if you go from one to the other. Technical comments about which of us got it wrong (both I dare say) and by how much would be very welcome. More media studies.

Getting back to what was said, there are many delightful moments in these discussions, especially in the maths one, which I would say, wouldn't I? Nevertheless, my absolute favourite bit of all happens towards the end of the first of the two aviation conversations, a soundbite which Patrick also featured on the short trailer that he did for that. The dialogue goes like this:

Patrick: "Can you trade your slots?"

Michael: "Er ... kind of. Not legally. Well, sort of."

There are times when hesitation is the most eloquent thing there is. Listen, and all is explained.

(55)

It has been rather cold lately in different parts of the world. As this gentleman points out, if worries about man-made global warming can cite the early appearance of flowers or migrant birds in support of their case, the argument cuts both ways. In case any supporters of the man-made global warming thesis get sniffy about this point, I am not a 'denier' of the thesis: I think there is some evidence that it may be happening. The trouble is that my views are coloured by the fact that supporters of it tend to support a Big Government agenda. And frankly, I see an awful lot of dodgy investment ideas being sold on the basis of encouraging 'Green' technology.

I am looking forward to the first article, meanwhile, that tries to blame Britain's earthquake this week on human activity. Take a good look at the British Geological Survey website: it is fascinating. Apparently, there have been even been quakes in Norfolk. Norfolk, fcrissakes.

(5)

And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan ^[1]. But then, I am a liberal - conservative only in my suspicion of social management and 'fixing' things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.

This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:

[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.

(4)

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

- Douglas Adams quoted (last month but who cares?) by Kevin Marks

(27)

The main front page story of today's Times newspaper says:

Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt. Broadband companies who fail to enforce... would be prosecuted and suspected customers' details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.

This is a crazy proposal. The technology being used, peer-to-peer file sharing, is legitimate technology which is important for disseminating large amounts of data cheaply. For example, if you download a multiple-gigabyte edition of Linux, the chances are that you will get it using peer-to-peer. The software is being given away for free and it saves Linux companies a lot of money if it is downloaded using BitTorrent. If peer-to-peer did not exist, companies would have to pay for lots of extra servers and bandwidth. Skype, the internet telephone service, uses peer-to-peer technology to work, as does the BBC's iPlayer internet television service.

Given that the proposal does not ban the technology outright, how will ISPs be able to work out what packets of data are pirated? They may have a chance with file sharing as it standards today, but when Napster was closed down people thought that that was end of peer-to-peer. Instead, file sharing networks adapted. The geeks realised they could get rid of Napster's centralised servers, which indexed everything, and created a different architecture that could not be closed down in the same way. Hence today we have BitTorrent.

If the government introduces this new legislation, it will not be successful. Geeks will introduce encryption or other technologies that hide what is being transmitted. If the proposed law has any success at all, it will make the lives of ISPs absolute hell, massively raise the cost of broadband connections and create huge compliance departments to snoop on users' internet use. Maybe ISPs will just end up blocking all peer-to-peer traffic, killing off Skype in the UK and destroying the BBC's broadband TV service. Libertarians, even if they believe in stronger intellectual property protection, should oppose this law.

(15)

Every so often I have one of those ain't-capitalism-grand? moments, and I just had another:

It's like we can't make it through the week these days without word of some outlandish memory technology solving all worldly ills; but it's not that we're complaining. This week's featured tech comes from Nanochip, and promises gains in storage quantity and cost per chip over flash memory. The first prototypes will store 100GB, and will be shipped to device makers next year for evaluation. Nanochip technology stores data on a thin-film material, and accesses it using microscopic cantilevers. Each bit will be 15 nanometers wide at first, with theoretical sizes as small as a couple nanometers. Speeds will be near that of flash, and the data could last longer. There are still some obstacles to accessing the data efficiently, but luckily Nanochip just scored $14 million in funding to complete its pursuit. IBM has been pursuing a similar tech since the late 90's.

Flash memory being the kind of memory you can drop on the floor, and still get at. Here's the story that engadget is linking to.

Yesterday, capitalism was great too. I finally got my hands on, and immediately bought, for a mere £220, one of these. Is the Eee PC about to be capitalism's next triumph?, I asked back then. Definitely one of them, I would say. It has hardly any memory built in, certainly no nano-magic like that described above, but it does have an SD card slot, and it is very cute, and very small, and very light, yet very solid, and I love it.

(8)

In a recent article I noted my surprise at the apparent progress made in fusion by the Bussard team and stated I had not heard of them before.

it turns out I was wrong. I did indeed run across them before but the importance did not register so it did not stick in my consciousness. I even have a photo:

EMC2 exhibit at the 2007 International Space Development Conference in Dallas.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In my defense, I am rather occupied with Society management duties at these events so I do not have much unscheduled time to talk to exhibitors.

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What are millionaires for? Why, to pay for things like this:

Gizmodo's Martin Lynch writes:

A UK designer is about to take the wraps off a unique floating chair/recliner called The Lounger, inspired by the Landspeeder from Star Wars.

Designed by 40-year Keith Dixon from Middleton, the futuristic looking Lounger has taken 5 years to create and allows you to float above the base thanks to the use of repelling magnetic forces in the base and the lounger itself.

We are not talking a few centimetres off the base either but up to 14ins so that you get that whole 'floating sensation'. That of course depends on how much you weigh. If you’re close to the 266lbs [19 stone] limit then maybe you should drop that to 4ins or less.

There are restraining rods to prevent the seat from shooting off to the sides and users are warned to keep it at least 5 feet from the telly. And make sure you don't have a pacemaker.

Apart from that, you're good to float from March 16 when The Lounger goes on sale for a cool £5,875. That should bring some people back to Earth with a bump.

Which is why I mention the millionaires. The millionaires will decide whether they think this is a cool idea. If they decide that it is, some of them will buy it, thus paying for about an eighth of the research and development costs. If the ones that buy it like it, more millionaires will buy it, thus paying for another quarter of the R and D. Many more chairs will then be made, for sale at a rather lower price, slightly better. Pretty soon, we'll all be able to buy them, either at Ikea or at Curry's, for £99.99 a pop, and half a decade later for £34.99, with additional features that the early adopter millionaires never dreamed of.

Why can't schoolznhospitalz be done more like this and less the way they are now?

(23)

I'm seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer ... because the victims are all spammers.

- Charlie Stross

(40)

One of our commentariat mentioned 'Bussard Fusion' several times and I did not at first pay much attention. I assumed it was yet another of the long line of ideas which might work out but probably will not. Still, with the name Bussard attached to it, I thought a quick look might be worthwhile.

It was. I did not realize that not only is Dr. Bussard still around: he has been developing his ideas with 'under the radar' money from the Navy for fifteen years and he took it far enough to show the physics is understood and works. They blew up the demo machine but when they analyzed the data they found it had managed to do what it needed to do before it performed its self-disassembly.

Another interesting facet is the radiation free P-11B fusion path. I never paid any attention to it in my own readings because even the D-3He I am familiar with requires perhaps a hundred times the confinement constant of the D-T fusion everyone has been working on for 50 years.

It turns out there is another way to fuse an atom. It is cheaper, smaller and avoids the basic problem which makes the whole Tokamuk family of fusion reactors into eternal research cash cows.

If you want to learn more, not only about the physics behind it, but also of yet another way in which the State screws up everything it touches, set aside the next hour and a half and listen to "Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)" presented by Dr. Bussard himself.

For those who have not spent a lifetime watching the world of Physics, Dr. Bussard is one of the elders of the field. He is no outsider and no crank. He is one hell of a serious physics dude.

(19)

Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with.

- Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace 2005, as quoted by Canada Free Press

Afterwards, another activist clarified the remark by stating that of course taller can also be evidence of shortness, richer can mean living in poverty, baboons can mean chairs, giraffes can mean pencils and hello Ms. Robinson, your lacy trousers are well buttered with smoked trout, can you hear what I'm writing with my toaster?

(11)

If you are of a conspiracy orientation, you are going to love this report I just picked up off a network admin mail list:

A fourth submarine cable in the middle east was damaged Sunday between Haloul, Qatar and Das, United Arab Emirates.

This is in addition to the damage affecting FLAG, SAE-ME-WE4, FALCON cables.

After reviewing surveillance video of the area, Egypt's ministry of maritime transportation is reporting no ships were near the FLAG or SAE-ME-WE4 cables 12-hours before or after the cable damage near Alexandria, Egypt. The reason for outage of the cables has not been identified yet.

Did anyone notice the NSA black-ops sub leaving the area (I should add a smiley here... I think)?

More information can be found here. There has also been a suggestion this report may be an 'echo' of a previous report caused by mis-communication across language barriers. I have no idea myself.

We now cue the Secret Squirrel theme and search for our tin hats as 'The Galloping Beaver' asks: "Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?"

(18)

One of the not-so-secret reasons why motor cars are popular, to the fury of some, is that some of the designs are just staggeringly beautiful. As with aircraft or yachts, the aesthetics of a perfectly designed machine should never be underestimated. At a time when much so-called Modern Art (the capital M and A says it all) is such empty, vacuous tosh, it is a fact that needs to be remarked that so much industrial design that we have today is outstanding, inventive, clever, even a bit naughty.

This must surely be contender for one of the very best, courtesy of those clever men at Alfa Romeo.

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The cover story in this weeks New Scientist is about how genetics determines political opinions.

However, the story did have some odd assumptions. 'Liberals', who the New Scientist seemed to be defining as people who vote Democrat, were described as people who are "open to new ideas". However, the basic characteristic of such a 'liberal' is that they are not "open to new ideas". For example, they continue to support spending ever more taxpayers money on health, education and welfare programs, regardless of the evidence that this does not work and disregarding any argument for reforms.

'Liberals' have a set of assumptions that they never question - for if they questioned them they would no longer be liberals.

• More government Welfare State spending - good, anyone who opposes this hates the poor.
• Government support for the arts - good, anyone who opposes this is a philistine.
• Anti discrimination regulations - good, anyone who opposes them is a bigot.
• Anti trust regulations - good, anyone who opposes them is in the pay of big business.

(23)

There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world's key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out.

However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled "Mother Earth, Motherboard". This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war.

The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, "British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building". The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain's control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger.

As I said, Stephenson wrote the essay in the heyday of competitive cable-laying in 1996. Prior to the 1990s global telecommunications generally consisted of state owned or state favoured monopolies in virtually all countries. These companies worked together to build and own infrastructure, including undersea cables. Between Europe and Asia, a consortium named SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe) had come into being as a federation of state owned and state favoured telecommunications companies. This was led by AT&T in the US, and Cable & Wireless of the UK - a curious creation that was never a major communications company in the UK but which was in many parts of the former empire. However, by the 1990s, at least competition was allowed in many markets. AT&T was split up into nine companies, and many other countries adopted a model that was initially created in Britain, in which various assets were brought together to create a single, reasonably large competitor to the incumbent. (In Britain, Cable & Wireless was given a licence to compete with BT, which it did under the brand name "Mercury", with rather mixed success for the company although with clearly positive effects for consumers).

This was an era in which fixed line phone companies were still believed to rule the world. More importantly, their banks believed this also, so capital was cheap. The companies had not yet figured out that mobile telephony would soon be everything as far as voice traffic was concerned, and the existence of the internet as a mainstream phenomenon was something they were only just noticing. They knew that there would be data services, but they thought that data services were something they could design and control.

So what we had was a group of new, highly capitalised fixed line phone companies who believed they needed to own their own infrastructure. These companies often had a legal right to build infrastructure in the same places as the incumbents - a concession made by governments to promote competition. And this is where FLAG came from. It was led by NYNEX, one of the "Baby Bells" (RBOCs) that had been spun off AT&T. It was a consortium of second telecommunications companies from various countries, that was building its own pipes to compete with the incumbents. In the US, the companies that had been spun off AT&T were very eager to expand abroad and to compete with one another and their former parent company. Plus, the same imperatives that led to the incumbents' cables tracing the routes between the grand hotels of the former British Empire meant that FLAG followed essentially the same route as SEA-ME-WE. In the real routing bottlenecks the two cables were built side by side, at times going through the same buildings and through the same tunnels. There is a good map that illuminates these details here.

Which is how what happened yesterday is possible. Apparently circumstances led to ships in Alexandria sailing in unusual locations yesterday. Anchors went down in usual places. And, apparently, both FLAG and SEA-ME-WE 4 were ruptured. One would hope that the redundancy due to the fact that there are two competing cable companies would have led to some protection against accident or sabotage, but it seems that the fact that the two cables are right next to one another simply meant that a change in shipping conditions can take out both together.

However, when we think about the consequences of this, we discover how the world has changed in the last decade. If you read Stephenson's article, you get the impression that FLAG was all about connecting the rich countries of Europe with the rich countries of Australasia and East Asia. India is mentioned a couple of times in the 40,000 words of the essay, but it is mentioned in passing, and it does not seem he visited. News stories today are all about the Middle East and particularly India losing their net access. China, Australia, Japan, and Korea are unaffected. This is not because these places do not communicate with Europe, but because there is plenty of capacity across the Pacific and across the Atlantic that there is no trouble rerouting their communications via the United States. FLAG and SEA-ME-WE have actually become the main means of communicating with India and the Middle East, places where a lot has happened economically in the last ten years.

The belief that secondary, competing fixed line phone companies were important to the future died sometime around 2001. If these companies had mobile subsidiaries, they discovered that the mobile subsidiaries were their main sources of profitability. Capital became expensive. The rates that could be charged at wholesale level for international voice services dropped to something close to zero. Ventures like FLAG did not make money for the sorts of services that their investors and builders had hoped. NYNEX is now part of Verizon, and AT&T is now part of Southwestern Bell Corporation (although, confusingly, the whole company took the AT&T name). Neither company is terribly interested in bold international ventures any more, and they instead spend their time concentrating on their US mobile networks and attempting to screw as much money out of their legacy customers as possible. Second, competing, fixed line telephone companies generally got into financial trouble and were sold to former incumbents from foreign countries or to mobile companies or both, which led to the owners of SEA-ME-WE gaining shares in FLAG as well. There is still healthy competition in some telecommunications markets (Britain is extremely competitive - I would say the US is less so), but not so much from the companies that were created by governments and regulators in the 1980s and 1990s.

And what happened to FLAG? Well, in 2000 there was an awful lot of undersea optical fibre capacity, that was not being used in the way the people had build it intended. Inevitably, it ended up carrying a great deal of internet traffic. This coincided with a huge rise in the tech sector in places like India and China. Partly because of this, it became cheap for India to provide certain kinds of services to Europe and the US, because the cost of communicating with India became negligible. FLAG itself ended up being bought by an Indian conglomerate, Reliance Industries. What goes around comes around.

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Tomorrow evening we are doing a blogger bash and one of the Samizdatistas, Michael Jennings in a bout of generosity is bringing a whole leg of Serrano ham to share. Another blogging groupie is kindly bringing a ham stand and a knife. So the video below is particularly relevant and wonderfully silly:

via dropsafe

cross-posted from Media Influencer

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My father told me a while back that I was distantly related to Henry Blofeld, landowner and legendary cricket commentator. The Blofelds are an old Norfolk landowning family. Well, if it turns out I am related to a family that has the same surname as one of the greatest Bond villains, then maybe I should invest in something suitably sinister.

It may be cheaper than a hollowed-out volcano, if only slightly.

Staying with the Bond theme, you can now, if you have the wealth, live in a beach resort in the same part of Jamaica as Ian Fleming's old beachside home of Goldeneye. Back in 1956, during the Suez crisis, Anthony Eden, then prime minister, stayed at the Flemings'.

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The Foresight Institute released its Nanotechnology Roadmap today. According to the Press Release:

"For the first time, progress across all key nanoscale disciplines has been brought together into R&D pathways leading to atomically-precise manufacturing, with revolutionary applications to medicine, smart materials, and energy," said Jim Von Ehr, Founder and chief executive officer of Zyvex Labs, Foresight Board of Directors member, and Roadmap Steering Committee member. "We look forward to hearing from technologists in industry, academia, and government on their thoughts about this roadmap, and their suggestions for improvement in the next version."

You can find all of this and more here.

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The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:

After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.

We know that Islamic philosophers acted as a conduit for preserving part of antiquity's heritage and transmitting mathematics and other ideas from India and the Orient to Europe. Some of this work was achieved by non-Islamic philosophers working within the Caliphate or Moorish kingdoms. There is evidence of scientific innovation up to the late Middle Ages and one can see equivalents to natural theology; one of the drivers of the Scientific Revolution in Europe:

He [Muzaffar Iqbal] points out that the Arab scientific movement in the eighth century pre-existed the translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. He draws attention to a curious genre of literature that developed later, called shukuk, which was devoted to casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks, and he has no difficulty in adducing instances of Muslim scientists improving on, empirically testing or refuting Greek ideas.

But Iqbal is successful in arguing that the "Quran itself lays out a well-defined and comprehensive concept of the natural world, and this played a foundational role in the making of the scientific tradition in Islamic civilization". Faith impelled rather than impeded the Islamic scientist. The Koran commands man to study Allah's creation. The eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni wrote: "Sight was made the medium so that [man] traces among the living things the signs and wisdom, and turns from the created things to the Creator". At a more practical level, astronomy and mathematics were studied and further developed to assist in such matters as the orientation of mosques, the determination of prayer times and the division of inheritances according to Islamic law.

Islamic science appears to have a developed a heliocentric system before Copernicus and continued its mathematical traditions up till the fifteenth century. We should debate the causes of the decline in these traditions during the Middle Ages and their replacement by religious debates. Robert Irwin, the author of the review and Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement provides his own big picture around complacent empires, religious education and a lack of resources that could kickstart an industrial revolution.

Only part of this big picture rings true.

I [Irwin] would suggest that the spread of the madrasa, or religious teaching college, throughout the Middle East in the central and late Middle Ages led to a certain narrowing of intellectual horizons. While scientists continued to do research and publish, they do not seem to have founded scientific societies of the sort that proliferated in Western Europe in the seventeenth century.

The Ottoman Empire, as a strong state, did not allow the flourishing of a civil society as we see in Europe during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Printing presses were effectively banned. In Europe, scientific societies could publish journals off printing presses and contribute to an increasingly literate population, supplemented by the Republic of Letters. There are no equivalents in the Middle East, as permanent institutions of polymaths would be viewed as dangerous innovators; perhaps similar to the attitude that Oxford took to Locke.

Through comparison, we can understand some of the general causes of Islam's path, but greater detail is required to comprehend whether we see a continuation of a long-term preference for religious debate to natural theology in current Middle Eastern attitudes to science. Perhaps we over-emphasise religious factors at the expense of poor education, parasitical elites and populations raised on Nasserite nightmares rather than capitalist dreams.

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Oscar Pistorius is a South African who has had the lower half of both his legs amputated, and participates in atheletic events with the use of artificial limbs. He has been banned from this year's Olympic Games because the International Association of Atheletic Federations has rules that his artificial legs give him a 'significant advantage' over his able-bodied rivals. He uses carbon fibre blades to race.

A study, carried out by Professor Peter Bruggeman at the German Sport University in Cologne, compared Pistorius with five able-bodied athletes of similar ability.

"Pistorius was able to run with his prosthetic blades at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters with about 25 percent less energy expenditure," the report concluded.

This is a small but significant point where an athelete using artificial limbs now has an advantage over normal-bodied atheletes. I doubt that his artificial limbs give him an advantage in day to day life, but in this narrow field, Pistorius does seem to get an edge. I think this is going to be the start of a wider trend.

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The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.

I'm serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain's beardies only because they don't work.

- Jeremy Clarkson

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Christian Michel holds talk-and-discussion evenings at his London home on the sixth and twentieth of each month. If you want know more about these events email him at cmichel@ cmichel.com. I am doing the talk at the next one, the first of 2008, on January 6th. My chosen subject will be: the history of music making in the twentieth century. I have just sent an email to Christian about my talk, from which he will concoct his email invite to all his regulars. I am still thinking about what I will finally say and would greatly appreciate input from the Samizdata commentariat on the subject. So here is my email to Christian:

An extraordinary interlude - an aberration, you might say - in the history of music is now drawing to a close.

The musical opportunities created by modern electronics, in the form of electronic recording, radio, and then later of actual electronically powered musical instruments, were responded to by the music profession in two profoundly contrasted ways.

The "classical" fraternity concentrated first on popularising - and then on recording in opulently perfect sound – their resplendent back catalogue.

"Pop" music has been just as profoundly shaped by electronics. Indeed, it is the creation of electronics.

The most fundamental effect of electronics on "pop" music has been that popular music (by which I mean the old folk traditions) has no longer been obliged to rely either on musical literacy skills, or, for those in whom such skills were lacking, memory. "Folk" music always teetered on the edge of oblivion, relying as much of it did on the human brain as its hard disc, so to speak. And folk musicians were forced to concentrate on remembering the old songs, having little brain space to create new ones (folk music before recording was rather like literature before printing. Written manuscripts were about as perishable as the people who created them, for they lasted about as long).

Recording, for folk/pop musicians changed everything. No longer did the lowest class of musician depend upon their own memories to keep their previous creations and inherited repertoire alive. They could compose at their instruments, and record it, confident that it would then survive, and they were thus liberated to get on with creating the next would-be hit. And pop musicians were as uninhibited in their use of new, electronic instruments as the classical fraternity were mostly stand-off-ish about them (I know: Boulez, Stockhausen etc. They're worth a mention).

This is a complicated story. Technology takes time to develop and get cheap, and it's still hurtling along of course. Electronic recording (and CDs) took nearly a century to get good enough to do justice to Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. At it took a similar time to get cheap enough for working class teenagers to play with it in bedrooms and garages.

The classical recording enterprise is now basically concluded. Oh, there are still occasional gems to be found in among the dross at the battle of the barrel. But, the great works are now recorded, and re-recording them again and again cannot count for as much now as making similar recordings did fifty years ago when classical fans were still hungry to hear their core repertoire. "Classical" musicians must now look to create new repertoire of a sort that can earn them a living, the inverted commas there being because a lot of them won't really be "classical" musicians anymore and are becoming a lot more like pop musicians, from whom they have much to learn. The music profession will once more be a single (if huge and sprawling) entity, full of varieties of taste and of technique, but without that cavernous gulf that divided it during the twentieth century (in this respect it resembled and resembles politics. Discuss).

I could go on, and on the night I will, but I'll end by briefly discussing my qualifications to do this talk. Well, first of all, I am a music fan, possessing an small-to-average sized pop CD collection and a gargantuan classical CD collection, having been a classical collector and listener all my now long life. I was a teenager during the sixties musical revolution. I have also been studying the history of the means of communication and information storage for as long as I can remember. I am no great shakes as a musician, although I did play the flute in my school orchestra, and I had a fabulous treble voice as a boy, which I used to sing in choirs of various kinds, at home around the piano and at school. But in the end, I'll just have to hope that my audience finds my talk illuminating and enjoyable. For the truth is that they know most of the facts pretty much as well as I do. The question is, will I make more sense of those facts for my listeners? I'll try.

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Wired has a list of what it regards as the top scientific breakthroughs of 2007. Some of the technologists and scientifically literate folk who read our blog might disagree, so comment away with your own suggestions.

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Six or seven years ago, there was a lot of debate and worry about whether open source could be economically sustainable. Many free-marketeers and conservatives were skeptical. One free-market group accused open source software of being "a leprosy", another said it was like "the borg" where "individual thought and creativity are extinguished". "The open-source model on its own," said another, "does not appear to provide a solid foundation for profitable business operations that can meaningfully contribute to a nations’ economic growth." There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, they argued.

In fact, the economic model was really so alien (how could people could afford to give away their work?) that one free-market group claimed that Linux was stolen ("probably"). Of course, if that were true it would be easy to prove because open source is, well, open.

But other free-marketeers got it. After all, the main founder of the Open Source Initiative is one Eric S. Raymond, a noted libertarian free-marketeer. His seminal book on open source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, quotes from the free-market theorists like F. A Hayek. Way back in 1998, when most people had never heard of Linux, Brian Micklethwait wrote a Libertarian Alliance pamphlet welcoming Linux, giving it a libertarian thumbs-up. Madsen Pirie from the Adam Smith Institute said he was in favour of Linux's rise because it was good for competition: he later wrote an article on the rise of the "free lunch economy", in which people make sustainable businesses off the back of giving their product away for nothing.

But while the criticism of open source six or seven years ago was largely from a priori thinking, now we can look at the empirical evidence. And it has become clear that there are very successful open source companies with sustainable incomes. I am going to discuss two major examples. The first is Mozilla which produces the open source web browser, Firefox. Not only is Firefox better than its proprietary rival Internet Explorer, it is also doing very well financially. Its revenues in 2006 were $66.8m, up 26% from 2005. The cash mainly comes from having a Google search box in the toolbar: it gets a percentage of advertising revenues from the resulting Google searches.

But given that Firefox is open source, couldn't someone other than Mozilla come along and take the code and produce their own Firefox with a search box that brought them revenue instead? Well, yes. Indeed, there are "forks" of Firefox, such as the Flock browser. But it turns out that in the open source world such forking tends to be quite rare - developers prefer to be part of the big team, rather than split off. As long as Mozilla is seen to be doing a good job, there will not be a major fork.

Firefox is also interesting from the point of view of user interface innovation. For example, the upcoming Firefox 3 has many really neat interface improvements, such as to how bookmarking works. They have also worked out a really excellent way of getting rid of those annoying dialogue boxes that ask if you want to save a password - without getting rid of the functionality. Firefox has never been a case of cloning Microsoft's user interface innovation: in fact, quite the reverse has been happening.

Seeing the user interface innovation and improvements in Firefox and other open source products like Linux over the past six or seven years was significant for me. In late 2002, I installed Linux for the first time on a desktop PC and there was a lot to like but it was really difficult to do certain things, like install software. I wondered if the open source model might be good for reliability but not so good for user interfaces and real innovation. But every so often I would try a newer edition of Linux on the desktop and it was really noticeable how quickly Linux was becoming simpler and easier. Installing Skype used to involved typing in various lines of code: now it is a case of double-clicking.

My second example is Red Hat, which supplies businesses with Linux, selling its product combined with a support subscription and guarantees. It gives away the entire source code for its products through the internet. People can take the source code, compile it so that it is ready to be run, and then distribute it. However, they cannot use the Red Hat trademark on the product. So Oracle Corporation, for example, has taken the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, stripped out Red Hat's branding, renamed it Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Other people do the same sort of thing, giving the software away for free.

Yet this has probably helped Red Hat, not hindered it, by increasing the size of the ecosystem around Red Hat-originated technologies. The figures speak for themselves. Brian Micklethwait's pamphlet quotes a magazine saying Red Hat grew from "a two-man garage start-up to a forty person two-million dollar company in its first two years". Today, it has a turnover of over $500m a year and employs over 3000 people.

Red Hat works in the same way as Nike does. People can buy a t-shirt for next to nothing from Tesco, or they can buy the expensive Nike version. In an over-simplistic perfect competition model, Nike pricing would not be possible: it would not be able to charge a premium over the Tesco brand. Yet plenty of people buy Nike-branded clothing. In the corporate world, Red Hat has a market-leading reputation for selecting reliable components for its Linux distribution, in supporting its product, and guaranteeing it will work with other hardware and software without problems. Red Hat can develop a new open source technology for Linux, give the code away, and say to corporates: we created the system and know it better than anyone else, so we are the best people to deal with. As the saying now goes, no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat.

Unfortunately, there will still be those who say that open source does not compute economically because it does not fit in with their high school perfect competition model. Despite the top open source theory book being overtly libertarian, it does not seem to have stopped (technologically illiterate?) organisations putting out articles even this year with titles like: The Malignant "Open Source" Movement: Marxism Takes a 21st Century Name. It seems to me that when an economic model does not chime with the empirical evidence, it is time to dump the model.

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The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.

- Dr David Whitehouse, author of The Sun: A Biography, writing in The New Statesman (via Brian Micklethwait)

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My knowledge of such things is close to absolute zero, but is not this, linked to by Instapundit (where more links and updates are even now accumulating) today, rather exciting?

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.

Damn right. It seems to me that if that caught on, the rules of energy would be changed for ever. Traditionally, energy has been a huge, heavily politicised industry. If only for that reason, politicians everywhere will fight this like cornered rats.

The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.

I have always found the Samizdata commentariat to be at their best when educating the rest of us about high tech issues like this one. Is this plausible? Is it safe? Will it be that cheap? Is today really April 1st and not December 20th at all?

Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the new system in Europe and America in 2009.

Bring it on. Never have I felt as optimistic about the future of nuclear power as I do right now, for this development turns nuclear power from a clunky, expensive mega-muddle that is totally dependent upon politics, to something that is small, simple, cheap and dependent only on the good sense of some people. Not everyone has to like this, and many will be flinging faeces in all directions about it. But not everyone has to. All it needs is a few countries, and a few people in those countries, to say yes.

How about this as a way to sell it? If you oppose it, you are in favour of Islamist terrorism. That should loosen things up a bit. An Instapundit emailer says that this technology is old news, updated. So, it's been around all along, has it? Do you get the feeling that some kind of political switch has been thrown? Rather than fighting like cornered rats, perhaps the politicians of the West who really matter are now willing to relax some of their their control over power supplies, if that's what it takes to separate those pesky Muslims from their oil money.

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I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo's rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less.

More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive 'urban renewal' projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should "shrink to greatness". I think it would be even better if the Feds didn't try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn't I?

All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar's article especially intriguing:

And Buffalo's dismal weather didn't help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out - and Buffalo isn't just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.

I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy.

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With technology, ubiquity is a virtue. People use Microsoft Word because everyone else does. The CD-Rom became a more popular backup device than the Zip, Jazz or SyQuest disk because there were lots of manufacturers involved. And, of course, floppies took far too long to die simply because they were everywhere, despite being evil unreliable and having a tiny capacity. Sony Betamax failed in part because far more movies were available for VHS. JVC was also proactive in licensing the VHS technology to lots of manufacturers. Consumers did not want to buy two different video players, so in the end most chose VHS simply because of its ubiquity.

Today, in the current format war between Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD, it seems that (unlike two decades ago) the Sony-backed format is going to win. This is despite the fact that Blu-Ray discs cost more to manufacture (although, arguably, Blu-Ray is the better format).

Why will Blu-Ray win? Because, firstly, Sony equipped every PlayStation 3 with Blu-Ray capability. Conversely, Microsoft (a major backer of HD-DVD) decided to only make it available as £100 add-on for its Xbox 360. Secondly, according to Wikipedia, as of late November there were 415 titles available in the US for Blu-Ray, compared with only 344 for HD-DVD. A search on WHSmith.co.uk brings up 259 results for "blu-ray", but only 167 for "hd-dvd".

Yet over the coming years, some of the companies that have benefited from the economics of ubiquity may find it turns round and bites them. With OpenOffice only ever a free download away, will people keep going to PC World and paying for Microsoft Office? Schools are already questioning whether it is a good to teach on expensive proprietary software in the classroom, when if they were to use open source applications, all the pupils would be able to practice with the same software at home.

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Digital Rights Management - more accurately called Digital Restrictions Management - is an annoying technology that stops people using music in the way they expect. Needless to say, consumers hate the stuff. It is never effective at its stated purpose of protecting copyright because it only takes one person on the planet to connect the headphones output on a computer into the microphone input and record the sound as an mp3 before it can be made available unprotected on file sharing networks.

Even worse news for the peddlers of DRM is that the technology itself gets cracked. According to Cory Doctorow on the Guardian website:

DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists

2008 will be the year DRM finally dies. While behind-the-times record companies have been irrationally worshipping DRM, the music retailers know that DRM is bad for sales. A couple of weeks ago, the Entertainment Retailers Association (representing the likes of HMV, WHSmiths and Woolworths) called for DRM to be scrapped.

Some of the record companies are waking up to the problem of DRM. Deutsche Grammophon, a major classical music label of Universal Music Group, recently launched its own DRM-free download store, bragging that "Our MP3s are open to all players". Even more significantly, two of the world's largest retailers, Amazon and Wal-Mart, have reportedly been stepping up pressure on music labels to eliminate DRM. Wal-Mart, according to top IT site ArsTechnica "has reportedly given an ultimatum to some of the largest record labels". They know that music that will not play on your choice of player or computer is bad for sales.

With the major retailers pushing for the elimination of DRM, perhaps it is time for a Requiem for DRM?

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Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday's posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter.

I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:

In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill ...

Yes, that Bishop Hill again.

... reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.

Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack ... , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold.

Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth's climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either.

What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it.

The sun's own orbit, he found, has eight characteristic patterns, all determined by Jupiter's position relative to Saturn, with the other planets playing much lesser roles. Some of these eight have orderly orbits, smooth and near-circular. During such orbits, solar activity is high and Earth heats up. Some of the eight orbits are chaotic, taking a loop-the-loop path. These orbits correspond to quiet times for the sun, and cool periods on Earth. Every 179 years or so, the sun embarks on a new cycle of orbits. One of the cooler periods in recent centuries was the Little Ice Age of the 17th century, when the Thames River in London froze over each winter. The next cool period, if the pattern holds, began in 1996, with the effects to be felt starting in 2010. Some predict three decades of severe cold.

In a few months we will know whether this winter that we are embarking upon now was cold, or not. And in a decade we will know whether it has got much colder generally, or not.

Ever since that prize ass Ehrlich made such a prize ass of himself by putting a date to his silly prediction about all of India starving - by 1980 was it? - the greenies have been noticeably reluctant to say just when their preferred catastrophes will happen. They have contented themselves with saying that if we act before it is too late, and impose all the taxes and controls and restrictions that they crave, all might yet be well, while omitting to specify by what date it will be too late to avert catastrophe. Well, it turns out that someone from the other side of the argument has more recently been putting his neck on the block by naming some dates.

If by the beginning of next summer I have forgotten all about how cold it either was or was not during the winter, not just in Canada but everywhere, somebody remind me about it. If no further mention is made at Samizdata for the next decade of this prediction of a longer cold spell, ditto. If by 2015 it is getting a lot hotter, then let this sunspotter be made to stew in his prediction, albeit posthumously, and let his followers ("Some predict ...") be made to stew unposthumously, just as Ehrlich has been made to suffer for his error, even if (as I am sure commenters will be queueing up to say) not enough.

The irony is that if the weather does get colder, or even if it merely fails to get any hotter, the Global Warming people will surely revise their models to include the activity of the sun, and assure us that had it not been for us being temporarily rescued by our home star, we would all have stewed to death, and that in another 179 years, we still will. Unless by then we have brought capitalism to a shuddering halt and put them in charge of the world blah blah blah, etc. etc.. Well, as I say, we shall see.

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If you thought spiders and scorpions bigger than humans were just 1950's B-movie creations caused by nuclear testing then think again.

Paleontologists from Bristol University and Germany found a rather large scorpion claw in a German rock quarry:

The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two-and-a-half meters long, much taller than the average man.

This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.

This is not a critter you would want to find under a rock in your garden. Assuming, of course, you have very. very large rocks...

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Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing.

The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links - climate cuttings number 14, no less - with the following:

And that's it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.

Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot.

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Recently I have been teaching a small boy the ancient art of handwriting. Make the small Ts bigger! Careful with those zeros, they're looking like sixes! Well done, it looks very neat! Yes I know it's hard, but keep going! And so on. Thank goodness for pencils. But there is a problem here. Is handwriting really that important any more? It was in a comment on that posting from fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings that the handwriting question recently presented itself to me.

Oh, I am sure that educational experts can correlate handwriting with achievement later on, just as in former times Latin went with being clever. But the fact remains that even highly-educated adults, and perhaps especially highly-educated adults, now hardly make any use of handwriting. We sign our signatures. If we are very pre-computer (as I still am in lots of ways) we write hand-written shopping and to-do lists, but more and more, people surely use electronic organisers for such things, if they use anything at all. And I find that the only stuff I remember now is stuff that I have blogged, because blog postings remain legible and are properly and accessibly stored, unlike my hand-written lists. If we are adolescents or young adults, we still use handwriting to take exams, in great intellectually sterilised halls, into which no information may be taken other than in one's head. But is knowledge retention now the skill that really matters? Surely knowing how to use computers to acquire knowledge is at least as important.

Recently a friend told me of her worry about her young sons neglecting their homework, but instead becoming utterly engrossed in some immensely complicated and long-drawn-out computer game. My hunch is that they are learning at least as much while obsessing for hour after hour about this game as they would if snatched away from their computer and forced to trudge through yet more school work for a few more tedious minutes each day. But is that right?

I do not need persuading that reading remains an absolutely essential skill, with typing, in one form or another, having become almost as valuable. But: what use now is handwriting? I do not ask this in a sneering, it's-useless way, as a merely rhetorical question. Maybe handwriting really does still have crucially important uses. If the teaching of handwriting is every bit as valuable as it ever was, I would love to be told this, and told why, so that I can proceed with my own current teaching duties with renewed enthusiasm? But, is it?

(47)

Clarkson is a hero, and Monbiot is a chicken.

- Why Monbiot is so Miserable

(10)

About 120 years ago, Mme. Cadolle figured out that it made more sense for women's breasts to be suspended from above than cantilevered from beneath. That is, she invented bra straps. So instead of walking around wearing the lingerie equivalent of the London Bridge, women could slide themselves into a Golden Gate. This was a huge relief - as anyone who has worn a strapless bra can tell you - because the London Bridge pretty much always falls down.

- Belinda Luscombe in the course of asking Warren Buffet for better fitting bras - spotted by Amit Varma

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I have a theory about gadgets, which is that we all get fixated on a particular type of gadget, on account of the particular sort of life we lead, or were leading when the fixation struck. I now live a very settled life, so, although I love my favourite sort of music considerably more than life itself, the iPod now holds no appeal for me. When on the move I prefer to read books. But when I first got bitten by the computing bug (which rapidly became the computing necessity), I lived a very unsettled life, and I thus became fixated on the idea of a really good, but really portable, computer. My first computer was an Osborne, which I could just about shift from one work surface to another, or move from one house to another, every few months. But, not surprisingly, I yearned for something lighter. Much lighter.

Laptops as currently understood have never enthralled me. Too expensive to take everywhere, and risk losing, to accident, forgetfulness or thievery. And still too big and heavy for my feeble arms.

So it is that I have been tracking the Eee PC, ever since they first announced that they were working away at it to the point where they would be able to announce it for real, with things like specs, a price, and somewhere you could actually go and buy it. The trouble with all ultra-portable computers up until now is that the smaller they have been, the more expensive they have been. What I have always wanted is a proper computer small enough to fit into a big pocket - and by the way why don't they make pockets bigger? - yet cheap enough to be purchasable out of semi-petty cash, and hence, at a pinch, if someone does pinch it, or if I drop it or something, I can just about afford to buy another without severe financial meltdown.

So anyway, the news now is that I am apparently not the only one on this planet thinking like this. The Eee PC is about to become a runaway hit:

The company first said the computer would be on shelves by August, then September, before it finally arrived Oct. 17. The holdup, says Shen, was making sure the interface worked well. To test it, Asustek took 1,000 prototypes and distributed them to employees and vendors, with strict orders to share them with family members of all ages. Bloggers on Eee PC Web sites that sprung up after the Computex show groaned that the product was taking too long to come out, but that didn't bother Shen. "The user experience must be very high," he says. "So we delayed, because with all the momentum built up around this product, I want to make sure it's exactly right."

There's nothing as cheap as a hit, and when you have a hit, make 'em queue round the block. Bloggers groaning? My oh my. But yes, me too.

However, I will not be buying an Eee PC until I can physically handle one, either owned by a friend or in a shop. Or, you know, maybe I'll meet a stranger with one and ask to have a go on it. I hope the keyboard is very small, so that it is. I have very small hands, and you know what that means. Finally, this may be of some advantage to me.

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At the recent Libertarian Alliance conference in London, one of my favourite speakers, Leon Louw, mocked the idea that water on earth is scarce. Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with the wet stuff, in fact. What people mean when they say that water is scarce is not that there is a lack of H20, rather, there is a lack of drinkable, clean water. But the idea that water is scarce is, in and of itself, bonkers. As Leon said, if an alien from outer space talked to some ecological doomsters and heard their moans about water shortages, he would probably fly off in search of more intelligent life elsewhere.

Heaven knows what an intelligent alien would make of George Monbiot.

(8)

I love this mighty beast, linked to by David Thompson in his latest batch of ephemera links (which he does every Friday and which I highly recommend):

This rusting hulk is (was) one of the world's biggest digging machines. It now resides in an open air museum, where the captions and propaganda messages are all about the ecological folly of big digging machines. But for me, this is a glorious monument to man's continuing and growing ability to impress his imprint upon nature.

And thereby, incidentally, to create all manner of interesting new habitats for other forms of nature beside man, once man has finished with using them for his original purpose. Last night I happened to watch a TV show about some defunct clay-excavation-for-brick-making site, somewhere in the Midlands I think, which has now become one of Britain's most satisfactory habitats for various particularly interesting sorts of newt. In general, I think the way that the First Industrial Revolution churned up the landscape and thereby made it more varied and interesting, is an under-talked-about topic.

The Norfolk Broads, no less, which I have fond memories of sailing on as a boy, began as peat mining:

It was only in the 1960s that Dr Joyce Lambert proved that they were artificial features, the effect of flooding on early peat excavations. The Romans first exploited the rich peat beds of the area for fuel, and in the Middle Ages the local monasteries began to excavate the "turbaries" (peat diggings) as a business, selling fuel to Norwich and Great Yarmouth. The Cathedral took 320,000 tonnes of peat a year. Then the sea levels began to rise, and the pits began to flood.

So, good for Dr Joyce Lambert, good for the Romans, good for exploitation, and good for rising sea levels. The Romans would have loved that giant digger, even as they would have been amazed and discomforted that it was made by their arch-enemies, the Germans.

In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.

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I do not pay attention to the Libertarian Alliance Forum, but many do of course, and according to one of these guys, Sean Gabb recently posted there a link to this:

It is a video clip of a bolshy brummy filming a couple of policemen. The policemen spot him doing this and tell him to stop. He tells them to take a hike. He is breaking no laws. He also, as if interchangeably, says: "I'm doing nothing wrong", and of course I agree. But, however right, and however desirable from the point of view of restraining the misdeeds of the powerful, how long before this kind of behaviour becomes illegal in Britain? I actually worry that too much publicity might be given to stuff like this, because it may give our meddling legislators ideas (was it wise to do this posting?)

Somebody told me last night (I think it was Perry de Havilland) that it is already illegal in some states of the USA to record the police. Commenters here often say that freedom etc. is doomed in Britain and that if you want such things you must emigrate to the USA. Hm.

At present the British Government already films whatever it wants. But cheap video cameras are rapidly becoming so small that soon everyone else who is inclined – rather than just wannabee spies and private investigators with money to burn – may be filming whatever they want, wherever they want. How will that play out, I wonder?

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Hey you! Yes you there, slouching over your computer, clad only in your pyjamas while you wait for the next remittance from your greedy, unscrupulous, oil-baron paymasters. Who the hell gave you the right to question global warming, you maggot? Don't you know that it's SCIENCE??!! Yes, science! What part of the word 'science' don't you understand? Scientists KNOW things. That's why they are called 'scientists'. And who are you, pray tell? Why, you are nothing more than a bunch of demented, anti-human global-warming DENIERS. Yes, that's right, you're just a rabble of depraved neo-nazis who can only drag your knuckles off the floor for long enough to count your Exxon paycheques.

So go back to doing whatever it is you heartless, moronic goons do with your spare time and just leave the scientists to the important business of making the world a better place.

Got that? Good. Excellent. Carry on.

One of the world’s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today...

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

Is somebody paying him to say that?

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Regular readers will know that I have a sort of allergy to the Sunday Times columnist, AA Gill. In the glossy magazine section, Gill spreads his wisdom about the utter pointlessness of space exploration and settlement. Bravo AA! No doubt some commissioning editor thought that what with all this renewed interest in space flight, the Google project, Richard Branson's support for the Rutan project, etc, that it was time to do what Gill knows how to do best, arguably, the only thing he knows how to do - take the piss. Here is a paragraph (no web link available):

The one lasting aesthetically beautiful thing that did comes from the whole guzzling, ugly space business was that photograph of the blue planet; astonishing and moving and vulnerable, our great group photo. And ironically, that image did more than anything to galvanise the nascent ecology movement.

There is a nugget of wisdom here, but he grossly exaggerates. The back-to-nature-can-we-just-turn-off-the-whole-industrial-thingy?" movement arguably started as far back as the bucolic sentimentality of Rousseau and the Lake poets and their horror at the Industrial Revolution; I'd argue that books, however flawed and tendentious, as Carson's Silent Spring did a lot to encourage the Green movement. Pictures of the Earth taken from space are indeed fantastic, but I doubt it got a lot of would-be Greens going; what those photos demonstrated was the brilliance of the space project, the daring, the sheer bloody-minded persistence required to get up there in the first place.

Gill lists, with his usual sneer, all the various inventions that are sometimes linked to the space race, like teflon coatings or GPS navigation equipment, the latter being ridiculous, he reckons, in that it allows us to reach Leeds without using a toll road. Such wit, such intelligence! (Has Gill ever met a person in the military, or a sailor or mountaineer for whom GPS has proved a lifesaver? Probably not). But one might as well sneer at say, the discovery of tobacco, the potato or other plants as a result of earlier "pointless" explorations. Earlier explorations drove the development of accurate clocks, which in turn improved standards of engineering; they encouraged development of storage of food, improved medical treatments to avoid problems like scurvy, and so on. No doubt some equivalent of AA Gill in the 18th Century would have mocked such things then (I am sure these people existed; they are of an ineradicable human type, alas).

Yet amidst all the smart-alecisms of Gill, he misses the really big criticism that one should make of the space race: it was almost entirely funded and directed by government. As a result of the gigantic sums raised in tax to spend on spaceflight, other, less spectacular but in the long run arguably more useful private ventures were squeezed out. If such private ventures could get going, it is hard to see how AA Gill or others could object to people risking their own money on such things although as his article implies, I reckon Gill would be quite keen to ban such "pointless" things if he thinks it somehow diverts precious resources from preserving the status quo on earth.

Here is a blast of fresh air on the subject, meanwhile.

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I hate chewing gum. Well, not chewing gum itself, but the annoying things that a hideous proportion of gum chewers do with their gum after they have chewed it. These are the gum scum, and a conspicuous blot on Western Civilisation they are too.

During my summer blogging break, I more and more found myself ignoring politics on the internet. But I kept up with the gadget blogs, cataloguing as they do one of the most positive aspects of Western Civilisation. The gadgets just keep on coming, cheaper, smaller, better.

So, you can imagine my delight when I came across this posting at Engadget:

Revolymer's latest concoction won't play music or record your favorite shows, but if it passes European health and safety tests, it could end up in your mouth before long. The Bristol University spin-out company "claims that it has created a new material (dubbed Rev7) which can be added to gum that makes it much easier to remove from surfaces," and in testing, it actually "vanished from street surfaces within 24 hours," presumably from rain or street sweepers whisking it away. Moreover, the newfangled gum would even dissolve quicker than traditional pieces, and if all goes as planned, it could be launched as "early as next year." Shoe soles, rejoice.

And pavement cleaners. More here.

This is how Western Civilisation works. It has a problem, and people moan about it, often believing it to be insoluble without social transformation or draconian punishments. But then, the techies get to work and deploy a technical fix. I am not saying that this particular technical fix will work perfectly, or that even if it does work well, technically speaking, everything about its deployment will be good. But this at least might be a step in the right direction, gumwise.

I mean, will non-non-stick gum become illegal to sell? It shouldn't, but if mandating this new non-stick gum could result in cleaner pavements and fewer defaced adverts, you can bet your last fiver that it will be, which would be wrong. Chewing actually existing gum is not wrong; it is the throwing about of it afterwards that is the problem.

So, one step forward, half a step back is my guess as to how this story may develop next. That's Western Civilisation for you.

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I have just come across this interview with Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who has rained on the parade of eco-gloomsters to memorable effect, but it is worth a read despite this rather sniffy sign-off:

Lomborg looks startled when I put the charge of utopianism to him. He sees himself as a pragmatist. He believes in progress, but sees where it can go wrong. But the deep green and antihumanist intuition – most beautifully expressed by the American biologist EO Wilson – that we are utterly dependent on the earth and must, therefore, approach nature with reverence and humility, means nothing to him. He cycles only in the city, not in the forests. And if, in spite of your own hypocrisy, you feel uneasy about that then you are right to do so.

I imagine he looked "startled" because the suggestion is such utter crud, to be blunt about it. Lomborg does not, as far as I can tell from his writings, contest the idea of man-made global warming as an issue, nor does he dismiss concerns about such things as some pro-capitalists are wont to do (although I can see why they do so). What Lomborg keeps banging on about is that if we use or sacrifice resources to combat such threats, then those resources cannot be used on other things, which might be just as important from the point of view of human wellbeing, such as clean drinking water, sanitation, health care, etc. Lomborg has had the temerity to remind people that resources are scarce and they have alternate uses. Nothing remotely utopian about that.

Appleyard also refers to the late Julian Simon, the economics writer, as a "right-wing" thinker. Oh please. So to be a broad optimist about technology and Man's ability to deal with supposed terrors like population growth is now "right wing", is it? It shows how one almost misses those old-fashioned socialists of the Eastern bloc with their posters of smiling factory workers standing in front of a building belching out smoke. What Appleyard and others don't seem to quite grasp - or perhaps they do and are not letting on - is quite how reactionary a lot of the Green agenda is.

Here's Lomborg's latest book, Cool It. I like the title and have ordered a copy.

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Whoops, looks like this spiffy-looking gadget has not achieved a trouble-free start but it may be too early to scoff. Even so, even a gadget nut like yours truly is sticking to his Blackberry (yes, I am semi-permanently attached to it) for the time being. Does any reader own an iPhone and have any views about whether it is worth the money?

For people with the sort of money to burn on one of these things, surely a spot of good, old-fashioned luxury is more appropriate if you want to have something snazzy to show off to your friends. I think a few members of the Samizdata crew should pay a visit to the wine and cigar department of the glorious Wonder Room of Selfridges. (Mr Jennings, Perry?) Keep a tight hold on those credit cards.

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I'll be poised to grab a cinema seat for this one when it comes out.

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Google comes up with a great prize idea.

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One of the problems of living such a busy work life is falling behind on reading books that have been around for a while. I finally have managed to complete "Project Orion" by George Dyson, the son of the famed scientist and writer, Freeman Dyson. The book recounts the story of how various US government agencies and some private contractors got together in the late 1950s and early 1960s - the project was finally halted in 1965 - to develop a rocket that would be launched by firing nuclear bombs underneath it. The basic idea was that you could put a seriously large rocket into space and fly it major distances - such as to Mars - by firing a nuke underneath the rocket, and use the force of the blast to push against a plate underneath the craft. By using this method, craft could travel far further than using the liquid fuel rockets developed at the time by the likes of von Braun and other engineers. There is a lot of complex engineering and scientific material in this book, which may send the head of a non-scientist spinning, but after working through this book, I get the strong impression that there is no insuperable obstacle to the technology actually working, although there seem to be practical issues such as how to avoid nuclear fallout problems near launch sites and how to avoid areas becoming seriously contaminated. Even so, we may hear again of nuclear rockets, although to assuage fears, I reckon they will be called plasma rockets instead.

Several things struck me about the period in the late 50s and early 60s when this project operated. First, the race by the US to beat the Soviets in space clearly was a massive impulse for technical and engineering advance, but it also sucked vast amounts of taxpayers' money into a variety of projects, many of which came to nought. The book raises the old issue of whether military/other competition between states does generate significant new knowledge that would not otherwise be generated (I remain unconvinced). Second, there was a remarkably tolerant attitude among the public - at least until the mid-60s - towards big scientific projects of all kinds, including nuclear power. These space projects were cool. This was the age, after all, of Alan Shepherd, John Glenn and Chuck Yeager. All of these men were heroes in the media as well as renowned in their own profession. Nowadays, it is a different story, although as Dale Amon of this site regularly reminds us, a tremendous amount of good work is going on to promote commercial spacefaring. Even so, in the time when the rocket was being developed, the environmentalist lobby that has done so much to lobby for restrictions in certain areas was hardly visible on the radar. Reading about the scale and number of nuclear tests in the Pacific or in the western US desert, for example, reminds me of how long ago the 1950s are in some ways.

A final thought about this excellent book: it demonstrates how the US federal government and its agencies developed a huge and sprawling bureaucracy to run different space projects. At times, I found it hard to follow the ins and outs of all the various acronyms representing different agencies of government as the scientists and adventurers begged and campaigned for funding. After a while, I started to drown in alphabet soup. After reading this remarkable book, I am more convinced than ever that when space flight technologies really do take off, they must do so as far away from the maw of the State as possible.

And on that final note, here is an author I really recommend.

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I am currently in Beijing, which is up there amongst the most polluted cities in the world. Beijing's summer days are characterised by heavy cloud cover, which traps the unsightly gaseous consequences of China's lightning-fast growth. The sun usually becomes discernable at around 4pm, when a golden-brown orb peers timidly through the haze. Being more acquainted with the brilliant Australian sun, for a split-second I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking at when I first saw its rather diminished Chinese incarnation.

In such circumstances, I have been thinking a lot about the "carbon footprint" of countries in the economic vanguard of the developing world - countries like China and India. Like most who contribute and comment here, l classify myself as a "global warming skeptic", due to the evangelical, anti-science and frequently absurd rhetoric that typifies global warming activists of all stripes. I am not a complete denialist - I have not written off the theory of anthropogenic global warming entirely. I simply believe there is an awful lot we do not yet know, and it is rash to be making grand predictions about impending weather-related catastrophes, and demanding action based on such flawed predictions. If, however, I was to reconsider my position and embrace the concept of AGW, I would still not champion the Kyoto Protocol or any other effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The fact is that if AGW is a genuine phenomenon, it is inevitable. There is absolutely no point in the rich world winding back its CO2 output, because China, India and the rest of the developing world will replace any first world CO2 reductions several times over. Despite the occasionally placatory noises about limiting CO2 emissions heard from the likes of the Chinese central government, the fact is that the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, the Brazilians, nor anyone else from the developing world will ever stymy their nations' opportunity to develop by hobbling their industrial output via significant CO2 emissions controls. Nor are the leaders of these countries likely to do anything to incur the wrath of their citizens by curtailing their perfectly reasonable aspirations to own motorcars, motorcycles, air conditioners and enjoy the convenience of air travel - all enormous direct or indirect sources of CO2 emissions. If significant CO2 reduction could be achieved with minimal economic and social cost, then perhaps the developing world would cooperate. However, large-scale CO2 reduction is an extremely expensive and socially disruptive exercise, and this reality will persist for several decades.

And it is too late to roll back the clock - too many people in the developing world have tasted the fruits of development, and quite legitimately demand more. Those governing the aspirational billions are far more likely to be influenced by them than An Inconvenient Truth. Global CO2 emissions are going to continue to grow for many years, there is no doubt about it. The "global warmenists", as the mighty Tim Blair calls them, need to re-evaluate their positions, because what they propose at present is simply an exercise in developed-world wealth destruction on an epic scale. Those insisting on such a state of affairs appear little short of anti-human luddites, as detractors of the green movement have long asserted. Bjørn Lomborg is spot on - any resources allocated towards the AGW issue should be directed towards researching crisis management and developing an appropriate disaster-relief capacity under the circumstances of rapid climate change, even if only as an insurance policy. And the absolute last thing we in the developed world should be doing is hampering the wealth-creating organs of our societies in a futile effort to cut CO2 emissions. If AGW is truly the looming catastrophe that many predict, we need to be as wealthy as possible to plan and make provisions for its impending consequences, and thus deal with them when they start to unfold.

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I thought about the line in the title - from Monty Python's Life of Brian - when I read this article today about the diabolical "summer" that we are enduring. Floods, thousands of people displaced from their homes; huge insurance payouts......yes, all the ingredients to keep us Brits moaning as only we know how. The article does make clear, in fact, that we have had terrible summers before. In 1845, one of the wettest summers on record precipitated the Great Famine in Ireland, as potatoes, on which the Irish population were dangerously reliant, were hit by blight. The disaster led to mass starvation and emigration of millions of Irish people to the US and Australia, among other places (the rancour that was caused by that calamity has never entirely disappeared, unfortunately). It also precipitated the end of the UK's tariffs on corn, as the then Prime Minister Robert Peel pushed ahead with free trade and caused a split in the Tory Party, leading to about 30 years of Liberal Party dominance in the age of Gladstone.

I am a global warming skeptic (not the same as denying it) and I do not know whether our lousy summer is linked to the increased violence of weather conditions that some say will be caused by global warming. But this is the weirdest weather I have experienced. A friend of mine who has taken up viniculture in the hope that hotter UK weather would lead to a revived UK wine industry may be wondering whether he has chosen the wrong career path. But then next year may be a scorcher. That is the beauty of global warming - you can blame anything on it.

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ZDNet opinion leader uses an excellent metaphor for the Conservatives's attitude to things digital and online.

..when it comes to being digital, standing with the Conservative party is like dancing with a hippo on a bouncy castle. You're not going to be in the same place for long.

I have heard George Osborne pontificating on open source and its use in public sector. It was a politician's speech, after all he is one so no surprises there. I was not as impressed by it as others in the audience but agree that it was a Good Thing that a member of the opposition front bench was talking about open source positively. But as usual for political parties, the left hand does not know what the right one is doing...

David Cameron told the British Phonographic Industry:

We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult.

Oh dear. It gets worse:

... it is only right that you are given greater protection on your investments by the extension of copyright term." He went on to suggest that the industry could earn this increase in monopoly rights by providing "positive role models" for children. Regulate and legislate; tame and control.

The ZDNet article sums it up perfectly:

Cameron may be telling the industry what it wants to hear, but it's as nonsensical as curing alcoholism with whisky. If we have learned anything from the past decade, it is that the music industry — indeed, the old intellectual property-based industries as a whole — has grown lazy and defensive through being given too much control, by being allowed to write the laws to suit itself and then demand deference. Now that such an approach is technically impossible to maintain and the customers are in open revolt, merely demanding more of the same is beyond satire. It's negligent, lazy and harmful — and in direct conflict with the facts.

Wholesale reform and new approaches are needed, not digging in to defend the ancient regime. The shadow chancellor affirms this. The leader of the opposition denies this. The rest of us have no idea what they think. Time to de-hippo that castle.

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Gaia is tommyrot in a laser-guided podule. It isn't just wank it's wankenstein tetrated.

- Commenter Nick M

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Just leave your computer turned on! I am pleased to see that all the modern gizmos that make life worth living are having a significant effect on everyone's 'carbon footprint'.

I cannot tell you how delighted that makes me. The notion that all the traffic that Samizdata generates adds to the preposterous statistics used to describe anthropogenic global warming gives me such a warm fuzzy glow I am myself no doubt heating up my little part of the globe... however the notion at all the people using their computer to visit the Greenpeace site are doing the same is thigh slappingly funny.

And yes, I leave my computers on 24/7. Take that, Gaia.

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A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the 'goods' with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.

Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:

Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it's often difficult for them to get information about a website's privacy policies.

So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. :)

cross-posted from Media Influencer

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There is an interesting article about the Russian government backed cyber attacks against Estonia.

(via Instapundit)

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I like to feel that programs get on to my computer at my invitation, rather than barging past me into the living room and demanding to know where the drinks are.

- Charles Arthur on the Word 2007 converter. Which goes for all sorts of institutions and people. If someone is prepared to explain themselves, gives us an alternative, recognises our autonomy, then we incline to trust them simply because they have shown they understand that there is trust involved.

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It looks like another candidate for my Amazon wish list. A thumping great book showing stunning photographs of the red planet, as taken by the recent US rover machines. The link here is to the Chicagoboyz blog site, which has a good review of it. There is also also a film about the exploration. Great stuff.

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I thought this is one of the cases where technology is nothing but good news...

German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.

Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.

Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps

Until I read the final paragraph.

Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany's tax authorities.

But then, it is never the technology that is at fault, but people and the uses they put it to...

No matter, I am very pleased to hear that there is some work somewhere being done on the past of former communist countries.

via Dropsafe

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Dave Walker sees more online samizdat, which he deftly names samizdata. Sounds familiar?

The original Samizdat consisted of textual material intended to criticise and subvert repressive political regimes - it was surreptitiously copied and circulated in a "pass it on to your trustworthy friends" manner.

Today's samizdata - such as a certain hex string which, in the last month, has spread from one blog across Digg and thence to thousands of blogs and sites - is material which can now also be intended to subvert repressive data management regimes.

In the days of the Cold War, samizdat was spread between people who typically knew each other, whereas today's typical samizdata - even though it could conceivably propagate via USB memory sticks in a similar manner - employs more of a "scattergun" approach. This may well be down to the fact that secret police organisations in Cold War times were not omniscient; by contrast, today's data management Politburos have access to Google, so the top priority for samizdata proponents is, as well as concealing their identities, ensuring that their data is propagated so widely that the probability of all the sites carrying the data being gagged becomes as close to infinitesimal as possible.

Before the AACS product key, the last major piece of data management-subverting samizdata was DeCSS. DeCSS spread by website, newsgroup and T-shirt, the AACS key has spread much more quickly by blog, wiki and tag indexer. It is a sign of the times, although I am not about to predict that AACS product key T-shirts won't happen soon.

While the contribution of samizdat and its influence on populations to the eventual fall of various regimes is discussed in detail elsewhere, the effects of samizdata (online samizdata for the purposes of this discussion) are also not entirely straightforward; DeCSS and the falling cost of embeddable processing power clearly influenced AACS, particularly in the case of the upgradable key. However, as AACS could be broken once, on the grounds that key and encrypted material are stored together in a device under the physical control of the user, it can be broken again. The most accurate prediction I can make is that we'll be seeing a lot more samizdata in future.

(6)

Sufferers from epilepsy might - just might - have a cure for their condition thanks to this piece of medical technology. I know one person who has epilepsy and it has had a hugely disruptive impact on her life (she is not allowed to drive, for instance).

As the late musician Ian Dury used to sing, there ain't half some clever bastards.

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Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:

They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.

They zoom on one woman's behaviour:

Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.

This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.

They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.

I share Steven's unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.

Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they'll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they're snoops. The upshot: We won't have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.

In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile - its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.

The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our 'protection' imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer - as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.

So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

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I usually make the point of only ever smoking a cigarette or cigar on No Smoking Day. It is the principle at stake, dear reader. For the remaining 364 days of the year, however, I avoid the weed. But for those who are less bothered about the state of their lungs or just love to smoke, here is a must-have gadget.

I think if Ian Fleming were alive today, he would make sure 007 had such a case for his Q-branch gadgets and Turkish ciggies (via the always-diverting Boing Boing website).

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In what amounts to a shocking admission that the "science" supporting anthropogogenic global warming is anything but settled and supported by data, we find that post-modernist thinking has been drafted into the service of stopping climate change.

It turns out that AGW is what is called "post-normal science", meaning that old-fashioned ideas like data and testable hypotheses have to be left on the wayside as we march in lockstep toward the Greater Truth demanded by The Times We Live In.

In other words, its our old friend Fake but Accurate, hanging out with the usual crowd. Don't look at the man behind the curtain, and all that.

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Enjoying a bit of time off work this afternoon, sitting outside on my back terrace in deepest Pimlico (oh, the wonders of wireless!), I decided to stop bothering about the patronising berk who leads the Tories and came across this story:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of huge seas -- one of them bigger than any of North America's Great Lakes -- on Saturn's largest moon, scientists said on Tuesday.

Big seas? I wonder if yachting or swiming on the beach is possible?

Scientists studying the images taken by the probe, which blasted off a decade ago, said the seas on Titan were likely filled with liquid methane or ethane and that the discovery reinforced previous theories.

All that liquid methane - do they have cows on that planet?

Seriously, the material being discovered by these probes is astonishing. At a time when our horizons appear to be shrinking in a fear-mongering political climate, it is nice to remember that some organisations, even state ones like NASA, are making discoveries like this. I guess a libertarian purist might object to the NASA funding model, but I am sure privately-funded ventures could pull this sort of thing off, if not in quite the same scale initially.

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In having another bite at the Green issue, one thing struck me as I surfed around the Net looking at some of the comments made by people about the idea of the Tories' trying to stop people from flying to holiday and business destinations. Some people genuinely seem to feel that a crackdown on global warming, and hence a halt to rising sea levels, is good for the poor. So we capitalist zealots should stop trying to argue that Tory leader David Cameron or Labour's Tony Blair are acting out of snobbish disdain for Essex Man and the latter's desire to go to Malaga for a cheap holiday. Oh no.

I guess it is true that if sea levels do rise as much as the gloomier scientists suggest, and the Earth gets progressively hotter, that poor people will suffer disproportionately from that. Air conditioning costs money. Buying a home away from a flood plain also costs money. I recall that about 3 years ago, hundreds, in fact thousands of French elderly people died because all the pharmacies were shut for the August holidays and they could not get treatment. That is what poverty does - it cuts your optiions and means of escape from trouble. So maybe David Cameron is acting out of paternalistic concern for the poor -- in the future.

And that is the kicker. Even if global warming is man-made and can be reversed, the benefits of such an expensive exercise will not come through for decades, centuries, or even longer. How can the interests of a guy who cannot afford an expensive flight be set against the interests of someone living in 2300? Why should a politician, answerable to an electorate, sacrifice or ask to sacrifice its interests for the interests of people in such a long time to come, and over a theory or set of theories that are, at best, not proven to the standards of a court of law?

We have been beastly to Cameron and his ilk on this site lately, and with ample justification. If Cameron wants to explain quite why the ordinary citizen should be shafted, yet again, by some grand project to make the world a better place in centuries to come, let him make that case.

Meanwhile, my boss, not the most excitable of men, said, in a quite unsolicited moment of rage this morning, that Cameron was a "communist". He is not even a rightwing Tory voter. I wonder if this view is starting to spread.

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Some of the so-called faithful are shamefully unwilling to put up with just a teensy-weensy bit of discomfort for the sake of Gaia:

World-renowned polar explorers and educators, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, today suspended their historic expedition to the North Pole seven days in, citing severe safety concerns due to a combination of damaged gear, frostbite and extreme cold.

The goal of this year's expedition has been to raise awareness among students and adults worldwide on the impact of global warming on the Arctic region.

Mind you, it could have been worse. If there was such a thing as global cooling they would have died from heatstroke.

(10)

As an addendum to Brian's post on the Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, I thought I would inform anyone unaware that the programme can be viewed in full at Google videos. Brilliant - I am downloading it as I type.

(picked up from LGF)

(83)

Like everyone in my part of the blogosphere, I am very excited about last night's Channel 4 Documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. I also recorded it to my TV hard disc.

The two most interesting claims in it, for me, were: that the Global Warming CO2 link is that that Global Warming causes more CO2 rather than the dominant notion now (as expounded by Al Gore) that more CO2 causes Global Warming, and: that Maggie Thatcher set the whole recent Global Warming pseudo- (if pseudo- it be) science funding bandwagon in motion because it was a stick to beat coal miners with. Brilliant. You want to explain what a mad cow Thatcher was? Denounce her take on Global Warming as cynical bollocks.

What was so excellent, for me, about this show is not that it totally convinced me (I have had enough experience with arguing to know that changing your mind is not something you should do lightly and impulsively) but that it sketched out with absolute clarity the anti-Gore (for want of a better phrase) case. It's the sun what does it. Sun temperature change, earth temperature change, CO2. That's the direction of the causes, not CO2 earth temperature change. They are correlated, just as Al Gore said. But Gore got the causation the wrong way round.

I also finally understand the point I have kept hearing about sun spots. Hitherto, sun spots have, when being sold to me as the explanation of all this, sounded to me like they are supposed to cause things. Wrong. They are merely a symptom of what does cause things, namely big change in the sun as a whole. The sunspots are a symptom of the sun warming, not the cause of anything on earth in themselves.

Nevertheless, this show certainly made me more of an anthropogenic Global Warming atheist, and less of a mere agnostic on the subject. I will be watching out for whatever arguments for and against that I encounter during the next few weeks and months. I will, for instance, be watching out for what happens to the academics featured in the show who were brave enough to put their heads above the parapet. That we now have a whole heroes gallery of sun-worshippers (so to speak), whose general intellectual demeanour and record we can now scrutinise, is an immense help. Presumably there will be (have already been) lots of character assassinations, attempted and maybe successful.

And who is Martin Durkin, the guy who made the programme? Ah yes, Living Marxism (that was what they called themselves when I first got to know these weirdos. Before that they were RCP. Equals Revolutionary Communist Party).

Living Marxism were one of those creepy outfits that then said you should only refer to them as LM, without saying what LM used to stand for. Sort of like BAT (who were absolutely not British American Tobacco you understand, definitely not, no relation whatsoever at all blah blah blah), only political. Then when that was greeted with the derision and contempt that it deserved, they dumped even the LM crap, and called themselves the Institute of Ideas. I do not trust them further than I can spit them.

But, for their own bonkers cult reasons, they are very ambitious and worldly wise, rather like the Scientologists (Claire Fox, for instance, is one of them. Frank Furedi is another). Generally, what they say is, strangely, well worth listening to. They speak truth to power, because they are insane and want one day to be power, and do Marx knows what to us.

RCP/Living Marxism/etc. is one of the great conveyor belts of libertarianism from the libertarian ghetto here on earth to the real world, also here on earth, via the planet Zarg. Their Zargian take on the whole Class War thing is that the Class War is still raging between the nobs and the yobs, just like Marx said, but Zargians explain it differently to the usual way. Instead of Al Gore et al being described as repentant nobs on the side of the yobs, the RCP/Living Marxism/etc. people describe Al Gore et al as unrepentant nobs, foisting their latest line of bullshit on the toiling masses, the Working Stiffs of the World who Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chains. RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Institute of Ideas/Whatever will lead the Working Stiffs of the World to victory, and then put Marxist lizards in power or whatever the hell they have in mind.

All of this will now be explained with great enthusiasm by Al Gore et al, the central claim being: These People are Bonkers and we can safely ignore what they say!!!

My answer: These People are indeed Bonkers and Not To Be Trusted (i.e. warmed over and (not very) secretly unrepentant Marxists), but meanwhile, what do you say to their arguments? This particular clutch of notions sounds rather persuasive to me.

Not the least of the fun is going to be that a bunch of warmed over Marxists (Al Gore et al) are going to have to explain that another bunch of warmed over Marxists are bonkers, and are going to disagree about whether they should play the Marx card. I personally agree completely that being a Marxist, still, is strong evidence that you should be taken away in a van. But how will other Marxists with a different take on Marxism handle this argumentative opportunity?

But all that is a digression. The truth is the truth. If a mad, not-to-be-trusted person says something true, there is still the matter of its truth to be considered. Pointing out that the person saying the truth is mad and not-to-be-trusted does not make the truth untrue. Point of logic. Besides which, although the RCP/LM crowd are from the planet Zarg, that doesn't mean that the scientists they have rounded up are likewise Zargians. They are almost certainly, almost entirely, bona fide earth people.

The arguments in this documentary are now going to be the new orthodoxy of the global right wing, anti-regulation, anti-high-taxes, anti-road-pricing, fuck-you-Karl, fuck-you-Tarqin crowd, who will now echo-chamber these arguments with their blogs into a roar that will deafen the world, in other words these arguments will be adopted by a huge number of earth people. Al Gore et al are going to have to explain why these arguments are nonsense, or, despite the fact that they have won every battle so far, they will lose their war.

I await developments with fascination.

UPDATE: try here for some responses from the opposition.

Cross posted from www.brianmicklethwait.com

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The green fanatics have been running the debate for decades now so perhaps it is time to hear some scientific basis for their intrusive and reactionary measures.

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena.

Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth's crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l' Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.

The nihilistic nature of the climate research debate - spot on! What frightens me about the environmentalists is that they recommend restricting ourselves back to stone age. Instead of harnessing innovation and searching for alternatives, the doomsday scenarios is what it is all about. Coupled with the urge to dictate what the rest of us should do, we have a long-term restriction on the very things that drives innovation - clear understanding of the problem, redundancy and waste (yes, that too is necessary for change), experimentation and focus on the demand, not just on restricting the supply.

In June, I will be attending the Apeldoorn conference in the Hague. This year the focus is on sustainability - the conference title is Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World. Well, you can guess what my contribution is going to be... I am looking forward to making the point for redundancy and playful experimentation by the markets. Otherwise, sustainability is nothing but another word for rationing progress.

cross posted from Media Influencer.

(8)

Last night was a magical one, and not just because I danced to some great music at the wedding of a sailing friend of mine. I also was able to stand outside and, glass of rather fine Armagnac in hand, watch the lunar eclipse in a crystal clear night sky. I have dabbled a bit in astronomy over the years, but this sort of thing might make me part with a few pounds and buy a proper telescope. Think of it: for a short while, the remains of the Apollo landing craft were bathed in orange.

(35)

I will be going to live in China shortly, however I intend to backpack around South East Asia for a few months before settling in Beijing. I do not really wish to lug my two hundred and fifty or so CDs around Asia. I am not a masochist. Also, I would hate to lose them. Yet I would also hate to be without my music - so I plan to buy a portable MP3 player and copy all of my CDs on to that. However, I do not know which model to buy, so perhaps a knowledgeable reader could help me out.

Firstly, I should mention that I do not want an iPod. I do not like having to use iTunes to plonk songs and data on the device, and I have heard a lot of stories about reliability problems - units dying just after the warranty has run out, unprovoked formatting of memory and that kind of thing.

I want a player that is compatible with Windows and has a relatively simple procedure for the addition of files - as I may be doing a fair bit of that at internet cafes and places where the software available is limited. Ideally, I would like to be able to rip a CD straight to the player without having to store the music files on a computer in the process. I am not awfully concerned about a video playing ability or an especially fancy display for viewing photos, as I will primarily be using the unit to listen to music. I would like the unit to have at least 30 gigabytes of memory, and I do not want to spend much more than 200 pounds or US$400.

A tech-savvy friend told me to check out the Creative Zen Vision M and the Toshiba X-series. Does anyone have any comment on these units, or any other recommendations?

(15)

Well it has been recently, thanks to my office being without internet since Thursday. I sent everyone out to the local internet cafe in Covent Garden today to do some blogging. BT of course has been totally hopeless, saying things that aren't correct and (incorrectly and repeatedly) blaming my internet service provider who themselves tell me that BT staff "are talking out of their posterior". Thanks to privatisation, the telecoms sector is so much better than it once was, with calls to the US costing little more than a penny, for example, but perhaps it's time to split the exchange infrastructure away from BT Retail?

(18)

The damage from an asteroid impact is referred to as an existential threat. The likelihood of this type of event is ranked alongside supervolcanoes, catastrophic climate change and pandemics as a risk that could undermine civilisation's infrastructure.

The threat from Apophis, aptly named for Stargate SG-1 fans, has crossed our radar screens with the possibility of an impact event in 2036. Astronomers mapping asteroids that pose a threat have singled out Apophis as a unique danger. Their campaign for awareness and funds to establish defences against such threats is beginning to bear fruit. Disagreement on how to institutionalise such space defences acquires momentum when one reads about the role assigned to the United Nations.

Russell Schweickart, of the Association of Space Explorers, has announced, during the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that they hope to submit a "draft document" on asteroid impact to the United Nations Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2009. The United Nations would acquire the responsibility for identifying dangerous objects in Near Earth Orbit and requesting national space agencies take appropriate action. This is usually know as the system 'UN say, US pay'.

The goal is laudable, the method is lousy. It is not clear if the United Nations has the mechanism available to foster co-operation in this field, since many countries may not consider this type of event a risk that requires further expenditure. Moreover, there is a possibility that a rapid reaction is required, whilst the UN's institutions are not noted for their nimble response to crisis, as the tsunami in South East Asia demonstrated.

The private sector institutions that campaign to counter such existential risks need to develop pragmatic plans involving national co-operation, principally through NASA, with ancillary aid from Russia and Europe, if possible. A private sector solution would be even better. The involvement of the United Nations is an additional layer of bureaucracy. Schweickart's proposal requires a more pragmatic competitor.

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Having spent £13,000 on installing a wind turbine at his home, John Large is disappointed at the return on his investment, which amounts to 9p a week.

Mr Large said that his difficulties highlighted the problems faced by consumers who wanted to buy wind turbines to save money and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

- from the Times today (hat tip Bishop Hill)

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I am going through a gadget blog phase just now. It is good to remind oneself of the wonders that capitalism is cranking out by the hour, especially if one reads Samizdata daily and is hence liable to be depressed, about ID cards, Islamofascism, etc..

Today at engadget, there is a torrent of mobile phones to be seen, of which this posting is only the most torrential of many. There have been about half a dozen other mobile phones featured at engadget only today, far too numerous to bother linking to indvidually. Go there, scroll down, and you will soon see what I mean.

I yield to nobody in my admiration for the mobile phone industry, and for the good it is doing to the world. The entire international aidocracy could drop dead, and on balance that would probably improve things, but if all the world's mobile phones were suddenly to vanish, that would be a true catastrophe. In Africa, the impact of the mobile phone is proving to be literally epoch making.

But, I get a bit bored with mobile phones. Of engadget's gadgeterial offerings today, my favourite is a robotic bird, designed to seduce real birds:

Apparently male sage-grouses, like some people, really aren't picky enough about their mates to discern between the real deal and a dolled up machine. Unlike 90% of other, monogamous birds, it's that oversexed sage-grouse libido that's fueling UC Davis researcher Gail Patricelli's project, designed to learn the innermost secrets about the game birds' mating rituals. The fembot bird (no Austin Powers jokes, please) wheels - head bobbing - around all dolled up, just waiting for males to approach and do their mating ritual. Apparently something's working right, too: Patricelli said of her coquette, "The males liked her quite well." We'd rather not dwell on what "quite well" must mean in her line of work, but we're happy for her - and her cold-hearted fembot - all the same.

The attempted humour of that is, for me, leaden. For better jokes about gadgets, I recommend Idiot Toys. But joking aside, is that not an interesting device?

I have often thought that computers and robots have a great future in enabling humans to communicate better with animals, in all kinds of ways. A computer/robot could turn the posturings of an animal into a stream of consciousness emotional commentary. It could offer a human a menu of simple statements that it is capable of passing on to the animal or bird, rather like Arnold Schwarzenegger choosing what line to say off a screen of computerised alternatives. Now I grant you, the first major applications for such gadgetry would probably be in making doomed animals more accepting of their doom (as with that woman who knows how to make cows less nervous), but at least it might cheer up their lives a bit in the meantime. And we will learn all manner of surprising things.

Maybe certain animals (pigs?) will become so likable to us that we will be unable to eat them any more, the way that we here in Britain (anyway) already prefer not to eat dogs, cats or horses.

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Björn Lomborg:

This is especially interesting since it [the IPCC report] fundamentally rejects one of the most harrowing scenes from Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. In graphic detail, Mr Gore demonstrated how a 20-foot rise in the sea level would inundate much of Florida, Shanghai, and the Netherlands. The IPCC report makes it clear that exaggerations of this magnitude have no basis in science - though clearly they frightened people and perhaps will win Mr Gore an Oscar.

All credit to the Guardian for risking accusations of heresy for publishing such impious sanity.

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RSS is one of those things that many people just do not understand; this posting is dedicated to all those who hear about it but do not really know what it is all about. Put simply, an RSS feed lets visitors to a blog know there is new content on the blog as soon as it is available - without having to manually visit it.

To take advantage of the RSS feed, you need a combination of the RSS feed address and a piece of software called an RSS reader on your computer. If you're using a Mac, the best program to use is NetNewsWire - the "lite" version is perfectly acceptable and is free. If you're using Windows, then FeedReader is good, and likewise it's free.

As an alternative to these programs, you can use a web-based RSS reading service, such as My Yahoo, Bloglines or Google Reader.

The RSS feed for Samizdata is at http://www.samizdata.net/blog/index.xml. On my own site, the GI Blog, the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalisationInstituteBlog, which is an example of a site using Feedburner for the feed - a great setup because it lets the publisher of the site know how many people are reading a blog on RSS.

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Nicolas Chatfort foresees the coming Holy Inquisition... albeit a rather innumerate Inquisition it must be said

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its long awaited pronouncement last Friday in Paris and I am informed by the media that this most definitive of all documents closes the debate on anthropogenic climate change. Now is the time for action, no more discussion will be allowed. I have read the document, and most assuredly it does use uncompromising language ascribing recent global warming to human activity. The science in the document, which I am told was reviewed by 300 eminent scientists, at first sight appears to be impeccable, but I must admit that was a little perturbed to find on page 5 that 0.16 + 0.077 + 0.21 + 0.21 = 0.28 rather than 0.657. I must not fully understand that esoteric form of mathematics known as addition. This level of ignorance on my part clearly shows that I am incapable of judging the merits of the science on my own and I give thanks to the IPCC for taking this burden off my shoulders.

With the debate now settled, what are we to do with those scientific heretics (deniers is a much too mild a term for these dangerous individuals) who continue in their error and refuse to accept the teachings of the UN's ecumenical council of scientists. David Roberts has already called for climate change heretics to be put on trial, but he goes too far as he appears to want to punish people for heretical statements they made prior to the issuance of the latest UN writ. After all, as the earlier pronouncements from the UN's ecumenical council were not as definitive as the current one and the debate not yet closed, these unfortunate souls must be given a chance to repent from their errors before they are punished.

Following enlightened historical precedence (see Galileo), I humbly suggest that the UN create an office to be known as the Permanent Tribunal of Universal Inquiry to investigate into the views of scientists on climate change. Those who publicly repent from their errors would be given leniency, but those who maintain their heretical positions should be handed over to civil authorities for proper punishment. In times past the penalty for the crime of heresy was burning at the stake but, regretfully, this would release too many greenhouse gases, so another form of punishment must be found.

Lord Monckton should be one of the first of the heretics to be brought in front of the tribunal of inquiry. I cite his recent critique of the IPCC report only as evidence with which he condemns himself. He has had the audacity to continue to publish his heretical views even after he was duly informed that the debate was officially over. His critique of the IPCC report is comprehensive and it could cause weaker minds to question the infallibility of the IPCC.

As for other scientists whose views remain suspect, helpfully Canada's National Post has recently provided a survey of some of the more prominent scientists who have veered from the true path in the past. These individuals are particularly dangerous as they all have reached such high levels of respectability in their professions that they will most certainly pollute the minds of the impressionable if they are allowed to continue to publish their heretical views. I will cite just a few of these scientists to show how much damage these individuals can do.

The first of these is Dr. Edward Wegman, professor at the Centre for Computational Statistics at George Mason University and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Dr. Wegman's crime is that he verified the McIntyre and McKitrick critique of Michael Mann's famous "hockey stick" graph, and has also complained that climate change scientists have routinely made basic statistical errors and insists that climate scientists actually consult with professional statisticians when using statistics in their work. I do note t