(24)

Rand Simberg is not a happy man:

"....here’s the problem with the comparison between creationism and climate skepticism. Evolution is a scientific theory. It is the one that best fits all of the available evidence. There is also a creationist theory that fits all the evidence: God did it, complete with evidence that evolution occurred. The problem with the latter theory is that, while it might be true, in some sense, it is not scientific, because it isn’t falsifiable. “Intelligent design” also isn’t a scientific theory — it’s merely a critique of one. And hence, it does not belong in a science class, except as an example to illustrate what is science and what is not. If people want to challenge the theory of evolution, they have to come up with an alternative one that is testable, and to date, they have failed to do so."

"In contrast, even accepting for the sake of the argument that the planet is really warming abnormally (despite the cooling trend of the past decade), there are numerous scientifically testable alternative theories to explain this, which is why AGW skeptics “are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters.” In fact, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions over the past several years, belief in AGW has taken on the aspects of a religion itself, complete with sin, a corrupt priesthood, indulgences for the rich to buy absolution and into green heaven, and the persecution of heretics."

I could not agree more. I have nothing against people who contest evolution and Darwin's ideas, but it is odd to conflate a skeptic about man-made global warming (where the evidence is far from settled) with someone who thinks that life on Earth was brought about by a Supreme Being.

And here is Simberg's signoff:

"I have a modest proposal. Instead of promulgating either the Christian religion, or the Green religion in our science classes, let’s get teachers who actually have degrees in science (as opposed to “education”), so they don’t need “teaching materials,” and teach kids how to do math (including statistics), think critically, and actually formulate testable and falsifiable hypotheses and test them, so that they will be inoculated to all religions, when it comes to learning science."

And this surely is the key. If we want people to learn science, a crucial thing is that it involves understanding the scientific method in all its rigour and painstaking discipline.

Brian Micklethwait recently, on a similar topic, asked the question of how much it really matters if people believe that the Earth and life on it were created rather than evolved. It is a good question.

(4)

I really liked that first Madsen Pirie short economics video, about the subjectivity of value, flagged up here. Now number 2 has emerged, on the closely related topic of price control. I happened upon this second video here, which would suggest that these things are getting around and being noticed. They should.

The short video lecture is the perfect medium for Madsen. Many is the time that I have had a short lecture on this or that topic bestowed upon me, by Madsen in person. From most others this would be intolerable. From him, it was welcome, because you had the feeling he had really thought it through, having bestowed it also on many others, each time slightly better. He has been working on these little videos for years, maybe realising it, maybe not. Almost always, when technologically enhanced things emerge that are really good, the person doing them has been doing them for quite a while by hand, as it were, before the technology came along to make the thing even better.

If the rest of these little videos are as good as the first two, they could add up to a classic set.

(22)

I recently had one of those eye opening web surfing sessions where I find lots of new awesome stuff to explore. I was checking up on the progress of Raspberry Pi, itself a very exciting project to make and sell an ARM-based PC board for $35. They say:

We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children. We think that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.

I saw a video of a demo of Raspberry Pi running XMBC, which is open source media centre software designed to run on a PC connected to your TV and display all your photos and videos and play your music. During the demo, a movie is played and I happened to catch the title "Peach Open Movie Project", which caught my attention.

It turns out that this is a short animated film made by the Blender Institute. Blender is open source computer animation and 3D design software. The Blender Institute in Amsterdam funds Blender related projects. For the past few years they have been making a short film each year. Peach was the codename for what became Big Buck Bunny. The film is completely open, Creative Commons licensed, and you can buy the DVD with all the assets, 3D models, scripts and tutorial videos showing you how to do all this stuff yourself. It strikes me that if you are a motivated teenager who wants to get into 3D animation your life is vastly better than it would have been 5 years ago in terms of the wealth of information available to you.

So far there are three Blender Institute movies and a computer game. My favourite is Sintel, a bittersweet fantasy about a girl and her dragon. Currently the Blender people are working on a fourth movie: project Mango. This is a "VFX-based" movie, which I take to mean real actors and filmography composited with 3D computer graphics. Blender can do camera and object tracking, so you get things like digital makeup and augmented reality. One of the main aims of these projects is to improve the Blender software, so at the end of each one, Blender is better; the free tools for making movies are better.

One of the guys working on project Mango is Ian Hubert who makes the sort of SF art that I love. He made a short film called Dynamo in his spare time, and is working on another independent, no budget movie called Project London that is made by compositing 3D digital elements onto live action. His showreel is particularly impressive.

If you look at the quality of these projects as compared to a big Hollywood movie like Avatar you will find that the gap is not so wide; certainly it is less wide than the same gap measured a few years ago. All this is being done using freely available tools that are getting better all the time. These tools and these projects may be offshoots of commercial projects or spare time projects, but now they exist the next iteration of artwork done with them will be better. We are all richer as a result and none of this is going away. It is one small aspect of economic growth that is very visible.

It is possible to get a sense of a what a lot more growth would bring: an economy where the essentials are cheap enough to leave us with even more time to work on projects like these; whether making movies or developing circuit boards or designs to be 3D printed.

Now consider this comment left on Eric Raymond's post about SOPA. Shenpen is talking about the problem of software and movie piracy and how the business models are flawed. The problem, he says, is that music is not scarce.

So the long-term answer is much more simple: selling non-scarce things is going to be stop being a for-profit business in any form whatsoever.

Take music. There will be no profits. There will be no music industry. And most musicians will not be able to make a living out of it. It will stop being a viable business model and a way to make a living altogether. Sure, some musicians will make a living out of fundraisings, advertisements and live performances, but it no longer will be a reliable way to make a living.

Is it wrong – how? The profit motive is great for a lot of things and not so great for a lot of other things. Some things – like sex – are best given for free. Take away the commercial motive and what you get is a lot better music. Sure, musicians will often have to work a day job and thus have less energy to invest in making music. This will reduce quantity – so what? As for quality, I think that will counterweighted by that then they won’t invest their energy into making plastic crap but genuinely good stuff, stuff they themselves would want to listen to, stuf they want to remembered for. When money gets out of the picture, artists often discover they have better tastes than formerly thought.

Why do we have to limit our imagination to the way these things are being done now? Record sales, movie sales etc. did not exist 150 years ago, why should they exist in 50 years from now? Time for some innovation.

This kind of innovation is just what we are seeing. Anyone can make a feature film or record an album and put it on the Internet. As the tools improve, so does the quality of the work done. It would be nice to make a living out of movies and music, but if the cost of living is low enough, and with freely available tools, high quality movies and music will be made even if it is not possible.

(2)

3D printing with chocolate. More here.

Is this the killer app that 3D printing has been waiting for?

(19)

As I've recently been mentioning here, I have lately been doing lots of clearing out of junk from and organising of my home, which is a very satisfying activity. While doing this today, I had another of those haven't-things-been-progressing-a-lot-lately? moments:

The point being that that's 16 megabytes. Not gigabytes, megabytes. This thing came with one of my earlier digital cameras, from about eight or nine years ago, and in fairness 16mb was rather stingy even then. The card could only have accommodated four photos of the size of the photo I just took of it.

I seem to recall an earlier moment of this sort, also recorded here, and also involving an SD card. Yes. Despite all the financial woe we are now suffering, this kind of progress still seems to be hurtling along.

Just wait until I get stuck into all those back issues of Personal Computer World that I also find I still have.

(3)

Yes. This …

… has finally moved out of my home, and out of my life. Last week, Men collected it and took it … I don't know where. A dump, presumably.

I recently wrote here about the continuing life of physical books and about the limitations of the idea of the paperless office or paperless home. Office-working commenters piled in to describe the persistence of paper in their offices, often in the teeth of earlier diktats from on high to the contrary.

But as far as my own libertarian activities are concerned, I really have pretty much completely abandoned communicating on paper, with my own writing, and most definitely with anyone else's. Which means that this machine, with which I once processed all the paper that I once processed, really had to go, if only to help me to accommodate my ever increasing hoard of books. Only inertia had caused the photocopier to linger on, in my kitchen. That, and the affection I still feel for something which once made such a difference to my life.

A simple way of describing what this machine did for me, and for a small gang of mostly London-based libertarians, from the 1980s until the early 2000s, is that it enabled us to do something like blogging, before there was blogging.

One of the many pleasures of blogging is that we don't now have to worry that much about how many people will want to read what we bloggers feel inclined to write. We like it when lots of people tune in, but if they don't, it's no big catastrophe. If only a few fellow fanatics read a piece I have written about, say, cricket, no unread piles of cricket verbiage accumulate in an expensive Samizdata office, causing us to wonder if we should then "market" the damned stuff, or try to give it away, or just take the hit and bin it. If, on the other hand, Instapundit instalanches something one of us has written, no queues to read it form while we scrabble about to find money for another print run and agonise about how many copies to print. All that nonsense, given only a bit of geekery to stop crashes, now takes care of itself. Here's what we think. If you don't care about what we think, well, we are a tad disappointed but we can live with it.

In its more cumbersome way, my photocopier enabled the network of libertarians that had coalesced around the old Alternative Bookshop in the early 1980s to be similarly unconcerned with mere numerical popularity. It enabled the creation of a tiny little libertarian internet, based on physical proximity and a mailing list, before and until the real internet came along.

One of us would write something that seemed of interest to fellow libertarians. I would do the artwork, with the words "cut and paste" being for me a reality long before they turned into a mere e-metaphor. It also mattered a lot in the early days, before even computerised desktop publishing, that I could photo-reduce text with this photocopier and thereby fit more writing onto one or a few sheets of A4 or A3. That the photocopier was A3 capable was also extremely important (which is also why it was so big). That enabled longer publications, clutches of A3 sheets folded down the middle and stapled twice in line with the fold (rather than a mere clutch of A4 sheets stapled at the top left corner) to actually look like publications, instead of looking like mere photocopies. (My long armed stapler was also an important piece of kit during those times.)

I would then run off only as many copies of each piece of writing as we definitely knew we needed. If whatever it was turned into a surprise hit, then more copies would be done, as and when, about half a dozen at a time. If not, no worries. As I said, no storage problems, and no fretting about print runs or about how to pay for them. It was just straight on to creating the next publication, and the next, and the next. The photocopier did enable a large quantity of publications to be produced, but not in the form of an excessive number of copies of a few publications. Rather did it enable us to deploy a few copies of many titles, ever more as time went by. Spread out on a row of conference tables, they could have quite an impact, and people could pick out exactly the ones they wanted. Not all that many libertarians were switched on by these means, but a decent number were. Certainly a lot more than would otherwise have been.

Then when the internet did arrive, all these laboriously contrived publications found a perfect new home. Undistracted by any fantasies about making money (as opposed to merely not spending too much) we shoved them all up and gave them all away. During the first few years of blogging, I believe they had quite an impact, turning many an "I thought I was the only one" libertarian into the real thing.

At first there was a real problem in the form of the un-copy-and-paste-ability of .pdf files, but that problem has now gone away. Thank you Adobe.

My photocopier lingered on as a rather undignified aid to scanning text from books into my computer. Until quite recently, I could only make my succession of computer scanners work if there were no shadows or complications for them to contend with (such as seeing one and a half pages but only needing to attend to one page), which meant me scanning a photocopy of what I wanted to scan, and then chopping off what I didn't want, with scissors. I know, crazy. And I'm sure I could have sorted out all such problems years ago if I had really needed to. But this ridiculous method did work, and it wasn't as if I had bought a photocopier only to do only this. And then, suddenly, my most recent scanner finally proved to be truly intelligent, even in the absence of any intelligence from me. Scanning stuff from books suddenly worked a treat, and the photocopier stopped being any use to me at all. At which point its bulk no longer seemed endearing, only annoying, and it had to go.

But when my photocopier really made a difference, it really made a difference. I am very glad to have been able to record my gratitude to it with this obituary.

(54)

If you are depressed about the economic state of the world, one way to cheer yourself up is to google things like "fracking" or "natural gas". Another is to try "3D printing". That was how I found my way to this piece, about a company which has started selling 3D printers to … people. From what I can make out, each printer now costs something like two thousand dollars, more or less, depending on whether you want it ready to roll or are willing to assemble it yourself.

I can think of three things, right away, that are bound to be true about such "printers". They will get cleverer. They will get cheaper. They will get smaller.

Currently, these gizmos seem to resemble those very early personal computers, circa 1975 (as I remember it). There are no very obvious things you can do with them, but despite that, they just reek of the future. Learn about them, and the next four decades of world technological history will be yours to surf at will, in ways that are impossible to know the details of but which are bound to be huge.

In due course, 3D printers may become no rarer than the 2D printers like the one I have on my desk are now. The first laser printer I blagged may way to using cost (someone else) around two thousand quid. My current one cost (me) about eighty quid, and is much better, not least because it is so much smaller. Presumably similar progress will occur with 3D printers.

I wonder what such machines will do to the world?

(9)

One of the things I notice about technological change is that it is, so to speak, quite abrupt but not completely abrupt. In historical terms, the arrival of, say, the printing press, was a huge upheaval, changing one reality to a completely different one. But on closer inspection, something like printing turns out to be a series of disruptions, including disruptions yet to come, rather than just one. And if you actually live through one of these disruptions, you typically experience it as something far more gradual and complicated than, say, a mere once-in-a-lifetime explosion.

Consider that old stager of our time, the "paperless office", and in my personal case, its more chaotic younger sibling, the paperless home.

I have spent quite a lot of time during the last few weeks de-cluttering my home, and that has involved chucking out much paper. A particular clutch of paper that I am about to chuck out is a book. But it is not a book exactly. It is a pile of photocopied A4 pages. It is a big and cumbersome copy of a book, a copy of a copy. But it is a copy of an interesting book, one I would still like to own and consult. So, what am I replacing this biggish pile of paper with, which enables me still to read the same words? Answer: an actual book. Now that the internet enables me to buy an obscure book for coffee-and-a-sandwich money, but does not yet offer me an e-version of the same book, the logical thing to do is to buy yet more paper. In the long run, as Amazon knows better than anyone or anything else on earth, paper for reading will soon (in big historical time) be superfluous. In the meantime, Amazon circulates, hither and thither, still, a veritable mega-cyclone of … paper. For quite a few years, that was the only thing it did.

I am purchasing my new and smaller copy of this book from Oxfam, an enterprise I have no love for, and only have dealings with for private gain on my part, never purely because Oxfam itself benefits. The internet has opened up a whole new semi-business, in the form of people who can't be doing with selling their own (often presumably inherited) piles of books on the internet, instead dumping these book onto charities, and charities then selling them for what they can get on the internet. (I sometimes suspect that the impact of Oxfam upon British society is far more profound and helpful than anything it does for places like Africa.) Again with the complication. Paper is not being chucked into a skip. It is, thanks to the internet, being rescued from the skip. Temporarily.

This is, as I say, the kind of process that does not show up in the big, broad brush history books, but it is typical of the complicated way that new technology works its complicated magic.

Another example of something similar that I recently learned of (and mentioned in passing in this earlier posting here, also about the complexity of technological change) is how the arrival of the railways caused a greatly increased demand for horses, to transport people to and from railway stations. In the long run, mechanised transport doomed the horse to becoming a mere leisure item. In the short run, it caused many more horses to be used.

(17)

Commenting on this reaction from Bishop Hill to a not-all-that-biased-by-their-standards BBC show about windfarms, regular BH commenter Philip Bratby says:

Only an idiot would consider building offshore wind farms (unless there is some other idiot prepared to give you huge sums of money to do it).

Bratby then mentions a website about a campaign called "Slay The Array". Slay The Array seems to be an alliance between those who oppose these giant propellers on aesthetic grounds, and those who oppose them on economic grounds, and they have set their particular sites on a vast clutch of propellers (the "Atlantic Array") which some gang of well-connected thieves and/or lunatics intend to build in the spot where the Severn Estuary turns into the Bristol Channel.

Personally I quite like the look of these giant propellers. But then, I like pylons, and skyscrapers, even scaffolding. As for wildlife, some of it will suffer if they build all these propellers, but other life forms will benefit, just as with every other human impact upon the environment.

However, I am entirely persuaded that, economically, these erections are ridiculous, in fact utterly fraudulent. So, for me, the biggest objection to them by far is this one:

The dash for wind energy is massively subsidised, making wind power three times more expensive than other power, paid for by increasing  all our fuel bills, pushing millions into fuel poverty.

If Artists Against Windfarms (who get a mention at the Slay The Array website where it says "our friends") oppose these stupid, larcenous but to me rather handsome propellers on artistic grounds, that's fine by me.

(22)

I like this picture:

I found it here. It is an escalator in the process of being replaced, at Charing Cross underground station, London. They've taken out the old one. They are now remaking whatever it is the new escalator will sit on top off. Then they will put in the new esacalator. It's a routine they must have done dozens of times, with local variations to keep them on their toes. I do not doubt that when they finish their work, the escalator in question will function smoothly, no matter how many people ride on it or how heavy their luggage.

What I like about the photo is that it is, for me anyway, a reminder that there are still some things about our world that are progressing very nicely. The engineering of things like escalators continues to improve. But because the complexity that you see in this picture is, when the final object is rolled out, hidden, most people only think of such things on those rare occasions when they don't work. At which point they grumble.

One of the big divisions in the world now, it seems to me, is between those who assume that such progress will necessarily continue, no matter how many mistakes the politicians make, and those who do not. Some people take technological progress for granted, while others notice it (often because they do it themselves for a living), want it very much to continue, but do not assume that it automatically will continue, no matter what.

(5)

Here is an interesting article about growing fear-mongering about nanotechnology. Of course, even one of the founding fathers of the nanotech idea, Eric Drexler, has warned about the underside of this technology.

(12)

This might be the only measurement you need to judge the Afghanistan War. Vendors in Kabul are doing a brisk trade in Taliban ringtones. Because Afghans report that the Taliban kill travelers at clandestine checkpoints if they don’t hear one of their messages on someone’s phone.

- The opening sentences of a Wired piece by Spencer Ackerman entitled Either Your Phone Plays Taliban Ringtones, or You Die

(5)

Wise words from David Thompson. He supplies video to prove his point, video which reminds me of the scene in Road Trip, where the snake tries to eat Tom Green.

This posting has nothing to do with France.

(6)

A reminder of earlier dramas in London and surrounding parts this year:

A court on Wednesday sentenced a rioter who was caught on video pulling a man off his scooter during the summer riots to almost six years in jail.

The footage of Ryan Kitchenside, 18, chasing his victim before yanking him to the ground during the August riots in Croydon, appeared on video-sharing website Youtube, leading to his eventual identification.

Equally depressing is how other rioters joined in to help, as in to help Ryan Kitchenside.

It won't end up as six years, but it will still be something. I recall reading elsewhere, somewhere, that the regular criminals are beating up rioters in prisons, because regular prisoners don't like their own neighbourhoods being trashed either, and because regular prisoners are having to be moved around to accommodate the new arrivals.

Read the story and view the video here.

Here is the same video at YouTube, with added sound. That video looks like it was done by a human, rather than any CCTV machine. I am not YouTube savvy enough to find out who held the camera and what the story was there. Anyone?

(20)

Here is the headline:

EU digital exclusion is 'unacceptable'.

The clear implication of the quotes in that headline is that whereas the person being reported doing the talking indeed said "unacceptable", that doesn't mean that the word makes much sense, and in fact it is probably rather ridiculous. Quite so.

But to me the word "exclusion" is at least as much deserving of sneer quotes.

I do not have a car, a smart phone, a garden, a hi-fi system that would enable me to get full sonic value from the quite numerous classical SACDs that I have acquired over the years, a cat, a Kindle, a wife, an exercise bike, an actual bike, any paintings on my walls, a Spurs season ticket (even though I like it when Spurs do well), a snooker table, a Bible (I lent mine to someone and never got it back), a blender (I did have one but didn't use it much and didn't much like it when I did so I sold it to a friend), a yacht, a space exploration company, or a collection of ornamental hippos. Just yesterday, I made the arrangements to get rid of my photocopier. I do have a personal blog, and also write for an impersonal blog (this one), but I use neither Twitter nor Facebook. Of none of these various things that I don't have or don't use does it make sense to say that I am "excluded" from them. I merely choose not to have or use these things, or, in the case of the rather expensive or inconvenient ones, I am put off by the money it would cost to buy or to accommodate them, and the effort that would be involved in acquiring the money to pay for such transformed personal arrangements. (I would really like a cat, but that would mean me getting a different home.)

Martha Lane Fox says that lots of EU citizens not being connected to the internet is "unacceptable". But instead of "not being connected", she says "excluded".

Speaking to The Telegraph, Lane Fox described the gap as “terrifying”.

More quotation marks, signifying more ridiculousness. Evidently Martha Lane Fox is a women who is easily frightened. What on earth is so "terrifying" about people not using the internet? Not so long ago, nobody used the internet, because there was no internet. Life went on.

Martha Lane Fox is apparently something called the "UK Digital Champion". More sneer quotes there, this time from me. She was appointed this by Gordon Brown, and the current government carried on with this stupid arrangement. Should we perhaps start a series here, called something like: Public sector jobs that are stupid even by the usual standards of the public sector.

It all very much reminds me of this excellent posting here not long ago by Rob Fisher, in which he said, among various other wise things:

I imagine that libertarians are very much in the habit of questioning the deeper meaning of words.

This libertarian certainly is. The deeper meaning that Martha Lane Fox is in this case suffering from, and spreading, is the notion that Things Only Happen Because They Are Forced To Happen. I don't have a cat or a Kindle, and that must mean that someone or something or some combination of someones and somethings must have forced me not to have a cat or a Kindle, just as if a gun had been pointing at me. Therefore, if "we" (another portentously wrongheaded word) think that cats and Kindles are good (as is many ways they are good, especially cats) it would be good also if "we" were to change the forces now forcing themselves upon me, and force me instead to have a cat and a Kindle. No more force would be involved. The forces in play would merely have been rearranged a little.

I do not describe such ideas as "unacceptable". The title of this posting is ironic, despite its lack of sneer quotes. I must accept that many stupid people, such as Martha Lane Fox, are in the grip of these ideas, partly because of various words that rattle about in their heads for which they know no better alternatives, even if they might like to, and that as a result I and many others are subjected to force in circumstance where we ought not to be. But just as I choose not have a cat, so too I also choose not to think in this silly way myself.

(2)

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs continue to have rather snarky arguments with one another, even though Steve Jobs (Z"L) has been dead for some time now.

(19)

A week and a half ago, I visited the Algarve and Atlantic Alentejo in Portugal. I left my rental car parked in Portimão for a few hours. I thought that the car was locked, but I cannot be one hundred percent certain of that. In any event, a few hours later, I returned to the car, unlocked it from a distance and got in the car. Shortly after this, I realised that a rucksack I had left in the car had been stolen. In it was my passport, a couple of lenses for my digital SLR, a pair of prescription spectacles, a (printed) copy of the latest Vernor Vinge novel, all my spare underwear, various printed travel information, and my Kindle. Things I did not lose included my wallet, my mobile phone, my camera, my favourite lens, and my iPad (all on my person), and my laptop, various cables and chargers, and all my other remaining clothes (in the boot of the car or in my hotel room).

This was highly annoying, and to have things stolen is always a personal violation, but one learns to be philosophical about things like this. If you travel as much as I do, things go wrong occasionally (as they do at home). Much worse would have been a car accident or (worst possible case) anything causing personal injury to me or anybody else. So, I made a visit to the police and the consulate, got replacement documents, and did my best to resume enjoying my trip. Nothing was lost that could not be replaced by spending some money. Annoying, but compared to the total amount of money I spend on rent, or food, or even on travel, a small inconvenience. (Getting to the stage where I can put such things behind me like this has taken some effort, and has not been quite as successful as I am pretending now.)

Places I have visited where I have had things stolen: Cannes; Prague; the Algarve. Places where people have attempted (unsuccessfully) to steal things from me: Buenos Aires; Prague (again); Belgrade.

Places I have visited without the slightest trouble: Moldova; Albania; Ukraine; Kosovo; Transnistria; Bulgaria; Romania; Laos; Vietnam; Kenya; Indonesia; China; Turkey; Mozambique; Most of these multiple times. In a couple of these places I have been overcharged by taxi drivers, but no direct theft has ever looked like happening.

What one learns from this is that tourism related crime goes where tourists go. Places that sound grim and dangerous are often quite safe (at least with respect to petty theft) when you get there. Places that are close and familiar can often be quite dangerous. Tourist resorts are much more of a problem than big cities. I was robbed on the Algarve, but I have never had the slightest problem in Lisbon or Porto. I was robbed in Cannes, but I have never had the slightest problem in Marseilles, even in neighbourhoods that physically look poor and dangerous. Take care in Malaga, but you are probably fine in Seville or Madrid.

One discovery is that rich and poor have nothing to do with it. I have been to places full of rich people in which one can barely walk out on the street without getting into trouble. I have been to extremely poor countries in the third world where one can walk down the road in the middle of the night with $2000 worth of expensive camera gear in plain sight without the slightest danger.

Of course, even when you are robbed, even in tourist resorts, good things sometimes happened. In Buenos Aires, I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book: paint or some other liquid was thrown at me from behind. I had no idea what it came from, and someone then approached me to offer me aid. This is of course an opportunity for someone connected with whoever threw the paint to get close to you, offer you aid, and then steal your possessions when your guard is down. However much you know this and however experienced you are, it is still possible to fall for these tricks when you are tired and in unfamiliar surroundings.

In this instance, I fell for it completely. I was in one of the fancier parts of Recoleta, the most expensive district of Buenos Aires. Such a thing would never happen in Belgravia, which is perhaps why I was off my guard. However, I fell for it. I would shortly have had my bag stolen (which contained almost everything of value to me that I had with me in South America) except for the fact that a local couple saw what was going on from across the street, told the potential thieves to get lost, told me to be more careful, and went on their way. They were gone practically before I knew what was happening. I wish I had later been able to buy them a drink or otherwise thank them properly, but I had no such chance.

Last week, after I had my bag stolen in the Algarve, I got replacement documents from the consulate and came home.

Three days later, a comment apparently from me appeared on my Facebook account, consisting of "contact me please hi have your kindle pedroxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com".

My Kindle is always connected to the internet. And the Kindle is synchronised with my Facebook account. Pedro presumably worked through the menus, figured this out, and then used this synchronisation to update my Facebook status. I sent an e-mail to Pedro at the given internet address. He sent me an e-mail the next day stating that his father had been walking his dog, and had found the Kindle in the middle of a road 16km from Portimão. He had given it to his son, presumably on the basis that the son had better tech skills and/or English language skills than he had. I sent Pedro my address, and he promised to post the Kindle to me as soon as possible.

I am struck by a couple of things here. Firstly, the kindness of strangers. There are a few people who will take advantage of you and steal from you, but a great deal more who will go out of their way to help you, even when they have no interest in doing so. I don't actually believe in good karma, but one almost sometimes can. I am also struck by the fact that we are approaching the point where modern technology is almost a menace for the thief. A Kindle is locked to a particular Amazon account and is essentially useless to anyone without access to that account. It is easy to change the account from that account and so sell the Kindle legitimately, but not from the Kindle itself. (This becomes problematic if the manufacturer of the device wishes to use such a power to prevent the legitimate buyer from transferring that right to another subsequent user, but hopefully the market can deal with this.) More and more items that we own are connected to the internet, and more and more can be tracked remotely. Thieves apparently know this, which is presumably why the Kindle was thrown out a car window. (My camera lenses are lost, alas.)

There are privacy implications in this, but there are also good, keeping track of your property implications too. Individuals are often more helpful than large organisations. If you lose your phone, the mobile phone company will disable it to prevent the thief from being able to use it, but they care not at all whether the legitimate owner gets it back. Nor, generally, do the police. (A mobile phone that belongs to me was temporarily lost a year or so back. The mobile phone company immediately blacklisted it, the phone, even though I only asked them to cancel the SIM. The phone was subsequently returned to me, but I have still been unable to get them to unblock the phone despite multiple attempts. Thus I have a nice paperweight.)

However, if a kind individual finds it, they often do have the ability to return it to you. And very often they will. Three cheers for Pedro and his father.

(5)

Here is an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal about how Microsoft's Paul Allen is faring with his own space venture. Rand Simberg weighs in.

All this private sector space stuff reminds me of this marvellously entertaining book by Victor Koman, although I agreed with an old American friend of mine that the book jacket design was a bit poor.

I hope Dale Amon doesn't mind my writing about his chosen specialist subject!

(3)

This is a pretty decent check-list for suspected bad science from blogger Eric Raymond. It is the sort of thing that it would be useful for trainee and even experienced journalists to learn.

(16)

Knowing my fondness for pictures of London's Big Things, taken from irregular places, South African blogger 6k (a scroll down there is recommended) has just emailed me with a link to this Daily Telegraph picture, which is a view from near the top of London's BT Tower, of such things as the Gherkin, the more distant Docklands Towers, and the now nearly completed Shard. Yes indeed, well worth a click and a look. I know I've said it many times before, but I love how, with this new internet thing they've installed recently, people six thousand miles away can email you to tell you about interesting things in your own back yard.

But the real story here is not the view from the BT Tower. It is what the view of the BT Tower is going to look like from now on, and why:

BT Tower press officer Ian Reed said: "The huge dishes are synonymous with the tower and it truly is the end of an era. With the introduction of fibreoptic cable, the satellites have been defunct for many years and have reached the end of their lifetime. People will remember the dishes from when they were children - they were responsible for 90 per cent of the TV shown in the country. They were a landmark and could be seen all over London."

I had no idea this was going to happen. [LATER: And either the DT or Ian Reed has it wrong also. As commenter Roue de Jour explains: "They're not satellite dishes they're microwave dishes. They point to similar dishes on masts on a line-of-sight. Satellites are not involved in any way."]

Here are a couple of before and after shots of the Tower, how it looked and how it now looks. And here are two shots I took of this tower, with its big dishes, in February 2006.

I wonder what will happen next? Will they just fill in the gaps with dreary windows and office space? Or will new and different high tech contraptions be installed? I fear and expect the former, but hope for the latter.

LATER: See also another amazing London tower picture, the very first one of these. Those are the Docklands towers.

(12)

And by that I do not mean that someone has merely been printing stuff on a violin. The violin itself was made by a printing machine.

Here is a video of the violin not only being enthused about but actually played, by Simon Hewitt-Jones. To whom many thanks for the email that alerted me to this amazing object.

(9)

Nice comment at the Bishop's, on this, about "Climategate 2", from "simon" (4:35pm):

I so hate it when my vicar quotes from the Bible. I can't take such quotes seriously as they are out of context.

Perhaps the institution of the Samizdata quote of the day should be abolished. Time and time again, we here quote quotes, out of context.

Not all of the snippets that are now doing the rounds of the anti-CAGW blogosphere strike me as being as damning as some of them are. But, if anyone chooses to wonder about the degree of wickedness revealed by any particular snippet, it is the work of a moment for that person to find the context, this being one of the features of the internet. Provided, in presenting your preferred snippet, you supply the means of inspecting its context, then you have at least supplied the means by which your interpretation of the snippet may be challenged. And some of the snippets are very damning indeed.

If you are caught saying you are guilty only half as many times as the prosecution lawyer says you have been caught, that still makes you guilty.

Earlier in the thread, Viv Evans (4:02pm) says:

This 'out-of-context' excuse is favoured and generally used by shifty politicians who try to defend their misdeeds.

Indeed. And shifty politicians is exactly what these people are.

I trust that simon and Viv Evans will forgive me for quoting them out of context.

(14)

Another for the Ain't Capitalism Great collection:

Thanks to the advent of smart phone technologies, many of us already carry the internet with us everywhere we go. But now, scientists have created the world's first wirelessly powered, computerized contact lens with an integrated LED display. That's right - the same access to information afforded us by the technology in our pockets could soon come to us via devices that rest directly on our corneas.

Here.

By wearing a pair of such lenses, you could presumably receive stuff in 3D.

Inevitably, a lot more work will be needed to turn this dream into a reality. But, you know, ... wow!

(11)

Say what you will about the environmentalist and Guardian columnist Mr George Monbiot - not, apparently, the prototypical moonbat but merely a moonbat - he does have integrity. I have no doubt his recent conversion to a belief in the benefits of nuclear power cost him many friends in the green movement.

This article will not win them back. In it Mr Monbiot and Justin McCurry write that

The Green party's former science and technology spokesman is promoting anti-radiation pills to people in Japan affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, that leading scientists have condemned as "useless".

Dr Christopher Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, is championing a series of expensive products and services which, he claims, will protect people in Japan from the effects of radiation. Among them are mineral supplements on sale for ￥5,800 (£48) a bottle, urine tests for radioactive contaminants for ￥98,000 (£808) and food tests for ￥108,000 (£891).

Launching the products and tests, Busby warns in his video of a public health catastrophe in Japan caused by the Fukushima explosions, and claims that radioactive caesium will destroy the heart muscles of Japanese children.

He also alleges that the Japanese government is trucking radioactive material from the Fukushima site all over Japan, in order to "increase the cancer rate in the whole of Japan so that there will be no control group" of children unaffected by the disaster, in order to help the Japanese government prevent potential lawsuits from people whose health may have been affected by the radiation. The pills, he claims, will stop radioactive contaminants attaching themselves to the DNA of Japanese children.

Gerry Thomas, professor of molecular pathology at the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College, London, describes his statements about heart disease caused by caesium as "ludicrous". She says that radioactive elements do not bind to DNA. "This shows how little he understands about basic radiobiology." Of the products and services being offered, she says, "none of these are useful at all. Dr Busby should be ashamed of himself."

(18)

Yes, there are a couple of interesting recent postings up at the Adam Smith Institute blog, both involving falling prices and falling profits.

Tim Worstall writes about why the solar power business is not proving very profitable. This is not, he argues, because solar power is rubbish. It's just that making the kit to capture it is not that hard, the price of such kit is falling all the time, and making that kit won't be very profitable.

The other falling prices and falling profits ASI posting is by Sam Bowman, who links to a piece in the Atlantic Cities blog about how a sharp drop in the price of cocaine caused a similarly sharp drop in the murder rate in the USA, during the 1990s. The business stopped being nearly so profitable and became a lot less worth killing for. (The reason the price of cocaine dropped was that smuggling got cleverer.)

I have very little to say about how true either of these claims are. Mostly my reactions are: interesting! Can anyone here be any more informative than that?

I believe in legalising drugs no matter what. But if it is true that a freer market in drugs, and consequent fall in their price, already has reduced the crime associated with illegal drugs, then that surely strengthens the arguments that I can use to support what I already believe in.

As for solar power, is solar power really about to become economically rational in a big way? If so, how much is that reality talking, and how much the politically rigged and politically deranged energy market?

(7)

Yes, I know that there might be some room for doubt here, but an example I came across in the news pages of CityAM today clearly highlights how so-called environmental taxes are hurting the economy and costing jobs, often in areas already in dire straits:

RIO TINTO yesterday said new environmental taxes and red tape were partly to blame for the closure of its Lynemouth aluminium smelter in Northumberland, risking 600 jobs.

The mining giant said the smelter “is no longer a sustainable business because its energy costs are increasing significantly, due largely to emerging legislation.

It is thought that the coalition’s controversial plans for a carbon price floor, announced in the 2011 Budget, are being blamed alongside EU emissions trading and large combustible plant rules.

Earlier this month, the lobby group Energy Intensive Users Group said Rio Tinto was among dozens of firms asking the government for some relief from the carbon price rules.

An agreement has not been made in time for Lynemouth to remain open, though a government “support package” is due before the end of the year.

The government recognises the need to support energy-intensive industry,” said a Treasury spokesperson yesterday.

Personally, I think risking 600 jobs is pathetic. If the AGW alarmists are really that good, they should be looking to risk millions. They need to raise their game.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but you can see why this blog, along with others, gets angry about the lying and bad faith of those "scientists" who exaggerate their doomongering, and the politicians who embrace their ideas. It has consequences for actual lives.

(9)

Not a lot of news coming out but I found this news on the Polywell Fusion reactor testing.

500 shots so far. A long way to go, but Dr. Bussard's concepts have now survived quite a lot of testing. There is probably a lot more interesting information behind the scenes, but the US Navy Office of Naval Research prefers they not talk a lot.

I wish them success because it changes everything for all of us if they do succeed on the final hurdle of creating a working fusion generator.

(16)

The world's financial system, run by institutions that were a few short years ago considered to be too big to fail but which are now too big to bail, is collapsing. But, the making of mere things, not now nearly so fatally deranged by government imposed regulations or corrupted by government supplied moral hazards, continues to flourish. Will thing-making survive the financial turmoil of the next few years? Who knows? Meanwhile, it has been and it remains a good time to be alive and thing-using.

A thing I particularly enjoy using is my digital camera. However, my current camera feels a bit ancient, and I believe I could now get a better one. But which? In this posting I solicit advice on the matter.

Very roughly, there are now three types of digital camera. There are the little ones like face powder cases which people carry for fun, such cameras often nowadays being included in mobile phones. At the other extreme, there are the SLRs with a small mountain of lenses you can attach to them, for people who, facing the choice between life and photography, have chosen photography. And then there are cameras for people like me, who adore photography but who also want lives. What we want is the absolute best camera we can have, without having to swap lenses all the time.

Well, that's how it sometimes seems to me. To be more polite to the SLR crowd, it may be more a matter of how they like to photograph, compared to how I like to. They photograph slowly and carefully and infrequently. I photograph voraciously and opportunistically, one moment snapping something right under my nose (like a mad safety notice), and the next moment wanting to capture something I spot in the far distance (like a big new tower with something else amusing in the shot between it and me - often involving a trick of the light which may vanish at any moment), and I never know which it will be until I see it. You can surely appreciate how annoying swapping lenses back and forth would be for me. What I want is one super-versatile lens, which I can either make erect or flaccid depending on distance, within about one second. For the SLR fraternity, artistic impression and precision of image is all. For me, those are good, but the point of the snap is what is being snapped. So long as you can see that okay, usually in a photo that I include in a blog posting, good enough, technically speaking, is, for me, good enough.

For several years now I have had a Canon S5 IS, and very satisfactory it has been. But now, things have moved on, and I can now get a technically much improved camera, with does much better pictures and has massively more zoom, hardly any bigger and while still not having to faff about with those lenses.

Those who think I am wrong and that I should get an SLR can comment away to that effect all they like, but I will pay no attention. What I want is comments about what I am now looking at. And what I am now looking at is two cameras of the sort that I have just described, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ150 and the Canon SX40 HS.

   

There are already an abundance of reviews of these two beasts on line, including even reviews like this, which compare the two head to head. But, I would love to know what our commentariat is able to tell me about this choice, before I go ahead and make it.

Both the above cameras have twiddly screens, like the one demonstrated by the Canon in the above photo. My current Canon S5 has this feature, and I would hate to be without it. Last Saturday, for instance, I was absolutely not the only one photo-ing those veteran cars, and I often had to hold my camera up above the heads of the crowd in front of me to get any sort of shot. Contrariwise, you often want to put the camera right down on the floor, to get (e.g.) the exact dramatic cityscape background that you want, for something like an outdoor portrait. In each of the above cases, only a twiddly screen will tell you what you are getting. There are also quite a few circumstances when I am taking snaps but would much rather that the snappees don't realise it. A twiddly screen is very handy for that too.

Both the above cameras do good picture quality, compared to all other comparable cameras. Picture quality does matter to me, in the sense that I want the best picture quality I can get without lens swapping. The earlier versions of the two cameras mentioned above (the Canon SX30 and the Lumix FZ100) both seemed to embody the idea that if people like me got a twiddly screen and lots of zoom, we would be willing to relax on the picture quality front. Not so. We want all those features, but given all of them, we also want the best possible pictures that are compatible with all that, and what is more we are willing to pay quite a bit extra for that picture quality. Lots of us said this on the internet, about the SX30 and the FZ100, to the effect that we'd prefer better pictures and would be willing to pay extra for them, or, just as threateningly, that we would be prepared to wait for them, in the meantime making do with whatever cameras we already had. Canon and Panasonic have now responded accordingly. Good for them.

However, there are some quite significant differences between the Canon SX40 and the Lumix FZ150, and these differences mean that I cannot now decide which would, for me, be the best. This is where I would really appreciate whatever Samizdata commentariat input that commenters are willing and able to offer.

First, both have huge zoom lenses, but the Canon's is (significantly?) huger. The Lumix is x24. The Canon is x35. I would be interested to learn, from anyone with an opinion on the subject, just how much difference there is between those two lenses. Would I, for instance, merely get a far distant London skyscraper a bit bigger, and a bit more detailed, with a x35 lens? Or would it feel more like twice as big, and twice as detailed. If the latter, then it's the Canon for me.

Then there is the matter of "RAW". The Lumix does this. The Canon does not. RAW files are uncompressed, and enable you to do a lot more post-production tinkering and improving, such as bringing out details hidden in shadow, but without turning the sky entirely white. All the Canon offers is JPG files, which are compressed, and less susceptible to later Photoshop-type tweaking. But would that really matter to me? I suspect that RAW is for the few-but-perfect-shots fraternity, rather than for me, a snap-early-snap-often photographer. Also RAW files are huge compared to JPGs, so I'd probably run out of card space if I used RAW a lot, and of hard disc space if I wanted to store all my RAWs. Plus, I've never been keen on post-production manipulation anyway, beyond a bit of cropping and sharpening, which only takes seconds. I suspect if I had the ability to take RAW pictures, all I would do would be to fret about whether to take RAWs or make do with JPGs, and not do any actual RAW processing. So, both cameras would be okay, including the Canon. But, comments? Was anybody reading this at first not attracted by RAW, but then got a camera which could do RAW, and found that RAW was great?

Finally, the Lumix is said to be quicker in things like focussing and rapid-fire shots. I imagine my current camera is probably much like the new Canon SX40 in this respect, and I do sometimes find myself shouting at it to get a move on. So for this, I say to myself: Lumix. Again, comments?

Best of all might be comments from people who have zeroed in on the exact same choice that I am now facing, and who have made their choice and can now report on it.

Maybe I should do what I did when pondering the Lumix FZ100 and the Canon SX30, namely wait for something better. Or, now, even better.

When it comes to digital cameras, there is nothing so wonderful as having the exact camera you want, and nothing sillier than spending a hundred and fifty quid less on a camera that is not what you really want. Nevertheless, all other things being approximately equal, price might decide this particular camera contest, for me. The Canon is significantly cheaper than the Lumix, so maybe, all other considerations having failed to tell me the winner, price will settle the decision in favour of the Canon.

I will end where I began, with a reference to the big bad world we are now living in, and are most of us worrying about living in. It may seem rather frivolous, on the day that the news channels are all now discussing the next big financial domino that is about to fall (Italy), to be writing here about digital cameras (although I note that Johnathan Pearce didn't have any worries writing about wristwatches in an earlier posting today). But there is nevertheless a pertinent point to be made about the Big Picture that we are now facing so fearfully, based on choosing between things like digital cameras. The last few decades, we can now see, have offered us a major contrast, between the excellence of the arrangements that have cranked out digital cameras, and all the other brilliant toys we've lately been blessed with, and the non-excellence of the arrangements that have now given us … Italy. And I like to at least now hope that this contrast may be getting through to a wider audience, right about now. There does indeed seem to be quite widespread agreement, first, that the banking system is an unholy mess, but, second, that capitalism as a whole should not be done away with. If that's what the public does feel, then I believe the public is getting two out of two.

Put it like this. When the Panasonic Lumix FZ100 had a huge zoom lens and a superb twiddly screen, and took pictures with great rapidity and great ease, but when these pictures turned out to be of a rather disappointing quality, nobody said that the government should step in to ensure better picture quality. We just yelled at Panasonic to do better, which they duly did. Panasonic, we shouted, you may be big, but you are not too big to fail. Make a better camera or we'll go elsewhere, or just buy nothing at all. Panasonic duly made a better camera. Ditto Canon. And people like me can now choose which is the very best.

I trust that my point - which Perry de Havilland might want to refer to as my "meta-point" - is clear.

It's far too late to prevent global financial catastrophe now. We are now living through Keynes' long run. But after Keynes' long run (and our present) has crashed down in ruins and has become our immediate past, then what? I like to at least hope that the lesson embodied in my previous paragraph but one might have been learned, in enough minds if not all, and in enough significant and influential minds, to make a significantly beneficial difference to our longer run.

What I would like would be a world in which we are all induced to take as much care choosing between banks – by being significantly rewarded if we do that and significantly punished if we don't - as I am now able to take in choosing my next camera. I would like a world in which choosing between banks is choosing between different versions of really quite predictable excellence, rather than like choosing with a pin between different versions of … Italy. The camera-choice I am now enjoying says to me that the bank-choice I can only now dream of is at least a theoretical possibility.

(22)

Over a year ago, I mused about the possibility that the wristwatch might die out as a result of new technologies. For the moment, I give that possibility a fat zero. Although I can barely afford a beauty like this Patek Phillipe or Vacheron Constantin on my income, I have always been partial to watches. They are some of the oldest examples of Man’s genius for matching precision, practicality and beauty.

I was reminded of the greatness of the wristwatch by the fact that Geneva – home of the Swiss watchmaking industry – soon plays host to an annual fair showing of the finest watches in the world. Here in London, the Saachi Gallery in Chelsea hosts the SalonQP fine watch fair. Another chance for your humble writer to look at things he can’t afford.

Away from the glitzy world of uber-expensive watches, we should recall that this year is the bicentenary of the death of Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal who clashed with John Harrison. Harrison solved one of the greatest challenges of his age: how to make a clock so accurate and yet robust that it could be carried on ships at sea, hence making possible accurate navigation. Maskelyne, who took a dim view of the older Harrison’s views, is sometimes portrayed as a villain of this story, although the writer Nick Foulkes argues this is unfair (article is behind a paywall).

Anyway, if you are interested in this tale, check out the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, which has started a project to research the history of the British Board of Longitude. The makers of the fabulous time-pieces of the 18th and 19th Centuries played their part in forging the modern world.

And of course, there are famous watches in films, such as that square Tag Heuer that Steve McQueen used to wear, or 007's Rolex Oyster. And I think it was Buzz Aldrin who wore a watch over his spacesuit: one of these beauties from Omega.

(13)

Yesterday, they closed off Regent Street, the famous central London shopping venue, to traffic, to make way for ... some cars. I made my way to Regent Street, on the off chance of some photo ops, and was not disappointed.

There were E-Type Jags and Minis (i.e. real Minis - not the horribly huge German rehashes we see now), because both are celebrating their fiftieth birthdays this year:

And there were even more exotic vehicles, like this one:

If there was a sign explaining that, I missed it. Anyone? It looks vaguely familiar, as having been involved in something like a land speed record.

There were also new vehicles on show, involving various drearily alternative means of propulsion, but looking exactly like regular cars.

But the really old cars were something else again:

  

There were lots and lots of those. And it would be putting it very mildly indeed to say that I was not the only digital photographer present:

  

Nor was I the only digital photographer who was intrigued by many of the smaller mechanical details of these old cars:

  

The weather was rather grim, but the rain held off long enough for me to take all these snaps. Click on all of the above to get them bigger, and if that isn't enough, go to my own blog, to see many, many more.

By the way, I'm not anti-German about everything they've done to Britain's motor industry. I love what they're doing with the Rolls Royce.

(34)

Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

- Richard Feynman, quoted by Matt Ridley in his Angus Millar lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh, the entire text of which you an read at Bishop Hill. Do read the whole thing. Following on from the above quote comes one of the best summaries of why climate skeptics are climate skeptics that I have ever encountered.

Does anybody know if Ridley's brilliant lecture is, or will be, available on video?

(6)

I'm now reading that book I mentioned here earlier, by Harvey Sachs, about the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth.

The event itself was nearly shifted by Beethoven, for both financial and organisational reasons, from Vienna (where Beethoven lived for all his adult life) to Bonn, which caused a great gang of Viennese high-ups to write Beethoven a public letter, begging him to keep the show in Vienna. Of this letter, Harvey Sachs writes (pp. 30-31):

The letter-signed by seven aristocrats and various well-known local bureaucrats, musicians, music publishers, and the piano maker Andreas Streicher - is valuable not only as proof of the esteem in which Beethoven was held in his adoptive city but also because it demonstrates how deeply the notion that great music could be both "immortal" and widely disseminated had taken hold in Europe within Beethoven's lifetime. Pre-nineteenth-century audiences had tended to lose interest in music that failed to follow the dictates of fashion. Bach, who was born in 1685 and whose works were already stylistically passé at the time of his death sixty-five years later, would have been delighted but astonished to learn that his music would be venerated and widely performed nearly three centuries after it was written. He may have believed in the hereafter, but he wrote for the here and now - for the church ceremonies and court occasions that took place as his life unfolded and for the instruction of the musicians of his day. Haydn (1732-1809) and even Mozart (1756-1791) still worked within the specific-piece-for-specific-occasion system, although the fact that Mozart began at the age of twenty-eight to keep a catalogue of his works, and the even more significant fact that he and Haydn published as many of their compositions as possible, demonstrate composers' dawning ambition to have their works survive them, perhaps even for a considerable time.

Not until Beethoven's day, however, did winning a place in posterity become a major goal - the greatest goal, for many composers. With the rise, in his lifetime, of the bourgeoisie, middle-class families were able to give their children music lessons, and Hausmusik - music in the home became the home entertainment system of the 1800s. The equipment required for making it comprised a piano, one or more other instruments and/or voices, and printed music, the demand for which increased almost exponentially. This phenomenon occurred just as the figure of the Romantic genius - the artist as a being unhampered by normal constraints - was taking hold. The music of the brilliant, eccentric Beethoven circulated widely, and the conviction that this music would become "deathless" was a logical consequence of both his persona and the diffusion of his works. In the letter from his Viennese admirers, the reference to "the many who joyfully acknowledge your worth and what you have become for the present as well as the future" is an exceptionally significant sign of the times: The arts were no longer to be considered mere "means and objects of pastime." Composers were becoming the high priests, perhaps even the gods, of a secular religion; the best among them were expected to create works that would endure, . . .

All of which reminded me of something Benjamin Britten once said:

The rot set in with Beethoven.

Meaning, Beethoven was the first of a huge tribe of artists who from then on took themselves, and were also taken by others, a whole hell of a lot too seriously. Beethoven was, of course, entitled to think of himself as a genius. In his case, it helped to turn him into the genius he became. Most of his imitators got the trappings of genius off pat enough, but neglected the bit in the genius rule book where it says that you have to produce works of genius.

After writing that, I tried googling that Britten quote, and look what I found, almost immediately. Yes indeed, a review of The Ninth by Michael Henderson, which begins thus:

'The rot set in with Beethoven’, said Benjamin Britten, who, cold fish that he was, could never understand the idea of the artist as hero (though he admired Mahler, whose music is nothing if not attention-seeking). He had half a point, because the past century has been chock-full of artists, or ‘artists’, who have asked us to soothe their fevered brows. They are still around today. No matter. Their egotism cannot disguise Beethoven’s greatness, . . .

Snap.

(76)

Pretty much for the pure pleasure of it, I have recently been reading The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. (I chose that link because what it leads to features the same cover artwork as my copy has. Presumably that's the exact same edition as mine.)

The basic agenda of this book is explained in its subtitle: "The Evidence for Evolution". I can summarise this evidence by saying that what it shows is that if God did create all of life on earth, in a great surge of Godly creativity just a few thousand years ago rather than over a period of time massively longer than that, then all the evidence - all the evidence - says that this God went to a truly diabolical amount of trouble to make it look as if it was evolution that did it, rather than Him. In this bizarre project of divine self effacement, God has so far not been caught out making one single, solitary wrong move. Okay, God is omniscient, so of course if he wanted to cover his tracks completely, he could. But why do this? Why the colossal subterfuge? Everything in life now looks like it could have evolved. Nothing in life now looks like it could only have been made by God.

The details of how this evidence shows what Dawkins explains that it shows aren't my concern in this posting. This is not a book review. I recommend this book if you like reading about the many wonders and horrors that life on earth consists of. (Dawkins argues that evolution is not only true, but also awe-inspiring, albeit in a rather morally gruesome way.) And I recommend this book if, like me when I started reading it, you accept the truth of evolution but would enjoy learning a little more about some of the many, many details of the mountainous quantity of evidence which proves the truth of evolution, and which makes a nonsense of creationism. Having been reading this book for a while, I am now more than ever entirely sure that evolution is a fact, for all the reasons that Dawkins says that it is a fact. I entirely agree with him that his creationist opponents are hopelessly and absurdly wrong about how life on earth came to be.

But my concern here is not whether Dawkins is right that evolution has happened and is happening. Of course he is, of course it has and of course it is. No, what interests me is whether the fact that so many people now, still, deny the truth of evolution matters. Dawkins thinks that this rejection of one of the central achievements of science is scandalous and appalling, and that these crackpot creationists must be told the error of their ways, and told and told again, until they return to the straight and narrow. Me? I don't think I care that much.

To illustrate my point with a contrast, I think it matters a very great deal that so many people have been and continue to be so very, very wrong about the nature of the financial crisis that now afflicts the world. Errors in this matter are not merely erroneous. They are errors with huge and hugely damaging consequences. Millions have already suffered horribly because of these errors. Millions more are about to. But who is suffering because of creationism? Why does it matter to the rest of us what creationists think?

Are creationists forcing their nonsense upon others? Maybe to some extent they are. Many potential commenters will know a lot more about the answer to that question than I do. If creationists are doing this, that would be a reason to berate them about all the errors they are making. But, are they?

Another good reason to go after creationists is to demoralise them, because of the other bad things that creationists are doing.

But what other bad political projects are creationists contributing to? Dawkins regards the USA's aggressive policies in the Middle East as very bad, and thinks that Christian creationists are responsible for these policies in a big way. I agree that occupying foreign countries these days tends to be a mistake, while shorter, in-and-out attacks, with fewer pretensions in the direction of telling the locals how to govern themselves (such as I hope and trust the recent Libyan escapade has been (and fear that it may not be)), are also fraught with peril but seem, on the face of it, somewhat less harmful. But I don't think that Christian creationists are by any means the only people who support such military operations.

Inflicting demoralisation upon Muslim creationists strikes me as worth doing, because of all the other bad stuff that such Muslims also support.

An atheist friend of mine goes a bit further in the matter of Muslims. He points out that central to demoralising the Muslims is pointing out that their God is imaginary nonsense. But so too, he adds (and I agree), is the Christian version of God. Failing to point out the imaginariness of the Christian version of God means that we then confront Muslims with one argumentative arm tied behind out backs. Christians, my atheist friend argues, are (to use an American sporting metaphor) running interference for the Muslims, and we shouldn't let them do this. Demonstrating the truth of evolution is central to the process of demonstrating that the Christian God is imaginary nonsense, and also to knocking the intellectual steam out of Muslims. We should be consistent, says my friend, rather than weaken our case with selective atheism.

Personally I prefer to be a selective atheist, despite what my atheist friend says. If your God tells you to do stupid and destructive stuff, then argument number one that I will use against you will be to point out that your God is made-up nonsense. But if your God is telling you to be nice, or even just to be harmless, then I will not constantly badger you with arguments that your God is imaginary. I may say this from time to time, when that's relevant to other things that I'm saying, as here, but on the whole I'll leave you to worship your God, and I'll get on with my life.

If your God says that we should all be libertarians, as the God of several Christians of my acquaintance does say, I'll regard you as a comrade. If you are a Muslim whose God says that we should all be libertarians, ditto. (Something approximately like that may apply to the author of this book, if the talk I heard him give last Saturday (he's bottom right in the pictures) is anything to go by.)

Other atheists argue for selective atheism in favour of Muslims, because, unlike me, such atheists agree with Muslims about lots of other things.

Not being that interested in Dawkins' opinions about matters on which he is not nearly as much of an expert as he is about evolution, I may be wrong in suspecting him of strongly disapproving of the general run of right wing American domestic policies, as opposed merely to being disapproving of those domestic policies which he considers friendly towards or insufficiently hostile towards creationism. This BBC report, recycled at RichardDawkins.net, suggests that Dawkins has swallowed the whole CAGW mantra hole, but I may be wrong about that. If he has, that would be a further reason for him to denounce creationists, if he believes most of them to be unpersuaded by CAGW.

In general, I surmise that being a creationist might make you generally more suspicious of leftist/statist policies, on account of those favouring such policies tending to be so scornful of creationism. If so, then as far as I'm concerned: good for creationism. I would not be at all surprised to hear that some anti-statists favour creationism in various ways not because they believe it to be true, but merely because it enrages all the people whom they like to see enraged.

Does the Tea Party contain mostly, many, some or hardly any creationists? I don't know, but would like to know.

What does Dawkins think about the level of US government borrowing? Does he agree with the Tea Partiers about that? I do, very strongly. Maybe Dawkins disagrees with the Tea Partiers about US financial policy, and believes that anti-creationism should be used to demoralise them, on financial policy grounds as well as anti-creationism grounds. Maybe Dawkins fears that the Tea Partiers may be right about US financial policy, but that they will use their rightness in that matter to then go on and enforce creationism, far more than they do now or even than they now talk about doing. I also fear that outcome, a very tiny bit, but I fear the consequences of bad financial policies a thousand times more than I fear enforced creationism as a result of those bad policies being somehow reversed.

Dawkins makes much of the fact that public opinion in favour of creationism is on the rise, in both the USA and in Britain. Like so many confronting a graph that is going up in what looks like a bad way, Dawkins, to my mind, continues the graph onwards and upwards in his mind, and sees civilisation collapsing, but ought not to. Me, I also fear the collapse of civilisation, a tiny bit, but if that happens, creationism will not be the cause of the collapse, merely a symptom of it, and arguably not even that.

In particular, I think that creationism seems now to be on the rise in the Anglo Saxon world partly because of the many failures of state education, rather than because of any non-existent creationist intellectual triumph. Anti-creationist statists having made such an expensive mess of running state education, a few creationists are now moving in on the running of schools. But this is not because they have persuaded anyone important of the truth of creationism. It is merely that educational decision-makers who are keen to rescue education think that a bit of creationism is a small price to pay for the educational improvement that will follow from the kinds of reforms that allow creationists to become more active in education. I think that too.

During the last few weeks I have asked various friends the question at the top of this posting. None of them have come up with any answers that I hadn't. Several of them talked about the general principle that it is always good when truth triumphs over falsehood. I agree. That's always nice, and in ways it is often very hard to see coming. But my friends haven't, off the tops of their heads, been able to suggest any considerations involving public policy and definite and immediate harm done by creationism or creationism to large numbers of people that I hadn't thought of. They could offer nothing saying that people who think as Richard Dawkins does, and as I do, about evolution and about creationism need, as a matter of urgency and for the good of humanity as a whole, to reduce creationism to the status of a theory that only a tiny number of total crackpots even know about. Can anyone here do better than that?

As I often add to questions that I ask at Samizdata (something I do here quite a lot), the question marks in this posting are all absolutely genuine, asking questions being one of the very best things you can do with blogging. I ask because I would truly like to know.

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"Nobody ever asked why Steve Jobs kept working after he was rich. Everyone understood."

- Virginia Postrel, writing about the computer entrepreneur and business visionary, who died yesterday.

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Peter Thiel, the founding CEO of PayPal, has an essay up that makes the contention that the pace of technological innovation in the West, for various reasons, has slowed. He argues that this paradoxically may explain why, in the absence of serious tech change, investors are instead drawn to the dangerous finangling of asset markets such as property, and have fallen prey to the easy charms of high leverage. It is quite an interesting idea.

Here is an interesting couple of paragraphs:

"The most common name for a misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is “Keynesianism.” Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there is always a bit of clever trickery in massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. But we must acknowledge that this fraud strangely seemed to work for many decades. (The great scientific and technological tailwind of the 20th century powered many economically delusional ideas.) Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, innovation expanded new and emerging fields as divergent as radio, movies, aeronautics, household appliances, polymer chemistry, and secondary oil recovery. In spite of their many mistakes, the New Dealers pushed technological innovation very hard."

"The New Deal deficits, however misguided, were easily repaid by the growth of subsequent decades. During the Great Recession of the 2010s, by contrast, our policy leaders narrowly debate fiscal and monetary questions with much greater erudition, but have adopted a cargo-cult mentality with respect to the question of future innovation. As the years pass and the cargo fails to arrive, we eventually may doubt whether it will ever return. The age of monetary bubbles naturally ends in real austerity."

It does rather go against the ideas of Matt Ridley about whom Brian Micklethwait writes below on this blog. Ridley's take on the pace of events is far more optimistic: he does not, for instance, share the gloomy outlook on food production that Thiel makes.

This rather gloomy "are the easy economic gains gone for good?" theme was also made recently in the Tyler Cowen book, called The Great Stagnation. Here is a somewhat critical review by Brink Lindsey.

Dale Halling, an entrepreneur and scourge of things such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and anti-patent campaigners, has his own take on why the pace of innovation in the US may have slowed.

I can see why a certain gloom might set in. Many of the innovations we see today, especially in things such as consumer electronics and mobile phones, don't have the majestic appeal of a space rocket, tall building or breakthrough in medicine. But these things are continuing: materials science, for example, which is an area that is not very "sexy" (to use one of my least favourite epithets) is full of innovation. And there are the developments in biotech and nanotechnology, to take other cases. And let's not forget that even in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, some people claimed that all that could be invented had been.

And here is another example of the sort of concern that gets aired about where all the big inventions have gone, taken from The Money Illusion blog:

"My grandmother died at age 79 on the very week they landed on the moon. I believe that when she was young she lived in a small town or farm in Wisconsin. There was probably no indoor plumbing, car, home appliances, TV, radio, electric lights, telephone, etc. Her life saw more change than any other generation in world history, before or since. I’m already almost 55, and by comparison have seen only trivial changes during my life. That’s not to say I haven’t seen significant changes, but relative to my grandma, my life has been fairly static. Even when I was a small boy we had a car, indoor plumbing, appliances, telephone, TV, modern medicine, and occasional trips in airplanes."

The worry is, of course, that in a world of low innovation and weak genuine economic growth, political fighting over the economic pie becomes nastier, and certain groups find life becomes very uncomfortable. Not a happy thought.

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I have been following news on China's supposed near monopoly on rare earth elements for some time now and reports like this one seem to bear out my opinion that things will settle out quickly. There are other projects around the world which can produce these important high technology elements. They have only been kept out of production because the Chinese were selling at prices lower than Western production could support.

So the good news is, we got materials at low prices from the Chinese for years and created new wealth from them. And the other good news is, their attempt to extract a windfall profit is likely to fall on its face. And even better news is that one of the important new mines will be in Nebraska so even if the National Socialist Republic of California pushes prices from the old mines there into a range that keeps them closed, we will still be pulling them out of the ground in one of the Free States.

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David Friedman (son of Milton F.) has a good post here in which he asks the question of why we don't focus more on the possible positive impacts of man-made global warming, rather than always focus on the bads. If you live in Siberia or have endured the winters of Canada, the idea of a bit more warmth will, well, warm your heart. And assuming the net impact of AGW is to leave more people with climates that have positives, such as longer growing seasons, fewer deaths from cold, etc, then surely this is a good thing? I remember Bjorn Lomborg, in his book, Cool It, looking at how many people die every year from cold and comparing that with current deaths from extreme heat and projected deaths from more heat.

The good thing about the way David Friedman poses this question is that he is not taking a view on whether AGW is bunk or not. Rather, he is saying that assuming X or Y is happening, we need to weigh the positive impacts as well as the bads before deciding on the right response.

Of course, from a cynical point of view, the reason the bad effects of AGW get so much attention is because it is more fun for grant-seeking scientists and journalists looking for a good story to play up disaster. Greater crop yields in northern Canada don't sell newspapers.

Thanks to EconLog for the pointer to the Friedman piece.

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At a time when what are called "rare earths" - key ingredients in many of our high-tech goods - are becoming, well, rarer and more costly, here is an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how firms are looking to do without such metals via the use of substitutes.

Substitution of one substance of nature for another, coupled with processes of minaturisation and use of smaller, lighter materials, is helping to deal with the supposed nightmare of how we are all running out of stuff. At this point, I must make my standard plug for that wonderful book, The Ultimate Resource, by Julian L Simon, and here also is the recently published and excellent The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley.

As Brian Micklethwait notes below in his piece about a Kevin Dowd speech, we are likely heading for serious trouble on the monetary front. All the more reason, therefore, to bang on about the continued creativity and adaptability of people working in free markets.

By the way, on the subject of rare earths, a good person to follow is libertarian blogger Tim Worstall, who makes a living from this area.

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A Brief History of the Age of Steam: The Power That Drove The Industrial Revolution
Thomas Crump
Carroll & Graff, 2007, 370pp., paperback, $15.95 (but now much less - I got my copy for £3.99 in a remainder shop)

The best thing about this book from my British point of view is that it does not focus only on British events and circumstances. It surveys the entire world, as best it can in the space it allows itself. In most other stuff I can recall reading about the history of the steam engine, Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, the British pioneers of steam engines during the eighteenth century (Trevithick being the first to build a steam engine that propelled itself along a track – in other words the maker of the first locomotive), are followed immediately by the heroic deeds of George Stephenson and IK Brunel, the mighty British railway pioneers of the Victorian age. Foreign places get mentioned because Stephenson's son did railways in them. Steamships are mentioned because Brunel also did them. But before you know it, you are being told about streamlined steam locos breaking speed records by hurtling from London to Scotland in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which was all good stuff but hardly central to the history of steam technology. By then, steam locomotives were a mature technology and soon to be an obsolete one.

In this book, by contrast, the steam engine arrives at its early nineteenth century state, but then the scene switches from Britain to North America. Steam engines, being still very heavy, made sense as the engines of big river boats on big American rivers well before they made sense as small locomotives on railway lines less than five feet apart. The USA, unlike Britain, has an abundance of huge rivers, in exactly the parts of the USA that were then developing most rapidly. The next chapter then concerns itself with rivers and canals (the two often being rather hard to distinguish) elsewhere in the world, most notably in central Europe, in particular in the form of the Rhine and its many reconstructions and appendages.

But already, I am getting ahead of the story. The first big job performed by steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines, the market that Newcomen catered to (1712 being the date of Newcomen's first installation), and then the one in which James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton also got their start. Until Newcomen made his engine, many a British coal mine would have to cease operating, not because the coal had run out but because the coal that remained, often in large quantities, was under water. Any kind of mechanically powered pump, however expensive and inefficient, could make itself useful in circumstances like that, a classic niche market of just the kind that a cumbersome but clearly important new technology needs to get started.

Thomas Crump (and yes, that is a rather Victorian sounding name, isn't it?) does not make anything of the comparison, but the similarity between the early steam engines and the computers of our own time will strike anyone who reads this book. Steam engines started big and cumbersome. Then they got smaller and more powerful, thanks to a succession of technical innovations, and thanks to a general rise in engineering savvy and all-round craftsmanship. Not that this steam engine/computer parallel won't have occurred to Crump. It's merely that this book is published as one of a series called "A Brief History of …", and you often sense, sometimes because Crump comes right out and says it, that lots of interesting stuff is being left out.

Personally, given my technological ignorance, I would have appreciated just a few more pictures to explain how steam engines and their successive iterations and improvements actually worked. The big improvement that Watt made was that he contrived for the down beat of the steam engine to be powered, as well as the upbeat. And, he somehow made steam engines better at twiddling wheels than they had been hitherto. Another hugely important development was when they started using steam of much higher pressure, which is the sort of thing you can only do if the general standard of craftsmanship is high. A good idea like that in an unsatisfactory engineering environment is a recipe not for success, but for untimely explosions, of which there were plenty anyway. Later came the steam turbine, which means squirting a jet of steam at a big propellor, yes? A few more pictures might have fixed the details of these and other developments in my head a bit better, and also given a better idea of how big each of these things was, and what they looked like from the outside. The general point, however, I did get. The steam engine wasn't just one giant leap forward. It was a succession of important steps, resulting in a constantly improving power to weight ratio and a steadily widening range of applications. Crucial from the historical point of view was the moment when it was possible to put an engine on railway wheels that was powerful enough not only to drag itself along, but other loads also. But, there were plenty of other important moments in the story.

This, however, is a book which is strong on maps of railway systems and waterways in various parts of the world, less so on the ins and outs of the technology itself. That is because it is at least as much about the impact and context of the steam engine, about what circumstances made people invent and develop it and what they did with it, rather than merely what, in their various and successive forms, steam engines actually were. Never mind. The Internet (our internet mania being not unlike the mania that kicked off the railway age) is a big and most informative place, and at least I now know more of the words that I need to type into google to learn more.

I did enjoy the maps. One of my favourites shows the many early – pre-Stephenson's rocket - railways in the vicinity of the River Tyne (p. 149). The point being that the railway age had begun well before the Rocket made its first journeys between Stockton and Darlington in 1825. Railways as a technique for shifting stuff were actually centuries old by then, having a history that is entirely distinct from the matter of putting machines on them, to drag things along them. People, horses and gravity had been doing this for ages, until the late eighteenth century along rails made of timber rather than iron or steel. There are some very good pages about the development of rails to assist military engineers in their efforts to life earth out of trenches, and suchlike. The first application of the steam engine to railways was in the form of stationary engines at the end of short railway lines, dragging wagons along with ropes or chains.

That Tyneside map of ancient railways illustrates a general point about transport technology. Please now follow me along a slight digression.

I have long been fascinated by the ins and outs of the history of communications technology, which is of course heavily dependent upon transport, especially in the days when complicated messages could only travel as fast as a human message-carrier could. And a recurring story in the history of the technology of communication is how someone invents a new method of communicating, and everyone then says: hey, this is going to put a stop to … some earlier and much loved method of communication. Printed books, it was said, and then television, would kill the art of conversation. The internet will finish off books and television. And so on. But what really happens is that methods of communication combine and assist one another. People use emails not to stop meeting each other, but, among many other things, to arrange meetings and to continue the conversations started at those meetings. Television gives people new stuff to talk about, and it also sells books, for example the books on which television dramas are based. The internet doesn't kill off books either. On the contrary, one of the first mega-businesses of the Internet age is a bookstore. Physical books like this one that I am now writing about may in due course become a thing of the past, but virtual books will live on vigorously.

Similar things apply to transport. Someone invents a new way of travelling or of transporting stuff, but as likely as not and especially to begin with, the new system of transport revitalises the older methods rather than rendering them instantly obsolete.

What that map of the River Tyne shows is all the little railways which connected coal mines to … the River Tyne! The railways were all separate. They went downhill, with horses dragging the empty wagons up to the top again when they had been unloaded. Then, when the railway age as we now think of it got into its huge and interconnected and above all steam-driven stride, horses, far from being done away with, increased greatly in number, to transport people to and from railways stations, and to transport people into and within the huge new cities that the railways made all the huger. The horse population boomed in the steam age, before later forms of locomotion pushed both steam locomotives and horses, and smaller horse-drawn boats on smaller inland waterways, into the relative (but only relative) backwater than is the leisure industry.

Or consider those big rivers in America. There comes a point as you travel downstream on the upper reaches of such a river when it becomes navigable by ocean going ships, at which point there is invariably a big city where all the resulting loading and unloading gets done. But loading and unloading is cumbersome, especially in the absence of twentieth century cranes and the like. So instead, you can bind lots of little boats together, like so many tree trunks, and stick a super-powerful steam-powered tug boat on the front. Steam doesn't put a stop to smaller boats on smaller waterways. It instead greatly increases their productivity, even though the boats themselves are far too small to accommodate a steam engine actually on them. Are you thinking "containers"? Me too.

Railways and state power were always intermingled. In Britain, this mostly took the form of the politicking needed to contrive the lines of violated property rights that railways needed to get built at all. Then, the government was again "needed" (Crump has entirely conventional ideas about this) to compel railways to be operated more safely than might otherwise have happened quite so soon. Crump's political views seem to be conventionally centrist. He favours human advancement and prosperity, but takes it for granted that governments were needed to get railways started, and then to regulate them, impose safety regimes upon them, and so on. As a libertarian, I can't help wondering what might have happened to the steam age if landowners could simply have vetoed railways on their land if they felt inclined, and if those railways that did nevertheless materialise had been allowed to be as unsafe as their proprietors felt inclined for them to be. But, as is often said in pro-laissez-faire blogs like this one, the triumph of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century was only very partial.

In the USA, railways were all mixed up with the creation of new states of the union. Railways made it possible for new settlers to move in, and for them then to sell their produce to rest of the USA. And of course, railways played a huge part in the waging of the American Civil War, railway junctions, then and since, becoming important military objectives. I was charmed to read an oddly large number of pages in this book (pp. 140-146) about an amazing episode in the Civil War, upon which the movie The Great Locomotive Chase was based, which was one of the very first movies I ever saw. All I remembered, of course, was locomotives chasing one another. I didn't care why, and I assumed they'd made the whole story up. But not so. Now, I know more about who really was chasing whom and why. Many other late nineteenth century wars, with prominently featured railways, are referred to, most notably wars in China.

Railways and war is another topic that British-centric books about the steam age tend to neglect somewhat, apart from how the railways managed to keep going during World War 2 despite all the bombing, because British railways were probably more innocent of military motivation in their origins than the railways almost anywhere else in the world. In most countries, economic and national-strategic considerations tended to go hand in hand, giving rise to lots of financial corruption involving politically adept plutocrats, most especially in Russia, surprise surprise. In Russia the plutocrats got vast amounts of money from the government. In the USA, the plutocrats used their vast amounts of money to buy governments. The pattern in the world generally tended to be that the railways were built to aggrandise states and state military power, but then it was thought by the relevant national grandees, well, now that we've built these things, we might as well allow mere people to use these trains to transport themselves and their produce, if they would like to, which invariably many of them did.

I especially enjoyed the pages about Japan. I knew, very roughly, about how Commodore Perry first parked his ship off the coast of Japan and demanded that Japan get with the nineteenth century. I did not know, until I read this book, that when Perry made his second visit to Japan to sort out the details, he brought a train set with him:

Conforming to oriental custom, Perry, on his second visit, brought a variety of gifts, among which was a quarter-size model railway, complete with locomotive, tender and a carriage, with several miles of rails. The American visitors having laid a circular track - about a mile long - behind the reception hall at Yokohama, proceeded to show the assembled dignitaries what the train could do. They were overwhelmed. According to Perry's official record: 'Crowds of Japanese gathered around, and looked on the repeated circlings of the train with unabated pleasure and surprise, unable to repress a shout of delight at each blast of the steam whistle." One official actually rode the whole circuit, sitting on the roof of the diminutive carriage, and reported that the experience was 'most enjoyable'. Travelling at 20 mph was far beyond anything conceived possible in what was still a feudal state. ...

And the "assembled dignitaries" duly decreed that the railways should come to Japan. Their heads were full of armies which could then be transported hither and thither and which could then more easily rampage about in China and Korea. But much more entertaining, for me, was the story of how the new trains in Japan impacted upon the Japanese silk trade, which was the big economic story in Japan when the railways first arrived. When silk is first harvested, or whatever it is you do to silk when you first get your hands on it, you have then to spin it into silk thread very quickly. Wait more than a few hours and the silk stops working, apparently. This meant that the traditional Japanese silk industry required silk spinning, as well as harvesting, to be highly decentralised. Harvesting and spinning effectively had to be the one operation. But once railways started snaking their way across Japan, that all changed. Now it was possible to transport harvested silk to bigger, steam powered spinning … places, by train. If the train went through where you lived, then your silk harvesting stayed in business and prospered as never before. But if the train went elsewhere, your silk business collapsed. I knew nothing about any of this, until I read this book. In general, Crump observes, the railways centralised. They created huge new cities, with huge new business empires based in them, while causing many a small town to die.

In India, the same pattern was repeated, of politics leading and people following. The rulers, this time British, built their railways to do such things as suppress the Indian Mutiny, and then wondered if mere Indians might like to travel on them also. As many a dramatic photo tells us, Indians took to train travel with a passion. I am fond of writing at this blog about the game of cricket, which now serves as one of the great modern unifiers of India. Right up there with cricket is another British designed, Indian built wonder of the modern age, the Indian national railway system.

Ocean going liners figure prominently towards the end of Crump's story, as they should, and he credits Brunel with the key insight upon which the nature (very big) of modern ocean going steamships was based (p. 289):

Brunel, although no shipbuilder, had the fundamental insight that a substantial increase in size was the key to building a ship that could carry sufficient coal for crossing the Atlantic in either direction. Quite simply, with the increase of the dimensions of a vessel by any factor, its carrying capacity increases by the cube of that factor while the resistance to be overcome by its engine increases only by its square. With the help of this principle it is possible to determine the minimum dimensions of a steamship able to carry sufficient fuel for a voyage of any prescribed length - such as the distance involved in any Atlantic crossing.

This will seem banal to many of Samizdata's tech-savvy commentariat, but I had never before encountered this particular point about how much size matters, when it comes to steamships. Does any similar kind of principle apply to modern jet airliners, I wonder?

Crump makes much of the sinking of the Titanic, a story he tells at similar length (pp. 313-317) to his earlier telling of the story of the Great Locomotive Chase. His excuse is that the Titanic sinking drama illustrates the crucial contribution made by wireless telegraphy to ocean going liners and their voyages, and the "need" for the law to demand greater safety at sea. Had just one wireless telegrapher on a nearby ship been at work instead of having just a minute or two earlier gone to bed, all of the Titanic's passengers would have been saved. Having made a point of ignoring the movie-induced Titanic mania of recent years, I did not know this. Crump also earlier emphasised the contribution made by telegraphy of the wired sort to railways. Obviously communications technology is intimately mixed up with the story of transport, to the point where it is hard to separate the two. Think only of national newspapers and postal services everywhere, both impossible without the means to transport the messages.

A number of things make me suspect that this book was first written not as a history of the steam age generally, but rather as a history of the application of steam to transport. The final chapter, for example, is entitled: "The Eclipse of Steam Transport". Steam did utterly transform transport, but it did other things too, like spin that Japanese silk. Crump tells us little about how steam power was applied to making clothes, printing newspapers, and powering "industry" – i.e. industry of the sort that goes on inside huge and immobile factories. Crump describes steam engines before they climbed onto the rails, so to speak. And he also mentions the stationary steam engines that still throb away, still powered by coal and still generating the bulk of the modern world's electricity supplies. And, he makes the further point that steam power lives on in nuclear power stations, in the form of steam turbines supplied with steam heated by nuclear means. The steam age is still very much with us! But as a general observation, Crump tells us little about what steam did indoors during the railway and steamship age. I guess I should read this book.

Nevertheless, as you can surely tell, I enjoyed reading this book very much, being much more diverted by what it did say than in any way annoyed about anything it may plausibly be said to have omitted. That's usually the way with books reviewed by unpaid bloggers. Why read a book carefully enough to write about it if you aren't enjoying it?

I'll end this with a general point, about technology and technological history and about the people who made it, and continue to make it. One of the great intellectual divides of modern times is between those who take technological modernity for granted, and those who do not. Those of us who regularly write for or read Samizdata are surely in the latter camp. We know how much sheer graft, as well as intellectual insight and analysis, went into and goes into the development of steam engines, railway lines, steam locomotives, steamships, power stations, and cars and airplanes and computers and space rockets and nanotechnology and mobile phones and better washing up liquid and cheaper laser eye surgery and corn flakes, etc. etc. etc. We also know that the right economic policy setting is needed for such things to be devised, or even borrowed from elsewhere and applied. This stuff doesn't just design and make and operate itself. That much I do know about technology and its ongoing history, even if I know little of the technological detail, as I fear I have made only too clear in this review. This, fundamentally, is what I liked about this book. It celebrates the achievements of people who deserve to be celebrated, just as our current techno-wizards also deserve to be celebrated. True, a lot of what the steam age pioneers did was construct the technological sinews of war, as the book well explains. But that doesn't diminish the impressiveness of their achievements, or the debt that we, who are fortunate to live the almost uniquely peaceful and comfortable and entertained lives that we mostly do now live, still owe to them.

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I see that overnight, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple - now the largest firm in the US by market capitalisation - has resigned. His health has been a worry for many months and this announcement should come as a surprise to few. Even so, it represents something of a moment in the industry. Of course, the usual "dog in the manger" types will say that many others must claim credit for certain things, etc, etc, and they will have a point, as they do. Even so, given that entrepreneurship represents the only real way debt-laden countries can and will pull themselves out of their problems, it sometimes surprises me how, even in libertarian forums, the real-world business leaders we have attract as much bile as they do. And I am not talking about those who obviously benefit from corporate welfare, such as beneficiaries from tariffs, subsidies, eminent domain rulings, and the like. Even the more obviously free marketeer businessmen seem to get it in the neck from us. Perhaps we ought to step back a bit and realise that if this was so easy, why haven't we achieved such success? Perhaps that is a painful question too far.

(16)

A year ago I wrote about the Chinese monopoly position in Rare Earths and how unlikely it was to last. It seems I was correct, according to this item Glenn Reynolds linked to today:

Elk Creek, Neb. (population 112), may not be so tiny much longer. Reports suggest that the southeastern Nebraska hamlet may be sitting on the world’s largest untapped deposit of “rare earth” minerals, which have proved to be indispensable to a slew of high-tech and military applications such as laser pointers, stadium lighting, electric car batteries and sophisticated missile-guidance systems.

And the best part of it? The deposits are not in California!

(5)

It would seem that the government is about to amend copyright laws, so that it will be legal to "format shift" recorded music that you have legally bought to a different format. For instance, people will now be able to legally copy the music on a CD to their PC, or perhaps to an iPod or the music player of a mobile phone.

Ignoring for the moment the absurdity of the idea that government and a bunch of lobbyist lawyers could actually lead anyone anywhere, I am struck by the thought that the people such an amendment might have been most helpful to in 1997 were those in the music industry itself, which spent the best part of another decade attempting to preserve their existing business model of reselling people the same music over and over again every time there was a technology change. (As late as 2003, I heard an interview in which one such person stated that if the rampant piracy problem could not be solved, then the internet would simply have to be closed down. Alas, I didn't preserve the details for posterity).

If the music industry had actually been willing to acknowledge that there was a complete paradigm shift underway a little earlier, then it might have done slightly less badly out of it. Or at least, it might have managed to avoid becoming Steve Jobs' bitch, as ultimately happened.

Although another way of looking at it is that the industry managed somehow to find a fate that it actually deserved.

(6)

The good news: those polars bears killed by "global warming," were not.

From the AP:

Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into "integrity issues."

... observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds and "suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

Bad news for some, I reckon.

(26)

Rob Fisher, fellow Transport Blogger and a favourite blogger of mine generally, has a posting up at his personal blog about the coming-real-soon-now Asus Padfone. Instead of each of us having a phone and a computer with a screen, this gizmo will combine the two. When you want a phone, you use the phone. When you want a computer, you shove the phone into the screen.

The central point being that phones are now big enough and serious computers are now small enough, for a phone to contain a serious computer.

It seems like the future. The amount of stuff that can be done on a smartphone-sized device is about to hit some critical level. Already desktop PCs are only needed for high end games and serious number crunching. The PC has become a laptop has become a netbook has become a phone. The only problem is the ergonomics, and a single device with multiple form factors is a good solution.

Well, I don't know about that "only needed for high end games and serious number crunching" bit, but in principle this has to be right. Maybe not now, but any year now.

Asus has form (as in good form) for spotting when something has got small enough to be seriously different. A while back, they lead the world into genuinely portable and genuinely cheap computers, with the Asus Eee PC. I got one. At first I liked it, but eventually I got fed up with its geek-friendly but human-hostile operating system and with its just-too-small keyboard, so I sold it on to a geek child, and got a proper netbook with a proper operating system that I was able to work properly (not least because it was identical to the one on my big old home computer). Even so, despite my eventual disappointment with this Asus offering, I always liked and still like what it was trying to do.

This Asus Padfone immediately started ringing the same bells in my head. It looks like this Padfone, or something very similar, could be the natural successor to that netbook of mine, and to my regular phone, and to my ridiculously antique mobile phone, and to my Filofax, and even, in the fullness of time, to my big old home computer. Microsoft look out. Google really is taking over the world.

Asus also understands that low prices cause a lot more people to become interested in whatever it is. If this thing is as cheap as I hope it is, that will hurry things along, just like the ultra-cheap Eee PC did.

I will probably be holding off this time, waiting for others to respond with their versions of the same thing, and even then it may not really suit me. However, next time I meet Rob I will definitely be cross-examining him about this latest triumph of consumer capitalism. Despite all the financial chaos, they just keep on coming, don't they? Why can't schools, hospitals and, above all, banks be like this, getting more effective and cheaper and just all-round nicer with every year that goes by? Well, we know why. The rules for making these latter things should be a lot like the rules for making Padfones: make a Padfone if you want to and sell it to whoever will pay you what you ask. If you go bust, that's your problem. The rules for schools and hospitals and, above all, banks are instead sadly different.

There are several other recent postings up at Rob's Blog, and I recommend all readers here to have a scroll down there, if they haven't already done this recently.

(9)

While some of its members may genuinely believe they are doing good by their fellow human beings in protecting health and potentially dangerous things, as they think genetically modified plants to be, the dangers of the Precautionary Principle are highlighted to a stark degree by the activities of Greenpeace activists in Canberra, Australia. According to a report, trials in producing GM wheat have been badly damaged.

The persons who did this will, hopefully, be caught and punished with the full weight of the law. Remember, if these guys had their way, the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the decades leading up to the Industrial Revolution might not have happened, or at least to the same degree.

Here is an article by the excellent Ronald Bailey on the GM crops issue.

(11)

This was one of the more splendid comments that we have had on Samizdata in quite some time: David Gillies, regarding this manifest steaming pile: the deceptively named "World Health Organisation" claiming mobile phones increase the risk of brain cancer.. even though there has been no observed spike in brain cancer despite the explosive growth in the use of such phones world wide....

This has been headline news in every newspaper I have seen, including the leading daily here in Costa Rica, and none of 'em have been fit to wrap fish in (I'd wager there's a far higher carcinogenic propensity in the ink used to print this shit.) Non-ionising radiation? Check. Sub-milliwatt power levels? Check. No causative mechanism that survives the laugh test? Check. Decades of use and no detectable increment in tumours at the lax 2.0 relative risk for publication in a halfway-reputable journal? Check. Defeats the null hypothesis at the 95% confidence interval? Ha ha ha, oh my sides. Soundbite-ready quacks straining in their traces to leap into the running on CNN and Fox and Sky and the Beeb to peddle doom-mongering (but possibly book-selling) crap? Mais bien sur, a regiment of them. The disgusting WHO ready to dip its grubby fingers into the whole stew of idiocy and rent-seeking? Ho, yus, my chilluns, and when were they ever not? Pathetic.

If you cannot, within say 30 seconds, get a ballpark figure for the photon energy in microelectronvolts of an 1800 Mhz photon (and why that matters), or describe qualitatively what a femtowatt is (not quantitatively, oh no, that won't do at all) or give a fairly robust description of what '3 dB/octave' means when it comes to microwave absorption coefficients then shut your face, crawl back under your silly epidemiological stone, and die of something real and not imagined. Maybe the publication-hungry pseudoscientists that infest this field might be able to do all of the above as some sort of parlour trick, but the notion that your average journalist could is as laughable as spaniels doing differential equations. And this isn't the argumentum ad verecundiam, like it is with the global warming zealots. There's practically no-one in the hard sciences who thinks that microwave radiation is a causative agent in cancers. It's lies, sophistry and nonsense. The really big question to ask (like with the AGW scam) when you see a scientific fraud being perpetrated on this scale is, as ever, cui bono?

- David Gillies

(20)

Ultracapacitors are my bet for the way to replace gasoline fueled vehicles. Hydrogen is just not dense enough even in hydrides and there is no infrastructure for it. Batteries are too heavy, too short lived, have complex temperature and charging requirements to maximize life, take too long to charge and are not improving quickly enough. Synfuels are possible but require a lot of new plants and the fuel is going to be expensive.

Electricity, on the other hand, is available everywhere. Once you have the ability to connect a plug and 'fuel' your vehicle at least as quickly as you currently do and have a range equal or greater than you now have with gasoline or diesel, there is simply no contest.

The electric car, with a motor on each wheel, gives neck-snapping acceleration, handling and braking that are awesome and all in a much simpler package. No differential, no coolant system, no transmission, no high temperature combustion, no crankshaft, piston rings or rockers, no oiling system... in the ultimate electric car there is little more than batteries, power distribution, four motors and a bunch of computers to control them. As much as I loved my old MGB, the internal combustion engine is unlikely to outlast the middle of the century. It simply will not be able to compete.

A Tesla in every garage... I can deal with that.

(13)

Our own Dale Amon has just been named Space Activist of the Year by the National Space Society. Well done Dale.

(9)

In light of the recent killing of OBL and the use by the military of drones and other surveillance gizmos to track down where the villain was hiding out, it is worth noting that these pilot-less aircraft are not just in the hands of military people. You can get some pretty sophisticated ones via the regular commercial market, a fact that is both beguiling for aviation enthusiasts and modellists, and presumably, a bit of a concern for the military who want to keep the airspace all to itself.

Chris Anderson, head honcho at Wired, the techno magazine, has his own website devoted to the whole business of building and using the things. Anderson, of course, is also author of The Long Tail, one of those books that I need to read again.

On a related theme regarding drones, robots and high-tech in war and defence, here is another reference to a book by PW Singer, that I blogged about the other day in a piece about sea piracy.

(14)

There is finally some news on the Polywell fusion tests that are under funding by the Office of Naval Research. This, as you may remember, is the project started by Dr. Bussard before his death and the one 'small fusion' project most of us take very seriously.

The report that it operated the way it was supposed to says a great deal to those of us who have been following them for the last several years.

(10)

The impact of these devices on our civilisation has been immense, whatever certain Luddites might claim. Wired magazine has a nice item about the 50th anniversary of the first microchip to be patented.

(11)

I'm looking forward to spotting (and snapping) my first one of these on the streets of London. The telephoto lens and the iPhone, I mean, not the mere iPhone.

I was expecting such an add-on to be priced at well over a hundred quid, if only because it has such a rich-guy's-toy vibe about it. But actually it's around fifty. But, does it work well? As yet, there appear to be no reviews. But click here to read the press release. In German.

My hope, and actually my expectation, is that as the years roll by and as cheap and cheerful camera technology continues to develop, my immense archive of cheap and cheerful snaps of cheap and cheerful cameras in action will get ever more fun to look back at.

A drawback of this lens might be, for some, that it makes it clear that you are definitely using your iPhone to take photos. There is no doubt that many of the powers that be would like to ban photography in public places altogether, by everyone except their noble selves, either because they really would or just for something to do. Historically, one of the more significant achievements of mobile phones with cameras may prove to be that they have made it impossible for some goon in a uniform to tell if you are taking photos, or merely texting or some such thing. If challenged while doing the former, you can protest that you were merely doing the latter. Simply, they couldn't and can't ban public photo-ing because they can't spot when it's happening.

(29)

A friend just emailed me to say that he is moving to a place in France somewhere, providing the name but nothing else. As it turned out, I guessed right about where this is, approximately, but it was only a guess. Within a minute I was able to turn a mere guess into pinpoint accuracy. It's like having a complete A-Z map of the entire world with you at all times. Yeah, yeah, like, you didn't know this. Of course you know this. But for me, resorting to something like Google Maps is still something I have to remember, from time to time, that I can do. And when I do, I feel like an Ethiopian of a hundred years ago seeing his first ocean liner.

If you grew up with this kind of thing, or if it arrived when you were a mere teenager, you wouldn't regard it as very remarkable. No more so than I regard electric light if I flick a switch as remarkable, or fresh water if I turn on a tap. But, I didn't and it didn't.

Not everything in the world is getting better to put it mildly (and see below), but things like this are.

(12)

In response to a recent response of the economic collapse of Portugal, commenter EndivioR had the following to say:

I lived in Spain during Gonzalez and Aznar. Foolishly, as I saw motorways roll out across the plains, buildings shoot up, high-speed trains whistle past, and cool graphics appear on TV news intros, I thought that some seriously good country management was going on. Now I realise that "economic miracle" means what it says. A miracle is something that defies the laws of nature. Spain is a mirage floating over the quicksand of unredeemable loans. I hope there are still people around there who know how to steer a donkey.

Oddly enough, Spain and Portugal remind me of something I have seen before. In the 1990s, we had a telco bubble. In mobile telephony, most places had two or three digital 2G mobile networks built. The spectrum was usually obtained cheaply by these companies, and the resultant networks were valuable, and useful, and there was a good return on the capital put up to build them. One or two companies made enormous amounts of money by figuring out something was happening early in the piece, building suddenly immensely valuable companies, and selling out, often to incumbent telcos who had read things less well than they had. Telecoms equipment manufacturers made huge amounts of money as their business was suddenly much bigger than it had been before. Other people got excited by this, and governments got excited by this, and there was an enormous piling in by new entrants to this industry. The equipment manufacturers (many government backed) wanted to follow up their first round of sales with subsequent rounds, and there was massive pressure to keep building. Many of the people and organisations who entered this business late were, shall we say, more dubious than some of the earlier ones. In many cases, they were the well connected rather than the prescient.

One thing that came from this, towards the end of the bubble, was a lot of what is known as "vendor finance". Someone probably well connected wants to make money by building a telco, and probably selling that company on to someone else once it was built and had a customer base. A telecoms equipment manufacturer would lend the new telco money which the telco would then use to pay the manufacturer to build the network. This was all great as long as the network could be build, credit remained cheap, the network could gain customers and profits could be gained from these customers. In short, it was great as long as the bubble continued. Lots of people were making money as long as the bubble continued, and didn't really care how it continued.

Of course, few of these things remained true. Credit became expensive, and what customers newer telcos could gain were very low value customers. For a time, mobile phone companies were valued simply on the number of customers, with little attention paid as to whether they were good customers. However, this eventually stopped, as it had to. Credit became expensive. Vendor financed networks defaulted on their debts and went bust. The companies that did the vendor financing went bust too. Bye bye Lucent. Bye bye Onetel. Amazingly, the banking system as a whole did not go bust for more than five years after this.

Which makes me think of Spain and Portugal. These countries joined the EC (as it was then) in the early 1980s after many decades of authoritarian government: poor, and woefully lacking in infrastructure. They lacked the capital markets, the expertise and the international connections to build modern infrastructure themselves, but there was the potential to catch up rapidly if they were exposed to international markets and international practice.

The avenue through which they did this was the EC and later EU, of course. The benefits of rejoining the international economy were immense, and EU aid and expertise did help them and pay for infrastructure. The scale of this in the 1980s and early 1990s was surprisingly modest, actually, and the infrastructure that was built was fairly hardly argue with. Motorways from Madrid to Malaga, or Lisbon to Porto, eminently sensible, and the economic value created by the motorways obviously exceeded costs. Given that they were and are tolled, a fair bit of this value was even captured by the people who built and financed them. Looking back now, it seems fairly obvious that market mechanisms could have build the 1980s and 1990s developments. The sad thing is that market mechanisms did not build them, and Spain and Portugal instead got used to the EU way of doing this. Money flowed from France and (particularly) Germany and French and German banks via the EU institutions, and this money flowed back to France and Germany to the companies who did a lot of the work in building them. Vendor financing, shall we say. No particular harm was done, as long as the infrastructure being built was actually economically sensible.

However, the French and Germans and French and German banks, and the Spanish and the French and German engineering companies got used to this. The inevitable greasing of wheels and protection and paying off of the well connected created a while class of people whose interests were in this continuing, long after anything was economically sensible. So in the late 1990s and 2000s, Spain and Portugal got huge networks of motorways in absurd and pointless places. (One evening several years ago, I drove in the evening along the old road from Regua to Vila Real in Portugal. It was a scary, winding, narrow single carriageway. The next day I discovered that there was a new road, which was a beautiful dual carriageway, four lane motorway, apparently being used only by me). These later ones tend not to be tolled, as if you were to toll them it would become immediately obvious how few cars were using them and how economically pointless they are. Then, things got nuttier. Spain got an enormous network of high speed trains. These are particularly good from the EU aid point of view, as there are two different European technologies - one French and the other German - and the contracts can alternate between the two. Pointless, but great in terms of being financed by German banks and then bought from the Germans. Then Spain got the world's largest system of wind farms. The further we went along, the more pointless the things being built actually became. We started more or less with sense, but because the incentives were all wrong, this evolved into madness.

So here we are. The EU vendor finance bubble has ended. The French and (particularly) the Germans created this mess, because their banks and their industrial companies were benefiting in the short term. Blaming the Spanish is beyond the point. The Spanish let the Germans lend them money and then build them stuff with the lent money, and they were foolish to do this, but it appeared they were having a rapid miracle of modernity, and given the history, I can see why they wanted to believe this. The German banks are screwed, after doing the bidding of the German government. If the German government has to bail them out, well they created the mess.

Except, the political class made the mess. As that political class keep wining and dining one another as they discuss how to make things worse fix things, it is actually the German taxpayer doing the bailing out. The mess is certainly not the fault of the ordinary bloke making Volkswagens in the factory in Wolfsburg, but he has to pay for it. Hopefully the anger of such people is with the German political class and the European political class, rather than with "The Spanish" or "The Southern Europeans" amorphously, because it is the political class who are responsible.

In the case of the vendor financed telco bubble that I discussed earlier, the companies that did the lending and the borrowing generally both went bankrupt, their assets gobbled up by new and more sensible companies. In the case of governments that have done the same thing, cleaning up is messier. The German and Spanish political classes are not just going to go away, however much we wish they would.

Perhaps there is anger with the German political class. Support for the traditional Christian Democrats and Social Democrats appears to be in serious decline, which has led to support for the Green party approaching 30%. Which is not going to help. It is hard to see any scenarios in which we are not totally fucked.

(21)

Instapundit has just asked if, in the words at the top of the piece he links to, Israel will be the third nation on the moon.

Oh I hope so. I really do hope so.

I am an optimist, in the sense that I always want to be an optimist, which I suppose is what an optimist is. But of late, being an optimist has been very hard. This notion, even as a mere possibility, has cheered me up no end. The nearer it gets to actually happening, the happier I will be about it.

And the more all the right people, as in the deeply and repellently wrong people, will get angry.

(4)

Computer modellers have long been accused of inventing extreme weather events at some deliberately vague point in the future. But here is an Australian story about how another kind of modelling invented extreme weather conditions at an exact moment in the recent past, that other forms of actual measurement didn't register.

The claim by SEQWater in its official report that a "one-in-2000-year" rainfall event occurred over the Wivenhoe Dam at a critical stage on January 11 has been widely reported in the media and cited by senior public servants to justify the near loss of control of the dam at the time.

But no such rainfall event was measured by any rainfall gauges. Instead, the claim was manufactured by SEQWater after it modelled the rapid rise of levels in the dam, repositioned rainfall data to an area immediately upstream of the dam, and then doubled it.

After extrapolating in this unusual way to achieve an extreme number, the SEQWater report states: "Rainfall of this intensity and duration over the Wivenhoe Dam lake area at such a critical stage of a flood event was unprecedented.

"The resulting run-off could not be contained without transition to (an operating strategy that led to the operator opening the dam's gate for huge releases)."

But:

Senior independent engineer Michael O'Brien, who has spent the past nine weeks analysing the performance of the dam and SEQWater, said that while the rainfall was heavy, he did not believe it was extreme and he doubted it was ever close to the range claimed by the operator.

This is no mere academic spat. SEQW's allegedly flawed decision making contributed hugely to the serious flooding that recently hit Queensland.

Mr O'Brien, who has mounted a strong case that the devastating floods in and near Brisbane would have been almost completely avoided with better management of the dam, said the one-in-2000-year event was an "invention" that could not be taken seriously.

The modelling-trumps-measurement vibe to all this is the reason that climate skeptics like Anthony Watts are already onto this.

Delingpole hasn't yet had a gloat about it all, but doubtless he will, because this just begs to be amplified into a big story, of the sort that the world's Old School Media will either run with, or make further climate-prats of themselves by ignoring.

(5)

Tim Worstall, the redoubtable debunker of flat-earth economic nonsense, comes across a particularly juicy specimen in relation to the recent terrible earthquake in Japan. It is worth quoting at some length, because this "localism" stuff needs to be endlessly trashed:

Take local food. So, if everyone in North-Eastern Japan were to be reliant upon local food supplies then everyone in North-Eastern Japan would now be condemned to starvation in the next month or so. Not just the ten or twenty thousand who have already died, but the hundreds of thousands, millions, that make up the entire population. For in the wake of an earthquake that destroyed much and a tsunami that swamped the rest, there is no food, no saved food storage and no damn chance of growing any for the forseeable future.

"Localism” would kill all of these people. And the same would be true of localism in Pakistan when it floods, Queensland when it floods, Cockermouth when it floods, any damn where when there’s a drought and, in fact, any part of the planet that could be hit by any of those natural disasters which a vengeful planet can plop upon us, from the flood and drought already mentioned through to hurricanes, cyclones, potato or banana blight and plagues of frogs

(18)

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour.

- Ross McKitrick abhors Earth Hour.

(13)

Well, I am back in the UK after a very busy - but also very enjoyable - trip to the US, visiting both New York and San Francisco. One of the problems in flying eastwards from somewhere such as San Francisco, as I and my wife did yesterday, is the jetlag. People have their own solutions or countermeasures, such as making sure you drink plenty of water to combat in-flight dehydration, and so on. I rarely sleep much on aircraft unless I have the luxury of a very roomy seat and can recline it. Being the cheapskate I am, I flew economy, and kept partly awake for most of the 10-hour flight. (I flew Virgin Atlantic, which I think is pretty good).

So what to do? Well, a number of friends of mine in the US recommend Melatonin. You can buy this easily enough in any decent US drugstore. In the UK, so I am told, you have to get it via prescription. But there appear to be websites where you can buy it, so I am not sure what the legal issues are, if any. I took a tablet last night, slept the sleep of the righteous, and now feel fine. It does not necessarily work for everyone, but it works like a charm for me. I am told that you should avoid caffeine and booze for a while before taking the pill and hitting the bed.

I first read about this substance via the Extropian crowd of friends - a group of futurists and transhumanists - back in the early 1990s. Melatonin is a substance that is produced by the body, but it reduces with old age, and some have argued that taken in the right quantities and used sensibly, that it has beneficial health effects. Here is a Wikipedia item on Melatonin. I know people who have suffered from insomnia, and it is no joke. So something that might handle that issue can make a big difference to quality of life.

(77)

Incoming from Michael Jennings, which started with the link to this Fukushima update piece in The Register (subtitled "Still nothing to get in a flap about") which at the end says this:

Reaction to our earlier piece praising the actually rather brilliant response of the Fukushima reactors and their operators in the quake's wake has shown that hoary myths and legends surrounding Chernobyl persist, and that one will still, even after all this time, generally be pilloried for suggesting that Chernobyl – far and away the worst nuclear incident ever which didn't involve an atomic bomb – was genuinely not that serious.

We here at the Reg attended the launch of this rather excellent recent book, Flat Earth News, in which veteran Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies dared to include the Chernobyl myths of thousands dead (actually the established figure is 56) alongside other great, baseless modern scares like the Millennium Bug.

Davies said that nothing else he has ever done in his life earned him as much flak as that.

Michael says:

I think most people are unfamiliar with the story of what actually happened at Chernobyl in 1985, beyond "There was a meltdown". Basically, pretty much every possible fuckup happened one after another (from reactor design, to reactor management, to employee supervision, to safety procedures (there weren't any, quite seriously) to after the fact disaster recovery. This of course had little to do with problems with nuclear power and quite a bit to do with problems of the Soviet Union. Not that I need to tell you this.

But I do need to pass it on.

(17)

Instapundit linked yesterday to a fascinating little Slashdot titbit about the price of digital books. Apparently, a crime writer called John Locke has lowered the price of his latest book from around what a book book costs to make and distribute, to a price much nearer to what an eBook costs to write and distribute, that is to say, he has dropped his price by about ninety percent. And he has been doing far better with this new arrangement than he did with the old one.

'These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale,' says Locke. 'And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses.

I certainly pause. For as long as eBooks cost the same as books, then I will prefer books, because I am used to books and eBooks are like … well, I don't know what they're like exactly, and at ten quid a go or whatever, I can't be bothered to find out. But when eBooks start costing a tenth of what books cost, that is to say, less even than remaindered or second-hand books, then I'll probably do a rethink.

Since writing the above, I have discovered that quite a few commenters on the Slashdot piece are of the exact same mind as me about eBooks.

It all reminds me earily of the early price of DVDs, which I recall as one of the oddest episodes in recent techno-biz history. For a fleeting little moment, DVDs were priced according to a "logic" that said that, since DVDs enable you to watch a movie lots of times over, that means that the proper price for a DVD is several times the price of a cinema ticket. Seriously, they thought they could get away with charging about forty quid for the things. Which, by the way, explains the ridiculously elaborate cases that individual DVDs still typically get sold in. When DVDs started out, they thought they were selling something almost unimaginable in its luxuriousness. They thought they were selling an even better version of those enormous metallic discs that they used to sell at about a hundred quid a pop to millionaires of the sort who really did have real home cinemas. Which they sort of were. But that didn't mean that the rest of us were willing to pay millionaire money to get our hands on a decent DVD collection. We could already guess what DVDs cost to make (not a lot) and until we saw that fact reflected in the prices we were being asked to pay, we sat on our hands.

And that is what has surely been going on during the last year or two with eBooks. They haven't charged for eBooks like they were hardbacks, but they have looked at what they consider to be the added convenience when deciding about price, rather than looking at the cost to them of making and distributing the product and the consequent opportunity to reach a whole new raft of customers with a dramatically reduced price. A few pioneers willing to pay off the development costs of the new gizmos have paid for these early eBooks. But now, eBooks will surely plummet in price, just as DVDs did.

Occasionally people tell me that I should write a book. I'm pretty sure that will never happen, but the eBook phenomenon, which I sense is about to get truly phenomenal (both in how books are read and in how they are created), may change my mind about that.

(13)

This is a development which, despite whatever natural skepticism that I might have about such items, could be enormously positive for the millions of people - not just the very old - who fall victim to the terrible disease of Alzheimer's.

(3)

This is a funky-looking camara from Sony - one of its "Alpha" models. When I first saw this picture over at Engadget, I thought it was an underwater camera - I am planning on doing more scuba diving later this year. Then I realised it was just a transluscent design.

I like this selection of odd-looking cameras. Some of them look as if they were whisked up by Q Branch. "Now James, this is something I am particularly proud of......"

(14)

Remarkable developments are in train at London's Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda. In a guest posting at Bishop Hill, Mr and Mrs Josh (Mr Josh also does the cartoons at Bishop Hill) provide a fascinating and enticing review of The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:

Book your tickets now, this play is a must-see comedy.

It has everything - more accurate climate science than a BBC documentary (ok, that's not exactly hard), brilliantly funny and wonderfully staged.

The drama centres on university climate scientist, Dr Diane Cassell, played superbly by Juliet Stevenson, whose research on sea levels in the Maldives shows no rising trend in sea levels.

This puts her at odds with Professor Kevin Maloney, Head of Dept Earth Sciences, played by James Fleet (sinisterly morphed from Hugo, in the Vicar of Dibley) whose main aim is to attract more funding to the department by toeing the consensus line on Climate Change.

When she publishes her research and expresses her skeptical views, notably on Newsnight to Jeremy Paxman, she becomes the focus of some very direct persecution.

Add in Phoebe, her daughter, and Ben, her carbon-obsessed first-year student, plus an ex-marine security guard and the stage is set. Pure comedy ensues as Ben follows the logic of his beliefs, refusing to keep warm, travel in any petroleum-based transport, and considering suicide since his vegetarian diet causes excessive methane production. Phoebe is ahead of him; severely anorexic she is at real risk of not making it. Both characters are played with worrying fragility that conveys lives overshadowed by fear, battling to understand the issues or find a set of rules to live by. Their plight is all too similar to that of Diane, struggling to work out if the death threats from environmentalists should be taken seriously.

In a feat of Montfordian proportions nearly all the major recent climate change stories are woven into the play: the lack of sea level rise, the politicisation of science by the IPCC, Glaciergate, the logarithmic effect of CO2 (in a way you will never forget), the misanthropy of some environmentalist groups, the 'one-tree' hockey stick, and, of course, Climategate. But the issues are put on the table, without arm twisting, encouraging the audience to go out and do their own research.

Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed and felt to one of those who has felt shut out. No anti-lefty dramas - e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis - have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn't been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things. What's the point? And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes. It stays at home surfing the net or watching its preferred telly shows and movies. If it is like me, it blogs.

Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain's theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly "issues" out there that we haven't done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven't allowed us to?

Never forget that theatre folk love a big row, provided only that the row isn't too big, as it would be if they took at serious whack at Islam. They love to push the boundaries, not too far, but just that little bit beyond what is entirely safe. They love to make mischief, to get everyone shouting at each other. They love to take the piss out of whoever happens at any particular moment to be the pompous and hypocritical elite, because, potentially, maybe, that will sell tickets, contrive bums on seats. Okay, most British thesps are lefties themselves, but many of those lefties are theatricals first, lefties second, and in quite a few other cases, on the quiet, so I surmise, not actually proper lefties at all, really, even though they dress like lefties and talk like lefties.

A earlier key moment in British theatrical history happened in the late nineteen fifties. British live theatre was then the Conservative Party at play, watching third-rate Noel Coward imitations consisting of brittle, well-dressed upper middle class chat in implausibly opulent living rooms with big floor-to-ceiling French windows at the back, centre stage. That is a caricature but not that much of one. But suddenly, or so it felt, all that was smashed to pieces by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and all that followed from it. Look Back in Anger was also, by the way, first presented at the Royal Court. Perhaps my view of all that is a bit myopic, because the nearest theatre to my home when I was a kid was the Windsor Rep, which, I seem to recall, showed third-rate Noel Coward imitations just about all the time. But I suspect I have it about right, even if those closer to theatrical happenings then had felt in their water that the Angry Young Man upheaval had been coming for some time and thus remember it as a somewhat more gradual thing. I'm not saying that The Heretic is in the same class, as a play or as a culturally explosive event, as Look Back in Anger. I haven't seen The Heretic yet. But this new play may perhaps, with hindsight, come be seen as one of the bigger paving stones that paved the way for something that is more like Look Back in Anger.

Goodness knows, Britain certainly contains plenty of anger just now.

Conveniently for me, the Royal Court Theatre is in Sloane Square, which is only a longish walk or a short bus or tube ride from where I live. I'm giving a talk on Monday. As soon as that's out of the way, I will pop around to the Royal Court and fix to see The Heretic for myself.

(7)

Leaving aside current affairs for the second, feast your tired eyes on these absolute beauties of motorcar design. Ralph Lauren certainly has an exceptional collection of classics. My favourite is the mid-60s Ferrari.

(32)

You can't blame them. It would go to anybody's head.

You can, in a way, blame Frederick Lindemann, the first (and last) Viscount Cherwell.

Apart from the facts that he more or less founded Oxford physics and so got a laboratory named after him and was some sort of scientific adviser to Churchill, most of what I know about Lindemann I learned today, from this site, aimed at children in secondary schools, and Wikipedia.

Lindemann ought to be more famous. He developed the first theory of how to recover when an aeroplane goes into a spin, and learned to fly so that he could repeatedly and dangerously put it to the test on his own aircraft. Umpteen pilots owe him their lives. Umpteen Germans owe him their deaths: his hatred of Nazism was "almost pathological" and - well, let Wikipedia give you the flavour:

When Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Lindemann as the British government's leading scientific adviser ... Lindemann established a special statistical branch, known as 'S-Branch', within the government, constituted from subject specialists, and reporting directly to Churchill. This branch distilled thousands of sources of data into succinct charts and figures, so that the status of the nation's food supplies (for example) could be instantly evaluated. Lindemann's statistical branch often caused tensions between government departments, but because it allowed Churchill to make quick decisions based on accurate data which directly affected the war effort, its importance should not be underestimated ... In 1940, Lindemann supported the experimental department MD1. He worked on hollow charge weapons, the sticky bomb and other new weapons ... "In his appointment as Personal Assistant to the Prime Minister no field of activity was closed to him. He was as obstinate as a mule, and unwilling to admit that there was any problem under the sun which he was not qualified to solve. He would write a memorandum on high strategy one day, and a thesis on egg production on the next" ... Following the Air Ministry Area bombing directive on 12 February 1942, Lindemann presented the dehousing paper to Churchill on 30 March 1942, which advocated area bombardment of German cities to break the spirit of the people ... Lindemann also played a key part in the battle of the beams, championing countermeasures to the Germans use of radio navigation to increase the precision of their bombing campaigns.

Lindemann's achievements in science, though distinguished, have been surpassed by those of other scientists. But never before or since has a single scientist, in his role as a scientist, been so close to the seat of power. He was like a Grand Vizier of old. His name may not be that famous, even among scientists, but his role in the Great Drama has become a folk memory; a fantasy.

In the 1950s Isaac Asimov, writing under the pseudonym Paul French, produced an enjoyable series of science fiction novels for teenagers featuring David "Lucky" Starr, Space Ranger. (In which occurs the first known appearance of the lightsaber trope. I didn't know that.) Like the Lone Ranger, Lucky has a faithful sidekick. Like James Bond - whose career began at about the same time - Lucky has gadgets. And backup. On Lucky's wrist there is a tattoo which is invisible until Lucky exerts his will, triggering some chemicals or hormones or something, which makes the tattoo become visible. Then they sit up, take notice, and hasten to do what he says, because the tattoo reveals that he is a member - indeed, the youngest ever member - of the Council of Science.

The Council of Science!

Quoting Wikipedia again:

In a later novel in the series, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, the Council of Science is described this way: "In these days, when science really permeated all human society and culture, scientists could no longer restrict themselves to their laboratories. It was for that reason that the Council of Science had been born. Originally it was intended only as an advisory body to help the government on matters of galactic importance, where only trained scientists could have sufficient information to make intelligent decisions. More and more it had become a crime-fighting agency, a counterespionage system. Into its own hands it was drawing more and more of the threads of government."

And just for a while a year or two back it all looked like coming true. Lindemann's heirs back in the saddle again. Maybe not the tattoos, but the Scientist taking the President's calls, speaking with grave wisdom to the frightened assemblies and governments of mankind.

You can't really blame them, can you? For remembering their time of glory and feeling just a smidgeon of pleasure that those days were here again?

From the story quoted by Brian in the post below this one:

Scientists have called for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions, as world leaders meet in Cancun for the latest round of talks on climate change.

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The Atlantic Monthly has a profile of Freeman Dyson, a scientist and contrarian who, I would hazard to guess, is known and has been read by a few regulars around these parts. It is okay up to a point - there are some nice biographical details to spice things up - but then it comes up with the following:

"That humanity has been kind to the planet is not a possible interpretation, not even for a moment—certainly not for anyone who has been paying the slightest attention at any point in the 4,700 years of human history since Gilgamesh logged the cedar forest of the Fertile Crescent."

So I presume that instances such as the spectacular achievements of land reclamation by the Dutch over the centuries - turning tidal waters into productive farmland, for example, don't count?

On it goes:

"That we repair our damage to the planet is a laughable assertion. It is true that the air is better now in London, and in Los Angeles too. Collars do blacken more slowly in both those places. Some rivers in the developed world are somewhat cleaner, as well: the Cuyahoga has not burned in many years. But it is also true that the Atlantic is afloat with tar balls, and that detached sections of fishnet and broken filaments of longline drift, ghost-fishing, in all our seas. Many of the large cities of Africa, South America, and Asia are megalopolises of desperate poverty ringed by garbage. Vast tracts of tropical rain forest, the planet’s most important carbon sink, disappear annually, burned or logged or mined. Illegal logging is also ravaging the slow-growing boreal forests of Siberia. The ozone hole over Antarctica continues to open every southern spring, exposing all life beneath to unfiltered ultraviolet rays. African wildlife is in precipitous decline."

These are assertions not backed up by actual numbers or clear sources in the article. They are just trotted out as "facts". In Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, he points out, if my reading of that book is correct, that much of the data on resource depletion and species loss, etc, is wildly exaggerated, and Lomborg was able to point this out by using publicly disclosed data from the very sources so very often cited by the doomsters. The Atlantic's article does, at least, concede that in the richer nations of the West, such as the UK, rivers have been cleaned up to some degree (as in the Thames), and air pollution of some kinds is far less - the smogs that were familiar in Victorian London are things of the past. What this article is talking about in fact is more about poverty; but as living standards rise and profit-making businesses look to wring out efficiency gains, so the use of fossil fuels to deliver a given level of output goes down. This has been a fairly widely observed fact. In the US, for example, thanks to improved efficiency as firms look to cut costs, less oil/coal is needed to produce a given amount of stuff now than was the case 100 years ago. Here are some figures from the US Energy Agency.
I suspect the reason why Dyson has got up the nose of the author of this piece is his essential optimism and enjoyment of the idea of human progress, his belief that science and technology can fix all the real or perceived problems, including Man-made global warming. He has likened the Green movement to socialism, and of course that really gets the temperatures rising. The truth, after all, often stings.

I found the tone of the article somewhat patronising, to be honest. Here is this fearesomely bright guy and he's a Denier! The shame of it.

On a related theme, I have just received my copy of Tim Worstall's Chasing Rainbows. I'll try and post a review soon.

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I ran across this item in a Jane's Newsletter this morning:

US, Japan agree to diversify rare earth minerals. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara agreed on 28 October that diversifying sources of rare earth minerals was a priority in the wake of China's freeze on exports to Japan. These minerals are indispensible to modern defence systems and see commercial use in mobile phones, wind turbines, televisions and hybrid electric drives

Rare earth elements, with names like Yttrium, Scandium, Lanthanum and Praeseodymium, are critical to a modern industrial society. They appear in lasers, high tech alloys, superconductors, and much else. China is applying Mercantilist practices to corner a larger share of the global market in high end electronics. They are the largest producer of the strategic REE's and see this as an advantage in a geopolitical sense as well.

It will not work however. They may well be the current largest producer, but these elements exist all over the world. In the short term they will gain an advantage. Over the medium to longer term they will accomplish the same thing ITAR regulations accomplished for the United States. They will create a thriving industry elsewhere and it will eventually 'eat their lunch'.

To paraphrase an old saw: "You can't fool Mother Market."

(2)

Do you have seven and a half minutes to spare out of your crowded, creative, busy life? I recommend that you find it, and watch this bit of video, now conveniently viewable at Bishop Hill, this video being ... well, see the title of this posting.

Of it, the good Bishop says:

This was posted in the comments on WUWT. I'm not sure if it's recent or not, but it hasn't been on YouTube for long. I've never seen it before.

Me neither. It's as good a short summary of the whole Hockey Stick furore (Bishop Hill's book about it all being a much longer version of the same story), what it is, why it matters, and so on, as you could hope to find.

The content of this snatch of video is impressive, of course. But I especially love McKitrick's calm tone of voice and measured manner.

How those climate warmists must hate the internet. They're still at it, by the way.

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Rees and the Royal Society are seeking ever greater roles for science in the political sphere. Politicians, who are suffering from a historic inability to define their purpose, take the authority this lends them with ever more enthusiasm. But this has resulted in a qualitative shift in the character of science. Where once it provided the means to liberate human potential, it now exists to regulate it. Instead of ‘speaking truth to power’, science increasingly speaks official truth for official power. The result is bad politics and bad science.

- Ben Pile of Climate Resistance asks What's Next for the Royal Society?, the above quote being his concluding paragraph. Linked to by Bishop Hill. Suggested by Michael Jennings, who is on his travels and couldn't post it himself.

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…the value of a scientific theory is judged by its power to predict – not in the sense of “psychic” predictions headlined in supermarket tabloids, but in the sense of predicting further experimental results. One failed prediction is enough to torpedo a theory. Success with every prediction, on the other hand, means only that it has survived everything thrown at it thus far. So, if evolution is valid, the newer discoveries made since its inception ought to be consistent with it. Apart from some haggling among specialists over relatively minor details, this has turned out to be overwhelmingly the case. Darwin and others predicted the essential properties of inherited generic units, even though genes and chromosomes were unknown at that time. From evolutionary theory, DNAs from different species should exhibit a branching pattern that reflects the same time sequence of divergence as it is deduced by other methods; they do. The primitive metabolic chemistry of ancestral organisms should be discernible in today’s organic cells; it is. There shouldn’t be much difference in the genetic code inherited by all organisms; there isn’t. And so it goes.”

“And of the predictive power of creationism? Can it predict which band in a series of tree rings should indicate the same age as a given mix of carbon isotopes? Or the tidal record that ought to be found written into fossil corals by the moon’s orbital motion of several hundred million years ago? Does it have anything to say about the composition of the early atmosphere and the kinds of minerals that would be formed as a consequence – their chemical nature, where they should be located, and at what depths we should expect to find them today? Can creationism, in fact, give a hint of any future finding? Not a one. It operates with hindsight only. Because of its built-in unfalsifiability it can cobble together an explanation of anything at all – but only after the fact as established by other means. As a method of prediction it is sterile.”

James P. Hogan, Minds, Machines and Evolution, in the chapter, “The Revealed Word of God, pages 174 and 175. Hogan wrote good SF and non-fiction, although this Wikipedia entry (treat with some care), suggests he also was a Holocaust denier, which is a bit like finding out that your close friend is selling hard drugs to teenagers. He died in July this year.

As some may know, I wrote a while back about what I saw as an unconvincing attempt by the UK journalist Christopher Booker to play the victim card and assume that advocates of AGW scepticism and intelligent design proponents (i.e., creationists), were both equally victims of intolerance from the scientific community. But actually, as one commenter – I think it was Counting Cats at his own blog – pointed out, there is more in common between AGW alarmists, with their almost religious approach, and creationists.

The reason why I keep returning to this topic is that for all that I am unbudgeable on tolerance for all manner of views, barking mad or eminently sane, the point is that if we are going to be able to resist some of the more oppressive demands of AGW alarmists, it pays not to ally ourselves with what I regard as seriously flawed ideas, such as creationism. It is the sort of thing that will be seized upon by the AGW alarmists, in their quest to treat any dissent as examples of bad science. Just sayin'.

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I have been busy travelling lately, so not much opportunity to post much on the site at the moment, but I could not resist this.

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In case you missed it, Apple is already the second biggest corporation in the world in terms of capitalization and is poised to pass Exxon as number one, possibly this winter with the iPad this year’s most coveted Xmas gift. The Silicon Valley company is sitting on some 50 billion in cash, pretty well positioned to do whatever it takes to maintain their technological/aesthetic edge. That’s one helluva long way from two young guys in a garage, tinkering with a computer. It’s close to the most extraordinary business story of all time.

- Roger L. Simon. Today I wrote out a cheque for a new super-fast computer, but not an Apple Mac, a PC. But, what kind of purgatory would the PC be in now, without the Mac keeping it semi-honest and semi-friendly and semi-nice-to look-at? Thank you Bill Gates, but thank you even more: Steve Jobs.

(15)

That Tim Evans certainly gets about. The last time I had cause to mention him here, he was emailing me about a Cobden Centre scheme to put Austrian economics on the map. Now, with another hat on that I have not seen him wearing before, he is emailing everyone of consequence in the known universe about this (read the whole thing here - it is just over twenty pages long), which is about how the British Government should allow rather than smother the UK version of the space industry, smother having been its preferred policy until now.

And you know? This just might work. If I were the British Government just now, I would be highly receptive to anything which I could call Doing Something, which did not Cost Too Much, and which preferably hardly cost anything at all. True, the report's author James C. Bennett does recommend a few fact finding junkets for British regulators, to enable them to learn how to create the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, which is must be, he says:

... predictable, sensible, provide reasonable guarantees of safety and make the UK a venue of choice for space operations ...

Why can the rules not be along the lines of: do what you want with your own property, provided it is within the laws of contract (e.g. not deafening to people who have been promised no deafening), provided nobody is swindled or deliberately incinerated (accidental incineration being inevitable from time to time in a business like this), and provided that you do not get so angry with any gawping onlookers that you try to murder them. You don't need a trip to Canada or Australia or India to devise a set of rules like that.

But then again, such expeditions can be fun, and I suppose there have to be inducements to Government people to behave sensibly. And such is the state of the modern world - the EUropean bit of it especially - that if some activity has not been supplied with the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, it can not even start.

It so happens that James C. Bennett is in the room with me as I write this, he being in Britain now to promote this thing, and he has just said, in connection with the above:

”Better to send regulators to Ottawa than to Paris.”

Indeed.

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I can think of few greater contemporary British journalists than Christopher Booker. He is the AGW alarmists' waking nightmare. In fact, he inflicts sleep deprivation on all manner of promoters of scares, seeing, as HL Mencken once realised, that scares are a means by which power-hungry folk can persuade benighted citizens to sign up to the latest safety measures.

And yet even great men have their off days. In last week's edition of the Spectator (which is behind a subscriber firewall), he writes, on page 20, that there is a dastardly campaign by the Darwinian establishment to crush any signs of dissent from those who subscribe to some form of Intelligent Design (or what might be more accurately known as Creationism). He then goes on to liken the plight of these poor, oppressed ID advocates with AGW skeptics. And yet the parallel strikes me as absurd. AGW skeptics fall into various camps: those who simply want to trash any suggestion that AGW is a problem; those who say that AGW is a problem but who are unsure about its effects, and those who realise that AGW is probably happening but who debate whether it can be mitigated, reversed or adapted to, and who want to know about the pros and cons (think of the likes of Nigel Lawson, or Bjorn Lomborg, etc). A lot of AGW skeptics pore over immense amounts of data to highlight their doubts; and some of them, such as Lawson, employ powerful economic and related arguments that draw on known facts.

But ID advocates do not have the same kind of facts, as far as I can see, to conclusively press their case. What they have instead is a sort of "We cannot explain X so in the absence of a better idea, we'll assume a Creator got involved". Not terribly convincing, is my reaction. I accept that some scientists might be sympathetic to ID without losing any integrity, but what Booker's article signally fails to address is whether any ID advocate has given a plausible explanation, with proof and evidence, of how a particularly complex phemomenon of nature came to be "created". All they do, it seems from Booker's article, is to state that because there are "gaps" in fossil records, etc, that therefore the gap must imply that some outside agent (like a God), caused X or Y. But his article does not go beyond that to explain what sort of processes these ID folk imagine happened. And the reason for that is simple: they don't know. By contrast, AGW skeptics seem to a far more persuasive lot and are able to throw out all manner of facts and data to back their case up. I am just not convinced that Creationists come remotely close.

In fact, a recent comment on this kind of issue by someone called bgates on Samizdata nicely captures a key issue here, because it might explain why a lot of people treat evolution theory and creationism as being on an equal footing:

"It's interesting that so many people who think they're proponents of evolution discuss the matter in terms of "belief". I've never heard anyone voice a belief that red light has a longer wavelength than blue, or a belief that B-lactam antibiotics work by interfering with bacterial cell wall synthesis. Those statements are instead presented as facts that have been deduced from an examination of physical evidence. The difference seems to be that so many of the most fervent defenders of the theory of evolution are unaware of the (astonishing, voluminous, and altogether convincing) physical evidence supporting the idea. They don't have knowledge of the evidence, they have faith in their belief, and they'll fight for their beliefs as passionately as any mujahedeen."

And in conclusion, for all I support Booker's general stance on free speech and resistence to any thought control, I think - as a AGW skeptic myself - that is not really smart for Booker to lump AGW skeptics into the same supposedly "oppressed" category as creationists. If creationists come in for abuse, they need to raise their game and employ the same rigour, if they can, as those who have looked at the AGW issue, and cried foul.

Sidepoint: Timothy Sandefur had some interesting thoughts about science and freedom of expression, and the role of the state, here.

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David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:

I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.

The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.

Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.

But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.

In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn't got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day - puff-puff - the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.

We'll see. Well, I probably won't see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.

And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.

(2)

For a couple of centuries an “Advertisement” in Philosophical Transactions expressly forbade pronouncements by the [Royal] Society as a whole on any scientific or practical matter.

... it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.

That sensible “Advertisement” disappeared in the 1960s when a politically ambitious physicist, Patrick Blackett, was the President.

- From the blog of Nigel Calder, doyen of science writers, via Philip Stott, who does his bit to inject some climate realism into the Radio 4's Home Planet.

The Royal Society should return to its former path of virtue. And The Lancet would benefit from that motto, too.

(18)

I'm not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:

More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.

The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.

The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.

It's an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)

For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to "support" those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?

I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.

Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher "suicide rate" could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.

We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don't think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.

My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.

But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.

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Instapundit has recently been noticing a little buzz concerning thorium, as an alternative energy source to put all the other alternatives in the shade. I have no idea how this works, or could be made to work.

Others seem also to be somewhat uncertain about the details. I shudder whenever I hear anyone recommending a new Manhattan Project to accomplish whatever it is they want. All they could be sure about when they embarked on the original Manhattan Project was a huge bill. I prefer the kind of technology that can start in a small, rough and ready way, in a hanger or a laboratory somewhere, and then spread gradually, improving all the while in cost and efficacy as it gathers viable applications, and only being rolled out big time, with big money, once it is clear that it has worked on a smaller scale. This thorium thing sounds to me like people taking refuge from huge difficulties in an even huger impossibility. If these thorium reactors are going to be so tiny, why can't the first one be built in a shed?

But what do I know? And more to the point, what can our more tech-savvy commenters tell us about this?

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Here:

Will very high res teleconferencing substantially reduce the need for business air travel?

My answer? It may, in some sense, reduce the need for such travel, but that doesn't mean that it actually will reduce it. Face to face contact has a way of proving stubbornly superior to all the other kinds, for all kinds of weird reasons that you never saw coming. I can remember people saying that the internet blah blah would have us all working on the beech [sorry, see comments, when you get old your spelling goes into reverse] beach by around now.

But what do I know? And what does anyone else think?

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It seems that the Saudis and the UAE have got upset about the use of Blackberrys for such evil purposes as enabling young men and women to get a date. Various so-called "national security" issues are also cited.

Sheesh.

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An interesting piece about how the oil slick disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Something is getting attention: there is not as much of an oil spill as some might suppose. Apparently, in warm water like this, and due to certain acquatic organisms, the oil is gradually absorbed. It is, in a manner of speaking, gobbled up. (Belch).

That got me thinking that yes, oil slicks caused by human error are obviously going to cause a lot of anger and lead to tort lawsuits from affected parties, such as fishing businesses and owners of beachfront property, but then again, what about an oil leak that is caused by tectonic shifts in the Earth's crust? In some geological areas, oil leaks of its own accord, sometimes in very large amounts. Which suggests that oil-cleaning technologies are a useful thing to invest in even if there were no offshore drilling.

None of this should, of course, remove any heat off those oil firms and contractors responsible for this disaster - which is what it is - nor indeed of the US government for its tardy response. However, it might help if more folk acknowledged that oil is the stuff of nature, and you know what, this stuff tends to move around occasionally, even without Man's assistance.

(Apols for my light blogging of late and thanks to the others for all the great articles. I have been incredibly busy of late).

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Blogger Eric Raymond - who plainly is not on Steve Jobs' Christmas card send-out list, points out the less-than-stellar launch of the new version of the iPhone.

What is noteworthy, however, is that at least when a product is brought to market and there are problems with it, then as demonstrated by the Eric Raymonds of this world, a swarm of bloggers, professional product evaluation writers and magazine journalists can weigh in. Capitalism will force Jobs and his colleagues to sort the matter out, in weeks, if not months, since otherwise the product and brand will be damaged with heavy losses.

Now compare this sort of process with say, a government project that involves spending billions of pounds of public funds on projects of questionable value, and consider how long it takes for a government to scrap such projects, admit they were wrong, etc.

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Last Saturday, Michael Jennings, Rob Fisher and I went to the Farnborough Airshow, to which, of course, we all brought our cameras. The one with the cheapest and cheerfullest camera tends to take the most pictures, (a) because the pictures tend to be smaller and will fit with ease onto today's infinite SD cards no matter how many you take, and (b) because with a cheap and cheerful camera you want to give yourself lots of chances to have taken some good snaps, in among the torrent of bad ones. So I took the most photos. There follows a very small selection of these compared to how many I took, and a very large selection compared to how many photos there usually are in Samizdata photo-essays. In the event that you would like to see any of them bigger, click on them. They are shown in chronological order.

Rob's photos can be seen here. They include quite a few that show what it was like arriving. Rather chaotic, and aesthetically shambolic, in a way that really doesn't suggest a great show of any sort. Farnborough only happens every two years, and I guess it just isn't worth organising all the incidentals associated with the public descending on the place for just one weekend every two years, any better than only just adequately. The train from Waterloo (they're very frequent) having taken about forty minutes (I bought a train-and-bus-included ticket to the show at Waterloo), there was then a satanically convoluted bus journey from Farnborough railway station, smothered in traffic jams of people trying to get to the same spot in their cars, a journey that caused us, in the evening, to prefer to take the same journey back to the station on foot. But we finally arrived at the airfield, where there was yet more too-ing and fro-ing, this time along improvised queue routes, bounded by temporary barriers such as you get around roadworks. We were herded along these tracks and into the show by men in flourescent tops shouting at us. Is this what pop festivals are like?

Mercifully soon we were in, and wandering past further aesthetic shambles, in the form of closely bunched exhibits with euphemistic signs on them about "all your force projection needs" (calling in an air strike when you get into a fight outside a pub?), "delivering ordnance efficiently" (killing people efficiently), "creative solutions" (killing people creatively), "mission specific solutions" (killing exactly the people you want to kill in exactly the way you want to kill them) and so on. Fair enough. The truth is too horrible to be faced head on.

Here was my favourite of these preliminary exhibits:

It's this. Looks like a whale, doesn't it? The twenty first century looks like being a golden age of unmanned flight. Who would have thought that model aircraft would turn into a grown-up industry?

Then on to join the main throng next to the runway, to confront sights like this:

This was the moment when I began to fear that I would be without food or water for the next six, hot hours. I could see lots of people, with their own picnic equipment, and lots of other guys with cameras. I could see a big runway, and distant hangers and airplanes. But what if I starved to death? I postponed such thoughts, because just as they were occurring to me, the main show (scroll down to Saturday 24th to see what we saw) was getting under way.

Item one, which I was really looking forward to seeing close up, having already photoed it from far below and far away, in central London, was this:

The A380 did a slow motion impersonation of a plane doing trick flying, going up too steeply and then down too steeply, and then tilting itself too steeply and cornering too much, all with the stately grace of the white elephant that I assume it to be. Beautiful.

Then, a real show of trick flying, by these characters:

There was much falling out of the sky leaving a trail of smoke, and at one point they did synchronised falling out of the sky leaving two near identical trails of smoke, to prove that they were doing exactly what they intended, rather than just letting it happen of its own accord. I was impressed:

Then came another giant, one of the dominant airplanes, indeed one of the dominant world facts, of the last half century:

That's the first time in my life I've seen a B52 in the flesh, so to speak. The surprise to me there is the fuselage. The B52, from that angle and in my distinctly approximate photo, looks like a wooden toy made by a super-dad in the garage for his small son, small son being too small to care that the fuselage is so unrealistic. A bit of sculpting under the rear, and at the front of course, but otherwise, just a length of broom handle, an effect greatly enhanced by the sawn-off look at the back. Real airplanes don't look like that!

World War 2 relics were much in evidence. Yah boo hiss!:

Hurrah!:

Also present were modern jet fighters. Trouble is, they take off so damn fast that they are a dot next to a cloud before you (by which I mean I) have realised they are even performing. The noise they make when they do take off is: noisy. The unprepared brain (by which I mean my brain), when subjected to this noise, does not make decisions any better or any faster. Here is an American F something doing its thing:

There came a moment when all those zoom lenses suddenly pointed straight upwards, without any moving about, and I snapped all the vertical zoom lenses for a while before I became curious about what they were pointing at. Parachutes! Again, much smoke, but also a union jack:

Foreigners, I instinctively assumed, sucking up to us. But then I thought, maybe not. Maybe here, the union jack is no apologised about by anyone.

There was a World War 1 show, involving lovingly preserved relics such as this:

There was another F something from America:

The World War 2 relics took to the air, thus:

And thus:

Owing to its implausibly shiny black paint, and my camera's habit of freezing all moving propellers into immobility, the Avro Lancaster looked like an assembled Airfix plastic kit, hanging from a kid's bedroom ceiling (i.e. my bedroom ceiling), circa 1965:

Then a "Typhoon". I was expecting an unwieldy mid-forties propeller-driven job, but it turned out to be this:

Again, it was a dot in the clouds by the time I clocked that it was even in the sky. Luckily it has a distinctive sillhouette, and luckily it did come back, but it never got as close to me again as when it was taking off.

Then this:

Photographing the Farnborough Airshow really well is a skill like any other, one which I do not really possess, what with this being my first visit since I was about six, and my absolute first with a camera. But if you can't get at least some good snaps at Farnborough you are really not much of a photographer, and it you can't get some good snaps of the Red Arrows, you are beyond photographic hope. I got some good shots of them:

I also got shots with red white and blue smoke, and less effective shots of Red Arrows suddenly charging madly off in all directions from one red, white and blue spot, many of them right out of my picture, and of two Red Arrows nearly but not colliding, none of them snapped at the exact right moment. Anyone who wants to see all the regular Red Arrow pictures has seen them. I felt I needed a different slant on the Red Arrow phenomenon:

We saw several of those.

So, it's the second last slot, between the Red Arrows, and the final grandstand finish. What do you shove in there? Answer, a really boring airplane - on its own, no smoke, no loud noises, no nothing, not even the outside chance of a collision - doing really boring aerobatics. Had I encountered such airplane behaviour on some other expedition, say to a London suburb, and had that been the only aerial oddity I spied that month I might have been very impressed. As it was, yawn:

And then, finally, the very much not-yawn Avro Vulcan:

Okay not much of a snap, but by then I was seriously tired. In any case the www is awash with state-of-the-art vulcanography.

And that was that. I've missed out quite a few performers. There were various helicopters, and a couple of transport planes taking it in turns to do their party tricks. The second was a Hercules, but we felt it was upstaged by the previous and smaller Italian plane. There was a Catilina flying boat. There were surely others that I've forgotten. But it was a good show.

Nor did I starve or die of thirst. On the contrary, the many food and drink stalls along most of the length of the public area did thriving business, providing expensive but eloquent lessons in the Austrian theory of the subjectivity of value. Ice cream on Westminister Bridge? Pass. Same ice cream at 5 pm at a hot and sunny Farnborough Airshow? A bargain at twice the price, in other words: a bargain.

It all seemed very safe. When I was a child, I can remember there being a huge crash at Farnborough, with lots of spectators killed, sadly involving a de Havilland airplane. Since which drama the planes have been forbidden to go anywhere too near to the spectators. No chance of anything like that happening now. Or this. Although I'm sure the reason all we spectators now take such safety for granted is that the flyers themselves never do.

I suspect that in two years time it will all be much the same. The same revered and two-years-older planes from the history books, the same kind of more recent jets doing the same kinds of tricks, spectacularly or solemnly depending on their size and demeanour. I think I'd like to go back in about ten years time, to see if and how things have changed by then. Hope I can.

I would sum the day up as great fun, and great to do in good company rather than alone. So deepest thanks Michael and Rob, without whose promptings such a trip would never even have occurred to me. But it was hard work for me to be at, what with the heat and there being nowhere to sit comfortably. But it was unreservedly great to have been at, although even as I finish this piece the skin is peeling off my stinging, lobster-coloured cheeks and forehead.

The biggest plus about Farnborough is that you can see most of what is on offer from anywhere. You don't have to hack your way to the front of the throng to get a view of the aerial performers, which means that everyone is relaxed and unpushy and friendly. You just have to look upwards, from wherever you happen to be. Which is a good approach to adopt towards life in general, I think.

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Indeed. Bulletproof custard. Thank you Instapundit. The spirit of Q lives on.

This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill's last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: "It makes you proud to be British."

(5)

Allow me to put it another way, instead of scientists, these people were hedge managers, and they were found by an inquiry, run by fund managers and bankers, of not being involved in insider trading, but being part of a fan club. Moreover, though the figures they published for investors were misleading, the investors could have obtained the raw data and worked out that they were being sold a lemon on their own.

Would you be so forgiving?

- A commenter challenges George Monbiot on the subject of the Russell "Inquiry", which found evidence of a failure to by communicate, but which didn't find anything wrong with "climate science" on account of it not trying to. Recycled by "James P" in his comment here.

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Joe Kaplinsky, who is a biophysicist just completing his PhD at Imperial College, gave a talk on the state of the climate issue at Christian Michel's salon the other evening. His main point was that there has been a shift in the debate between the 1990s, when the environmentalists were down on the supposed uncertainties of science, and today, when their refrain is "the science is settled".

Correspondingly it is the sceptics/deniers/denialists/contrarians who now harp on the theme of the uncertainties of science. Joe wants to damn both their houses, but I was not very clear why from his talk, and I think the same went for most of his listeners. I got a better idea of what he thinks when I found a review of his book, which I mention below.

Joe quoted from a wide range of writers. There was one amusing episode that I had not known about. Frank Luntz, an adviser to Bush, was reported as saying that:

"the scientific debate is closing against us." His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled," he writes, "their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."

Bruno Latour, distinguished Gallic "theorist of science", was disconcerted. He had been arguing all this time that the notion of science as an objective and impartial process of discovery is bogus, and now that self-same thesis was being used by a hated Bushist to draw entirely the 'wrong' conclusions. "Was I wrong?" he asked himself. I have dug up his self-flagellation - in an article called "Why has critique run out of steam?" This is rather a long quote, but it is too good to miss:

Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?

... entire Ph.D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not?

… Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but I am worried to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland, many of the weapons of social critique. Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognize, still burnt in the steel, our trade mark: MADE IN CRITICALLAND.

Hilarious.

But, I am sorry to say, Joe countenanced this stuff, while not actually endorsing it. He came across as surprisingly pomo-sounding for a practising scientist. As you can imagine, he got plenty of opposition from the more vocal members of the gathering (though there was one audience member - there is always one - who dragged in Kuhn, and the Uncertainty Principle forsooth, in support of the claim that the objectivity of science is an outmoded notion). I said that all my Enlightenment instincts were brought out by some of the things in Joe's talk. And I found myself siding with remarks made by, of all people, Lord Robert May, former Chief Scientific Adviser, emphasizing that scientists pose options, others decide policy.

Joe's suspicious of scientists "framing the debate" in this way. I said that provided there were economists there to expand the scientists' perspective, having them lay out the options was pretty much the way things should be. I do not believe in the "democratization" of science... I believe in the scientists living up to their own well established standards.

But though I found what Joe said radically ambiguous, he is gratifyingly pro-consumerist, pro-technological-progress, pro-energy-consumptionist. With James Woudhuysen he co-authored a book called Energise!: A Future for Energy Innovation, about the problems of providing the energy we need to bring the world average standard of living up to that of the average Californian - and beyond. I actually understood more about his position when I found this account of the book by Ian Abley on Audacity.org. I recommend Abley's rhapsody - it will inspire you to read the book itself.

Kaplinsky and Woudhuysen, as paraphrased by Abley, claim that neither the environmentalist nor the sceptic...

...argues for the need for an industrially productive transformation of every country and every region on Earth.

Unfair to a lot of us sceptics, but you can see that their hearts are in the right place.

The voice in the debate that Joe most likes is Freeman Dyson, who apparently does not think that civilization should be rebuilt for the sake of modern notions about distantly possible risks. Good.

I do not think that talk of the construction of science, or of "prematurely naturalized objectified fact" helps anybody; what does help is a clear sense of the good old Enlightenment distinction between the "is" that climate science strives towards and the "ought" of policy. And while I am open to the adaptationist, geo-engineering thrust of Kaplinsky and Woudhuysen, I do not want to sidestep the question of the truth or otherwise of global warming. I am still going to keep on harping on the uncertainty of the science - not to perpetually throw contrarian spanners in the works but because the science at this moment is lousy, and can only be improved when the scientists get their house in order.

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Germane to Michael Jennings' post below pertaining to Prince's declaration that the "Internet is completely over", I had a brief conversation with a decidedly winsome 20-something young lady, elegant yet edgy (she was a cut glass accented thoroughbred Sloane Ranger wearing 'All Saints'). She was sitting in a sandwich shop in a well-heeled part of town... expensive Apple laptop open as she availed herself of the free WiFi whilst having luncheon...

The following really happened, serious, not joking.

Samizdata Illuminatus "Did you read that Prince thinks the 'Internet is completely over''? He refuses to release any of his music on it at all"

20-Something-Young-Lady "Really? Umm... I did not even know he was a musician."

SI "Well, yes...he is. He is one of the great guitarists of our time."

20-S-Y-L "Hah, that's funny! I cannot picture that old foggy playing a guitar! I thought he just spent his time playing polo, messing with architects and hugging trees..."

SI "No, no, no, not Prince Charles... "

20-S-Y-L "Prince William? No, I am sure you must mean Harry! Oooo! Yummy Harry with a guitar!"

SI "No, the American musician called 'Prince'."

20-S-Y-L "Oh, I see. And this chap calls himself 'Prince'? That's hilarious!"

SI "He used to call himself 'Squiggle'."

20-S-Y-L "I'm sure I've never heard of him."

SI "I suddenly feel very... old'."

20-S-Y-L "I'll download something of his off Bit Torrent and see if he's any good."

I do not believe she immediately grasped the sheer transcendent irony of the moment.

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One of the issues that comes up with a space that no-one owns, as in private property, is the so-called "tragedy of the commons". As no-one has to bear the long-run costs of pollution or reaps the rewards of rising property values, so there is an incentive for people to over-farm, or over-fish, or pollute and generally muck things up. This occured to me when I read this article about the amount of junk that there now is in orbit around the Earth. The article, at Wired, also contains some rather cunning ways to deal with the problem. We cannot assume, for instance, that all this stuff eventually falls down and burns up during re-entry (although a lot does). There have been some potentially catastrophic near-misses in space.

So if any of you are star-gazers and think you have spotted a new planet, it might instead be an old satellite that is now out of commission.

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Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.

This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening.

That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:

As the water rises, it penetrates fissures and seeps into soil. Then it loosens the slopes that ascend at steep angles on either side of the river. Eventually, rocks, soil and stone give way. The landslides undermine the geology of the area. That, in turn, sets off earth tremors. It may be the world’s biggest case of rising damp.

The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:

"What kind of dogshit government moves itself out and moves us into somewhere like this?" one of them complained.

A key point made by the Telegraph piece above is that less is now being done than you might expect by Chinese higher-ups to suppress such reports:

Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.

This all made me think of a book I read a year or two ago about the Western Way of War, or some such title, by Victor Davis Hanson (I think it was this book, although I believe I read a proof copy with a different title). The connection? Well, Hanson identifies one of the strengths of the Western Way of War to be the way that western war efforts are often preceded by almighty rows, often woundingly public, about how to set about, or even whether to set about, doing whatever it is they are attempting, which typically continue after the effort has begun. One of his major points being: this is not recent, it's always been like this.

The result, for all the mess and unpleasantness and unfairly ruined careers, tends not to be the division and confusion that you might expect, or not only that, but also (a) better decisions, and (b) better understood decisions. Even the losers of such arguments at least understand the plan the others fellows are now making everyone follow, so even they follow it better. Both decision-making and decision-implementation are improved. Then, often with even greater doses of injustice, wars, even successful wars, are then raked over and argued about yet again, afterwards. It's all very indecorous, and "debate" doesn't do justice to the chaotic nature of such public rows. But the result is better decision-making and better informed and better prepared decision-makers, at all levels.

And for war, read: everything else big and dangerous also, like mega-engineering projects. Tyranny, aka dogshit government, in war and in everything big, imposes bad and un-thought-through decisions on baffled subordinates, decisions which still might have worked after a fashion if implemented properly, but not if even quite senior subordinates don't really have a clue about what they are supposed to be doing and are just following orders blindly, or worse, perhaps not even doing that, because, you know, who gives a shit.

It must now be becoming clear to quite a few Chinese high-ups that had they had a big, messy, public ruckus about how exactly (or indeed whether at all) to build this damn great dam, then it might at least have been a damn sight better dam than it now looks like being. It might have been messier and more difficult and more stressful deciding about it all beforehand, but far better afterwards, once all the dust, and in this case also all the mud and all the various bits of collapsing land and roads and buildings that are now sliding and tumbling hither and thither, had settled.

And even if they failed to argue about the Three Gorges Dam properly beforehand, it would be better than nothing to at least have a bit of a public row about it now. At least that way, some harsh lessons might be learned and spread around, and such things might be done a bit better in the future.

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Here’s the problem: the global economy has gone tits up. We are doomed. And nowhere is more doomed than Europe whose Monopoly-money currency is going the way of the Zimbabwe dollar and the Reichsmark, and whose constituent economies are so overburdened by sclerotic regulation and so mired in corruption, waste and the kind of institutionalised socialism which might work just about when the going’s good but definitely not now sir now sirree.

In Britain, David Cameron is wedded to the same suicidal policy – on the one hand brandishing £6.5 billion cuts in government spending as though this were a sign of his maturity and his commitment to reducing Britain’s deficit, while on the other remaining committed to a “low carbon” economy set to destroy what’s left of our industry and cost the taxpayer at least £18 billion (yep – almost THREE times as much as the pathetic cuts announced so far by his pathetic chancellor) a year.

- James Delingpole explains why he keeps banging on and on about Global bloody Warming.

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This is the sort of story that must give the anti-proliferation folks nightmares. On a more positive tack, though, it is testimony to the continuing trend towards minaturisation that we see in fields such as computers, engineering and medical technology.

Original link fixed. My apologies.

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Instapundit compares President Obama to Apple, saying, in connection with recent rather belligerent rhetoric from Obama, and similarly belligerent conduct by Apple regarding the alleged stealing of their latest iPhone before they had themselves unveiled it, this:

Like Apple, Obama’s strength is mostly in the image department ...

That may be right on the money about Obama. Don't know for sure. Don't live there. But I definitely think it's wrong about Apple. For me, Apple's stellar "image" is based on an underlying reality of product quality, not on how nicely Apple supposedly behaves, or did behave until this recent atrocity.

A lady friend of mine has the earlier version of the iPhone, which she adores. Talks about it like it's her perfect boyfriend, and looks at it like its a new and really good baby she just had. When she first got it, she could hardly stop gazing at it, and kept not listening to anything I was saying, instead wanting to demonstrate how fabulously it worked and how great it was for tracking emails and recognising pop songs and taking snaps and the rest of it, like she was a fat old geek with no life. Shame about the battery life, she says. But of course they are fixing that in the new version.

And then there's my beautiful Apple keyboard, which a few months ago I purchased and attached to my clunky old PC because every PC keyboard I have ever owned or seen or heard of is total shite, either about a mile across with a completely useless accountancy section adding even more mileage to its width or, if a sane size, doomed to instant disintegration and requiring baby fingers to use even half accurately and so flimsy that if you type like an adult with your adult fingers it slides across your desk like a big insect. Also, on all the PC keyboards I have ever owned a few of the damn letters soon became invisible, and I had to buy new stick-on letters from Rymans. Contemptible.

My new Apple keyboard is the total opposite of all such shiteness. It is the keyboard I am happily typing on right this minute, and it is well on the way to convincing me that my next entire computer should be Apple as well.

Quality like this is not "image", of the sort based on merely incidental nice behaviour. I suppose you could argue that what happens on the front of an iPhone is "image", in the sense of legible lettering, clever pointiness and so forth. But that's image of the kind that is central to the quality of the product. And my keyboard is solid, beautiful reality, at its most solid and most beautiful. (Make of that what you will.)

Meanwhile, I also think of Apple, not as serenely nice people, but more like neurotic and borderline psychotic artists. The kind of artists who regard the transcendent excellence of their creations as a excuse to be mad bastards. I pretty much agree with them. It comes down to my understanding of the character of Steve Jobs. Genius. Mad bastard. Hell to work for, apart from that little thing that you get to make supremely great stuff and everyone thinks you are great too, which you are. "Insanely great", you might say. So, for me, Apple getting the government to smash down the door of some defenceless little tech-bloggers is no deviation for them. That's regular Apple behaviour. That's Jobs throwing a mad tantrum and stamping his never-grown-up feet, insisting that just as his products must be perfect, so must the launching of them be perfect, or not enough people will buy them quickly enough and the network effect won't cut in soon enough, and can't you pathetic fuckheads see that!!!! And if the new iPhone that Apple's psycho lawyers are saying was stolen turns out to be as good as all the other Apple gizmos have been, then Apple will continue to rack up insanely great profit margins.

The day may come when Apple products start to be only average, but the incidental madness continues. This is what I foresee if Steve Jobs ever departs, because of death or some such catastrophe, or because they fire him, again, on account of wanting quiet lives, again. Then nemesis will follow, and the revenge of all the other nerds will be something to see. But that's not the story now.

In a related way, and to fly off at a bit of a final tangent, if the current British Prime Minister, also a mad bastard, whom I do know quite a bit about because I live here in Britain, was imposing sensible government policies on everyone with his mad bastardry, then we here would idolise him, certainly enough of us would for him to stay in his present job. Those mobile phones (does that include iPhones I wonder?) would hurtle towards the heads of his underlings, and they'd moan to journalists, and the journos would say: "Ooh that Gordon, what a character! He blames everyone but himself whenever he does anything wrong, like he's a mad kid or something! He's a laugh a minute, isn't he? Now, about that wondrously falling government deficit ..." And they'd be right. But alas, the Gordon Brown product is not insanely great, just insanely insane, and he and all the other mad bastards who foisted him on us are all about to be hurled over an electoral cliff and good riddance.

(15)

Dominic Lawson draws out some perceptive conclusions about the recent volcanic ash problem for the airline industry:

Underlying all this, however, is something quite new, which, like the phrase “zero tolerance”, is from across the Atlantic. This is the idea that there is no such thing as an accident — a concept that is heaven on earth for litigators. On the basis of the so-called precautionary principle (which, if it had existed in prehistoric times, would have been bad news for the caveman who discovered fire) governments are expected to remove all possibility of risk from the field of human conduct. It was something akin to this sort of thinking that caused the British Medical Journal to state in 2001 that it would no longer use the word “accident” because even earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions were predictable events against which we could, and should, take precautions. We have just seen what happens when the authorities do have a fully fledged “precautionary” volcano safety policy. It does not survive the first encounter with reality.

The problem, alas, is that "reality" is something that many of those in power are uninterested in. As he notes, when the PP is applied to small groups - such as farmers - they lack the political and business clout to kick up a fuss. What really forced policymakers to back down on the airline travel restrictions was the fact that hundreds of thousands of travellers were faced with massive delays and thousands of businesses were affected.

I understand one blessing of the flight restrictions was that this whole kerfuffle prevented Tony Blair from playing more of a role in the election campaign. Silver linings and black clouds, etc. (Excuse the cloud pun). It would be nice to think that this globetrotting parasite could be permanently stuck in a departure lounge.

(4)

The United Kingdom Transhumanist Association has organised a small shindig at Conway Hall, the Mecca for freethinkers, to present and discuss issues that become less radical every year. This takes place next Saturday, April 24th.

The UK chapter of Humanity+, an organisation dedicated to promoting understanding, interest and participation in fields of emerging innovation that can radically benefit the human condition, announced today that registrations are on track for record attendance at the Humanity+ UK2010 conference taking place in Conway Hall, Holborn, London, on April 24th.

Always worth making the case that emerging innovation requires the precondition of liberty.

I note that there may be some absences if Iceland continues its revenge.

(41)

Incoming email from fellow Samizdatista Michael, just received:

This morning, I forgot to pack the charger for my laptop before heading for the airport. Therefore, once the battery had run down, I was faced with the real possibility of being without a computer for a week.

The horror, the horror.

Obviously, this could not stand, so I needed a charger. I had to do this is Rzeszow in Poland, or perhaps in Lviv in the Ukraine tomorrow. (Lviv is a bigger city, but Ukraine is a more backward country). After trying a few local stores, and a branch of Media Markt (the German equivalent of Curry's), I eventually found a universal laptop charger. I found it in a branch of an obscure, East European chain named "Tesco". The price was very reasonable, too.

"Markt"? Is that proper spelling, or just email spelling?

I have no idea whatsoever why so many people in places like London find the spread of Tesco - really a wonderful company - to be such a bad thing.

Well, here are some ideas. They are snobs who only want good stuff to be available to richer people such as themselves? They are anti-capitalist scum who hate humans and want humans to die out, but only after they have died first? They oppose international free trade in food (or in anything) and blame Tesco for it? They used to run inefficient food shops that sold stale and overpriced food, until Tesco drove them out of business?

I'm sure commenters can suggest further motivations for Tescophobia.

(15)

An unfolding saga in the game of cricket in recent years has been the question of whether technology should be used to aid umpires in the case of close or potentially controversial decisions. Like many things in life, the question of whether to do this has turned out to be more complex than it may at first have appeared to be. There have been situations in which the on field umpire has asked for a replay, and the replay has been unclear but has none the less been used to overrule an on field umpire who probably saw more. There have been situations in which the players have appealed to a video replay that didn't show anything, when they likely knew themselves what had happened and the situation would previously have been resolved with a gentlemanly code of conduct. There have been situations when the television company did not manage to produce the appropriate replay in time, and the umpire then made a decision that was revealed to be incorrect five minutes later. Many decisions depend on whether the batsman hit the ball, and a mixture of sound and picture is used to make these decisions, and determining which items of the bat, ball, ground, clothing, safety equipment etc came in contact with each other is often no clearer using the technology than not.

Fans of other sports are no doubt nodding at this point, as similar issues have come up in most sports that have attempted similar things. Cricket has one further issue, not unique to it but relatively central to it, which is the question of how technology should be used in the interpretation of the leg before wicket rule (LBW).

One of the principal ways of getting a batsman out is for the bowler to bowl at the batsman, for the batsman to miss the ball, and for the ball to then strike the wooden stumps behind him. It would be possible for a batsman to avoid getting out this way by his simply standing in front of the stumps at all times. In order to avoid this, the rules of cricket allow for a batsman to be out if he is standing directly in front of the stumps, the ball hits his leg, and the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. (The rule is actually more complex than this, but the complexities are not relevant to the point I am making). The umpire stands in a good position from which to judge whether the ball will hit the stumps, and traditionally the umpire's judgment has been used to decide whether the ball would have hit the stumps.

Umpires inevitably make mistakes, and there have been many accusations of umpire bias over the years. For a long time people have been watching replays in slow motion on television in order to second guess umpires, but these have never been conclusive. Occasionally an umpire will make an obviously wrong decision, but most of the time there is as much of an element of doubt watching at home as there is for the umpire. Or perhaps more: the umpire is in a better viewing position than the TV cameras.

In recent years, however, things have changed. The "Hawk-eye" system was initially used by television companies, and there was then pressure for it to be used in assisting umpires as well. Basically, this system looks at a number of video replays, and from them constructs a three dimensional model of the ball, the pitch, the bat, etc. From the this model, the path of the ball is extrapolated going forward. Television viewers see a computer graphic image of the ball hitting (or not) a computer graphic image of the stumps, and are told whether the ball would have hit the stumps and whether the batsman was or was not out.

Every since this system has been in place as part of television coverage, there has been pressure for it to be used in umpiring decisions. When people have asked me about this, I have stated my position with unexpected vehemence, particularly given that I am generally in favour of using video replays as part of the adjudication process. For I am, at present, unequivocally opposed to the use of Hawk-Eye and similar decisions in umpiring decisions.

My reason for this is as follows.

Hawk-Eye is a system featuring a lot of complex computer code. The code is proprietary, so what follows is largely reasonably well informed speculation. Although we do know the laws of physics with respect to motion of cricket balls, air resistance, the effect of gravity, bounce when the ball hits the pitch, linear and angular momentum, etc etc etc, the complexity of a even a relatively simple system such as a cricket ball moving in a cricket game is such that it is difficult to impossible to develop a useful model directly from the physics. In addition there are margins of error when triangulating the motion of the ball from video imagery. What this means is that Hawk-Eye's models are not really physical models per se. What they have likely done is a more simple matter of trial and error followed by extrapolation. The ball has been measured going through the air, perhaps half way down the pitch. Various ways of further extrapolating the position of the ball have been tried, and they have been compared with the actual motion of the ball further down the pitch. Trial and error has continued until prediction and reality have become close, and the resulting (statistically derived) algorithm has been used to predict the motion of the ball in cases where the ball has not actually traveled the full distance (because, perhaps the batsman's leg was in the way).

This is all actually fine, except that there are circumstances in which the system can break down. Weather conditions that were never encountered in the development phase might be one. Balls made by different manufacturers might behave differently. Pitches in different places may be made of different kinds of grass. In cricket, local conditions matter a lot, and pitches in different countries are known to have different characteristics and favour different types of bowlers and bowling. (The greatest players will succeed in any conditions, but some players will only be effective in certain kinds of conditions).

These sorts of empirical models are not always terribly robust: the further you are from looking it the actual physics the more likely that your software will do a poor job when you depart from the exact conditions in which you did your calibration. A model developed in English conditions by Englishmen may not work as well when used in India. It may contain biases, either accidentally or deliberately.

However, there is a dangerous tendency of people to fall in love with the technology: in cases where the technology disagrees with reality, then it is reality that is at fault. "Science" has given you a definitive answer, which is obviously right. However, if you dive into the science, you will discover it has been developed using a methodology involving a lot of ad hoc steps and statistical approximations and errors.

It may well be that Hawk-Eye, as it exists, is better than the unaided umpire's eye. However, arbitrary choices have gone into its design. Human biases have gone into its design. Different, equally skilled programmers may have made different choices. Hawk-Eye is not definitive.

In tennis, Hawk-Eye is used in umpiring decisions. Players have the right to challenge line calls. When they do so, a simulation of the ball hitting the line on the court is shown, and the computer rules the ball in or out.

And yet, when this decision is made, all the umpire sees is the simulation. A simulation of the ball intersects with a simulation of the line. There is no attempt to superimpose the simulated ball on the real ball, or the simulated line on the real line. It is all technology. Players have from time to time complained that the computer's decision is wrong. And yet, on television there is no way of telling that.

Given that Hawk-Eye is not definitive, another nasty possibility rears its head. Like baseball, cricket is a game greatly suited to gambling. There are a huge number of statistics that followers of the game are interested in, and it is possible to bet on the outcomes of most of them. Cricket has had a significant number of corruption scandals in recent decades. Most famously, a captain of the South African national team took bribes from Indian bookmakers to lose matches. (He later died in a mysterious plane crash). Many other players took money from bookmakers in return for various favours, more of which probably influenced specific match statistics rather than actual results of matches. The manager of the Pakistan team may or may not have been murdered by gangsters for reasons related to gambling during the last world cup.

Imagine then a situation where statisticians and programmers are running a system of computer code that nobody understands (and which, in fact, they are extremely secretive about the workings of, on the basis that it is "proprietary intellectual property" and a valuable trade secret) which has the ability to overrule umpires decisions. Nobody outside the firm they work for (and indeed few people inside the firm) knows exactly who the people are who run this stuff - certainly not the official administrators of the game. The potential for corruption is obvious.

Far fetched? Well, the best way of running such corruption would be to not be obvious about it. Decisions should still appear approximately right. You do not change the result of matches, but apply a systematic bias of 5% in the direction that improves your profitability. As it happens, I am not a bookmaker, but I am a financial analyst. Give me a 5% systematic bias in the financial markets that I can control, and I will shortly be a very rich man.

You don't believe that bookmakers could figure out who was in charge of this code, who was vulnerable to bribery, and get to them? Well, bookmakers have got to a lot of people in this game. Players, officials, and coaches. And as far as understanding technologists and statisticians, bookmakers are way ahead of just about everyone. Bookmakers these days employ huge numbers of programmers and statisticians. If you think about their business for even a moment, it is obvious why. In fact, it is likely that statisticians and programmers in both these places know one another already, as they were likely recruited from the same pools of people - mathematically adept obsessives who love sport.

Which is why I have been opposed to the use of Hawk-Eye or similar systems to assist umpires in cricket. The potential for corruption is too great.

Except, when people have pressed me further, I have qualified this a little, and I have actually said that Hawk-Eye and similar systems should not be used unless the code and the data are open. If people at home are able to go through the code line by line, see what it does, and then run it themselves, and duplicate it themselves, using the same video footage being used by the actual system assisting the umpires, then any corruption will be visible instantly, and the game is safe.

As it happens, I suspect that the administrators of cricket and the television networks broadcasting it consider the footage (ie the data) to be too valuable to make it available to everyone. I suspect also that the developers of Hawk-Eye consider their intellectual property to be too valuable to make the code available for technically minded cricket fans to run at home. If so, then fine. LBW decisions should be made by the on field umpires. They may be corruptible, but at least they are the people responsible for their actions, rather than some unidentifiable programmer. Hawk-Eye is a wonderful tool for observation and commentary on the game, but involving it in the administration of the game raises issues that its developers may not want to deal with.

This story, of course, is very similar to the stories of many other fields of endeavour, particularly scientific endeavour. A huge amount of modern life, and a huge amount of modern science, involves computer simulations of statistical systems, either in the foreground or the background. The level of complexity and the level of obscurity of these systems is such that (intentionally or unintentionally) such systems are very vulnerable to becoming sloppy, biased, or corrupt.

This, of course, is why, if it deals with anything important, such code must be open. And data must be available. Outside eyes must be able to investigate such biases, and the possibility of the presence of outside eyes must be there in order to discourage corruption and simply to discourage sloppiness and detect genuine errors. And the data must be available, so that other people with different biases can construct competing models, as, always, little is ever settled and improvement comes through competition.

It is when results are robust to such biases that interesting things are discovered.

(22)

That James Lovelock is a strange case, as discussed by Natalie here on Monday. After hearing him on the Today programme the other day, I had to interrupt my bath and rush off to make notes, yelling to my wife as I went that he's an old charlatan. The immediate provocation was the claim that's bothered me in the past and had me quarrelling with fellow members of a science journalists' mailing-list - the claim that global warming could cut the world's population to a billion. I don't know where he got this from, but it's fixed in his head now - he keeps saying it. He talks of the scientific sin against the Holy Ghost being to fudge the data, but there's another mortal sin too - lending the weight of your authority to pronouncements made in a field in which you're not actually expert. Calculating the demographic effects of such a geophysical change, if it's possible at all, would be the province of a team of - what? - geoscientists, economists, geographers, sociologists (sociologists - right, yeah, duh, like they're really going to be any use - as the young people say). It's not something that can just be dreamed up in the noggin of an old greybeard who did some useful geophysics decades ago and then got deified for the barmy green non-hypothesis of Gaia.

When I read the notes of his Guardian interview published by Leo Hickman on the paper's environment blog, I found the charlatanism mixed with all sort of stuff that sounds superficially congenial to libertarians. But it's clear that he's got no clear ideological compass to make sense of it all. He seems to think that climate science is in a mess because all these terrible oiks were churned out by state-funded education instead of the right sort of chap, like himself, that we had in the good old days. And the journalists are to blame too, presumably for demanding sensationalist answers from those naturally bashful creatures, the climatologists.

Whereas the journalists, when they do their job right, are part of the solution - part of the scrutiny that all specialists need.

(20)

Lord Stern would have us believe that 'arrogance' undid the recent attempted power grab known as the Copenhagen Conference.

Strangely the public unravelling of the entire political and cultural narrative of global warming does not so much as get a mention in passing, as if 'Climategate' can be wished out of existence and with a Triumph of the Will, time itself can be rolled back to pre-hack days.

(20)

Repeat after me, you greenie morons ... cold kills, cold kills, cold kills ... greenies kill. You granny killers should be up for manslaughter.

- The indefatigable Richard North spells out just how much worse cold weather is than hot weather.

(3)

Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.

- Instapundit reflects on the travails of Toyota.

(19)

My Climategate pieces here have been of two sorts. There have been the big set-piece pieces where I at least try to say vaguely original things about it all, which given my life experiences tends to mean what sort of argument this is, how it is going and how it seems likely to go on going. And, there have been little bits like this one which basically just say: be sure not to miss this.

So anyway, be sure not to miss this, which is a report, from one of Bishop Hill's readers, of a tactical discussion by a bunch of climate alarmist journalists, thinking aloud about how to handle the situation now that the general public has started smelling rats all over the place, rats which they helped to bury, but which those mad bloggers have been digging up. How to bury all the rats now?

Typical quote:

I used to think sceptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad. We published a string of articles in late Jan, early Feb showing that people had misinterpreted the emails as casting doubt on CC.

We as in the Guardian. And that worked really well, didn't it?

Oh well, at least they are finally getting that we sceptics say what we say because we actually believe it, rather than merely because we have been paid to say it. That's something. Next thing you know, they may even be admitting that some of their fellow climate alarmists are only still climate alarmists because someone is paying them, and that many more who would like to be sceptical are staying mum for similarly economic reasons.

Don't miss the comments, which say everything that the good Bishop himself didn't feel the need to say.

LATER: Bishop Hill now has a Tip Jar. The Bishop has a wife and three children, and I am guessing that even a quite small amount of cash that has been earned directly from his blogging efforts would make him an even more potent force in the Climategate debate. If the commenter who says Big Oil might be about to switch sides in this argument, again, is right, then how about a little oil money in the Bishop's collecting plate?

(25)

The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.

And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.

- Willis Eschenbach is unimpressed by Dr Judith Curry's ideas about reestablishing trust in climate science. Lots more Climategate commentary and links from North.

(23)

Patrick Crozier has an interesting list of things that might disappear if AGW alarmism, now very much on the defensive, loses support from policymakers.

Here are a few suggestions from me about products that might wane or go into defensive mode:

Carbon-trading hedge funds and other financial firms trying to make money out of cap-and-trade rules.
All those various "Green" mutual funds and even the occasional hedge fund. They sometimes smell like a scam, and the latest revelations of AGW alarmist skulduggery do not help.
Sellers of loft insulation where there is not a genuine economic demand for it.
Pressure to change building codes in the light of AGW alarmism might abate somewhat. New homes, I have noticed, often have tiny windows so they resemble houses in a children's story book. We might go back to having bigger, more light-enhancing windows.

Alas, I don't expect the alarmism theme to diminish in Hollywood movies or BBC documentaries. Mind you, as I said in a comment on one of Brian Micklethwait's posts the other day, you know the prevailing climate of opinion (excuse the pun) has changed depending on the kind of villain chosen for a Bond movie. When they cast a deep Green scientist as a baddie, and put the villain's lair in a bunker in deepest East Anglia, we'll have won.

Suggestions welcome.

(8)

Political bloggers of the Guido Fawkes/Iain Dale variety have found themselves, I suspect, and as I suspect that the traffic numbers may now be proving, being ever so slightly sidelined during the last month or two. Who cares about the petty pilferings of MPs when there is a world of lies and plunderings out there, under the general rubric of "Climategate"? It's not that the blog-as-gossip mongers been ignoring this story, more that they have faced a problem of how to respond to it. Should they hurl themselves into the science of it all? Probably better to leave that to specialists. Should they switch from contemplating the merely local government of Britain, to contemplating the government of the world, no less? Probably not.

One way for these bloggers to turn Climategate into their kind of story is to follow the money, especially if it is flowing through Westminster. Iain Dale, a political blogger very much inside the Westminster Bubble, yesterday featured an expensively produced climate change propaganda guidance leaflet entitled the rules of the game. Characteristic quote:

Those who deny climate change science are irritating but not important. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate change, but how we should deal with climate change.

Which just goes to show how much difference Climategate had made and continues to make. Without Climategate, the wider public was just left having to trust the scientists and acquiesce to this kind of stuff. Now "those who deny climate change science" are a whole lot more than irritating, important even, and the question very much is about if we should deal with climate change by any means other than simply adapting to it, as and when it really does occur.

Besides which, the second part of the quoted claim is also false. The argument being put by these climate propagandists is that we all should "deal with climate change" in the particular manner that they demand. Us saying that we have different opinions about how to adapt to climate change is also to be ignored, just as is the claim from any of us that "climate change", i.e. climate change of the man-made and catastrophic variety, may not even be happening.

The whole thing is disgusting, of course, and kudos to Iain Dale for featuring it. But the point I want to make here and now is that this disgustingness is only now clear. For as long as "climate science" was widely trusted, or at least not widely contested, this leaflet was just a leaflet, not a story. Publishing it before Climategate would merely have resulted in counter-comments from those who agree with it to the effect that they agree with it.

I recall being told by some pessimistic commenters on this early Climategate posting of mine here (done during the time before that word had even been decided upon as the name for all this), and reading elsewhere, that this story would, contrary to what I was already then enthusiastically asserting, soon go away. It would, that is to say, be made to go away. This Iain Dale posting is just one small example of very how untrue that notion is proving to be.

(10)

One of my little pleasures in life is finding interesting pictures to put on my personal blog which are vertically very thin, and which thus assist in the pursuit of blogging brevity. As here for instance, yesterday, when I displayed a wafer thin slice of a picture of the rings of Saturn.

And I was all set to put this picture up at my personal blog too, until I found myself asking technological questions of the sort that Samizdata's commenters are the very people to answer.

That picture, severely cropped by me, I found here. It is the new unmanned Israeli bomber, the Heron TP. The Israelis have apparently just put a flock of them into service.

Two thoughts.

One, this is surely vivid evidence of the wisdom, from the purely defence point of view (never mind the wider economic arguments), of the Israelis contriving, with encouraging tax policies, their own version of Silicon Valley, said to be second only in the world to Silicon Valley itself. And who knows how long the original will last, given the current insanity of Californian fiscal policy. The surrounding enemies of Israel can only dream of being able to contrive such birds. But is this a purely Israeli achievement, or did Americans have a big input? And do Israelis now have quite a big input into American aircraft of a similar sort?

Two, I find it interesting that although there is no pilot on board, there is still a bulge at the front and on top, just as if there was. Why is that? It surely can't just be that they are used to such bulges at the front of airplanes, so they stuck with it. Could it? I'm guessing it's the logical spot to put lots of guidance kit, telling the bird where it is and where to fly next and how to aim its weapons. It's the best place to put, that is to say, the various "pilots". Or, is their some aerodynamic reason? Comments on that appreciated.

(23)

Instapundit today links to a bizarre article at something called The American Interest Online, by someone called Walter Russell Mead, which summarises itself thus:

Short summary: the current iteration of the movement - with its particular political project and goals - is dead.

Incidentally true things are said by Mead about the "movement to stop climate change", to the effect that it has indeed taken a severe beating in recent weeks, and that its denizens will, once they get this, become extremely distressed, and will blame everyone except themselves, rather as Mead himself blames Al Gore. He calls his fellow Warmists "immature, unrealistic and naïve".

But the most obvious and most important truths of the matter that Mead does not mention are that this "movement to stop climate change" was trying to do something hideously destructive on the basis of a huge pack of lies. This movement was and is both intellectually and morally wrong, and all the more morally wrong as its intellectual failure becomes ever clearer. Mead merely says that warmism has, this time around, been a political failure. It tried to reshape (i.e. utterly screw) the world economy, but (alas?) it failed.

Mead even has the nerve to compare these would-be climate tyrants with the people who, in the 1920s, tried to put a stop to world wars. Bit of a difference there, Mead. There actually was a horribly destructive world war, not long before those efforts. Another equally real world war soon followed, which would also have been well worth stopping. Whereas your planet catastrophe now stands proved as having been imaginary.

I'm with Mead's appropriately scornful commenters, like this one, "RKV":

"The climate change movement now needs to regroup." Excuse me for asking the obvious, "Why?"

What they really need to do is shut the hell up.

And this one, "Lazarus Long":

Sounds like a defense of the Soviet Empire, after its defeat.

"Darn it, if only the right people were in charge communism WOULD work!"

Sorry, the AGW myth collapsed under the weight of it’s own lies and corruption.

Sorry, as in: you're a twat, rather than as in: I actually do apologise for anything.

These two worthy commenters, and this posting, all illustrate an important technique of propaganda. Which is: when you have your opponents on the run, keep them there. Do not, because they have started to acknowledge parts of the truth, let them get away with continuing to tell unchallenged lies about other parts of the truth, and especially not if the parts of the truth that they continue to contest are the most important parts.

Do not, so to speak, let them get away with a draw, and with it the continuing prospect of long-term victory, out of a misplaced sense of fair play. I have long known this, but was still extremely glad to find the commenters on this earlier Climategate posting here also getting this particular point so well.

(11)

At the start of my previous Climategate posting, I suggested that James Delingpole might be slacking off on the subject. Maybe he is. There is still nothing up at his blog beyond his afore-linked Beano bit. Maybe he feels he needs a breather. But maybe he is working very hard on another Climategate story, of which there are now dozens to chase up. Talk about a target rich environment for journalists.

Not that you would know it in the USA, if blog complaints like this are anything to go by. The way that the USA's old media are mostly ignoring the biggest scientific fraud in history, and one of the biggest global stories of the century so far, is itself an amazing story. Delingpole has written an entire book on recent US politics, and surely has many acquaintances in the US old media. Maybe he is now grilling these people, and will soon be doing a piece on why these persons are covering themselves in such unglory, Climategate-wise. Someone should.

Although, maybe I'm out of date and the US old media are getting their Climategate act together at last. Or maybe the Americans I've been reading are wrong, and the US old media have always been noticing Climategate, just not in the way those Americans would like. Comments from US readers about those possibilities would be most welcome. The Washington Post seems to be noticing. Weren't they the guys who lead the way on that original gate thing?

ADDENDUM: In the course of shortening this post, cutting out some digressions, I omitted one crucial non-digression which I now take the liberty of adding.

If it's true that right wing bloggers and right wing Brit newspapers are now savaging the Warmists completely wrongly, well, isn't that a story in its own right, given the huge scale of this phenomenon? Aren't these bad bloggers and cynical Brit journos threatening the very future of the planet? And you guys are ignoring that? Why aren't you grilling these bad, bad people? Why no big exposures of the wrongness and wickedness of Steve McIntyre? Why no stuff saying "What's up with Watt's Up With That??" One way or another, this is a huge story.

Trouble is, I guess they want the story to go one way, but that if they investigate it properly they fear that they'll find it going the other way.

ANOTHER ADDENDUM: Bishop Hill:

Steve Mosher, the man who broke the CRU emails story and author of Climategate: The CRUtape Letters, is interviewed on PJTV. Some interesting thoughts on what it means and why the US press has largely ignored it.

Which would at least further suggest that they have ignored it.

(16)

Like James Delingpole, I'm finding it hard to keep up with Climategate, the latest posting by this Climategating journo-blogger, after another tumultuous weekend of Climategatery, being a piece he put up on Saturday about the Beano. Read EU Referendum, read the Bishop, Climate Audit, WUWT, and the rest of them. In particular, the sheer quantity of good stuff that EU Referendum puts up every day amazes me.

In one of his more recent postings, EU Referendum's Richard North says this:

... there is a long way to go before the institutional inertia supporting the global warming industry can be overturned, and the lack of political engagement by the Conservatives is a major handicap. Until and unless this issue goes political, there is little to sustain it in the long run. Without that political traction, skeptics will find it hard to keep up the momentum, feeding fresh stories to the media. The campaign could falter.

I don't believe the campaign will falter for a moment, any more than that old habit we used to have of complaining about the uselessness of Communism ever stopped, just because the newspapers had been ignoring that fact for a week or two. But, I get the point. Yes, the "campaign", in the sense of daily old and new media Warmist catastrophes and surrenders and humiliations and measured retreats that turn into routs, might soon slacken off bit. And a few words of doubt about Warmism from David Cameron would indeed keep the media pot boiling that little bit longer. But how to contrive this?

Cameron's plan for the next general election is to present himself as Mister In-Between, neither Left nor Right, but Nice and Good and Wise, and thereby to make a nonsense of all Leftist protestations to the effect that he is a nasty Rightist. The more the Right complains about him, the more it suits Cameron's plan. His plan may be unprincipled hogwash, but that's another whole argument. Meanwhile, that is his plan.

It thus follows that the way to get an anti-Warmist response out of the Cameron is not for the Conservative Party's entire activist base to bombard him with anti-Warmist complaints. Cameron believes he has all his faithful votes in the bag. He frets now only about the unfaithful ones. He will merely use his refusal to notice complaints from his own angry supporters to burnish his image as Mr Not-Right. No, the trick is somehow to get the Left to say anti-Warmist things. If that happens, Cameron will be echoing it within the hour.

And the good news is, the Left is starting to do this. The newspapers of the Right are now all over Global Warming, printing their usual newspaper mixture of important truths, sloppy lies, stupid irrelevancies, and generally echoing the anti-Warmist blogosphere of about a month ago or more. But, quite often, they are even acknowledging that bloggers got there first. And now they are catching up. The Guardian is starting seriously to shift. Even the BBC is starting to ask some of the questions that matter.

The reason this is happening is that when the regular non-Left newspapers publish stories about Warmism and about the dishonesties of the Warmists, people read them. Public opinion is inexorably shifting on this. Why wouldn't it? Had it been uncontested, Warmism would have spread - still might spread - ruin all over the planet, and at a time when ruin of other kinds has just been spread all over the planet on the basis of other excuses. What's not to hate? The arguments are extremely complicated, but the basic message now being learned from them is cruelly simple. It's bollocks. This is a meme that can spread from one head to another head in under a second. The opinions polls can only go on going one way on this. By and by, the Left that hasn't noticed this already will notice. Even if their only complaint is that Warmism isn't working any more, and is instead hated, well, that's a good reason for them to hate it too. Perhaps Warmism's ultimate crime in their eyes will be that it is now making them look like fools.

And guess what they will then say? My guess is, they will say (see above) that Warmism is a capitalist plot. As opposed to global warming, I mean. This is how the Left always ends up accepting that something that their enemies have denounced for years as bad actually is bad. They say, it's bad because capitalism did it. That they actually started it themselves, well, they forget that bit. But, in a way, they're correct about this. Leftist causes do have a habit of degenerating into capitalist rackets. Certainly Warmism has become a capitalist racket, big time.

"Capitalism", in an argumentative context such as this, is a word that blurs the distinction between (a) good and just and freedom-enhancing rules that result in, among many other splendid things, capitalists doing very well, and (b) capitalists who have done very well buying up the government and bending it to their will. We here unswervingly support (a), while remaining suspicious of (b), for all that, as we constantly also point out, (b) is at least better than (c) utter ruin, caused by people who hate both (a) and (b). For most Lefties, the dubiousness of (b) is iused as an excuse to destroy (a), which is stupid, but there you go. If that's what it will take to make them enjoy performing the intellectual about-turn that I am suggesting for them, away from their idiotic and hitherto wholly uncritical fixation with Warmism, well, so be it. It would also help if by then the Left had found some plausible but quite different excuses for ruining up the world in their preferred manner. Again, different argument.

If anybody else in the world is doing more than Richard North to offer the Left the sort facts it needs to change its tune in the manner I describe, then I have not noticed such a person, although the Left won't thank him for this. It will suddenly pluck such facts out of thin air, as if nobody had ever thought of them before, and denounce Right wingers for none of them having realised any of this. They will. Just you wait.

Which is when Cameron may finally have something to say about the imperfections of Warmist scientists.

It goes like this: specialist skeptic blogs, unspecialist but skeptic blogs, the Conservative Party's usual supporters, public, non-lefty old media, more public, lefty old media, more public, and finally, last of all, David Cameron. This undignified process is presumably what David Cameron thinks of as leadership. It may end up being branded by the rest of us something seriously other than leadership, but, like I say, different argument. My point is, given Richard North's question, that has been my answer.

(4)

Friday's debate at the RI turned into a soggy mess of a love-in, but it held no comfort for alarmists. The very limited point of discussion was "Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?" Audience members repeatedly asked where the points of difference among the three speakers lay, and they were certainly hard to see. Everyone seemed to agree that the answer to the discussion question was a clear and resounding "there is no evidence for that whatever."

The speakers were Roger Pielke Jr, of the University of Colorado, Robert Muir-Wood of the consultancy Risk Management Solutions, and Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE. The meeting was chaired by the amiable James Randerson of the Guardian (standing in for David Shukman of the BBC). He polled the audience beforehand on whether we believed that global warming had indeed increased the toll of disasters, a question that had apparently been dumped on him by someone else. After a hilarious quarter of an hour of having the question taken apart by stroppy audience members, who wanted to know whether by answering it they were committed to belief in warming, he finally had to force a vote. Most were don't-knows. At the end of the discussion, when the same vote was taken, many of the don't-knows had switched to the 'no increasing cost' position; they could not really do anything else, on the evidence presented.

I gathered that there's just one definitive study of trends in global costs of disasters, produced by Risk Management Solutions. Since Bob Ward had been at RSM before joining the Grantham Institute, he wasn't about to argue with Robert Muir-Wood about that study - hence the lack of grit in the discussion.

The report 'normalized' the various measures of damage due to various types of disaster, weather-related ones and otherwise: normalizing involves correcting for factors such as inflation, changing densities of populations in affected areas, changing property values, improved defences, and so on. The upshot was that there has been no discernible effect of climate change overall in the very wobbly graph of costs since 1950. However, since 1970 there seems to have been a slight but statistically significant rise.

Pielke, by far the clearest and most skilful speaker of the three, thinks that rise means nothing in the long run - there have been similar intervals of rising costs, and the IPCC was unjustified in making a meal of it. Furthermore, he is very angry at the IPCC for attributing opinions to him that he did not hold.

Muir-Wood, who talks like a machine-gun, also declared himself 'irritated' at seeing part of the study seized on by the IPCC (he is also annoyed with the Stern Review's use of the study, but the Stern Review did not get discussed).

Bob Ward was a surprisingly unfocused and ineffective speaker. His PowerPoint presentation seemed to be an all-purpose climate-talk affair; he rambled through much of the same material as Muir-Wood and Pielke, without much in the way of interpretation or challenge. He did not defend the IPCC against the charges. He made the usual pious points about the IPCC having to keep high standards, mistakes needing to be exposed, wrong-doers needing to be held to account and so on - all ending with the importance of not being distracted from the main point: the reality of climate change, the disastrous consequences, etc.

A commenter on my previous post thought the whole thing would be a waste of time, since Pielke and Ward were equally 'warmists'. It is true: Pielke is no 'denier', and at the meeting he was arguing for 'decarbonizing' the economy. But people of Pielke's calibre should be listened to with respect. No sensible person should be a climate-change-denialist in my view: I am an alarmism-denialist, and a "the science is settled" denialist. When the climate-science house has been cleaned up, and there is effective oversight of the researchers, and they publicly archive all their data and methods, and they are prised away from the deep-green wingnuts, it will be interesting to find out what the climate's really doing. And what it was doing back in mediaeval times. Academically interesting; but not justifying interfering with technological progress.

There are notes on the meeting by commenters on Bishop Hill's blog. There is an audio archive at the RI site.
And RPj is claiming a clear defeat for the IPCC in this corner of the battlefield.

(46)

Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can't leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.

However, I do agree that things are now moving on, and that is what this posting is about.

I will start by saying that AGW, as an acronym, is incomplete. We should really have been talking, throughout the Climategate campaign, not about "AGW" only, but about ICAGW. As in: Immediate and Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. And a good way to describe the current state of the debate is that we are now witnessing the removal of the I from that acronym.

Do you remember when earlier environmentalists also put time limits on their catastrophies? Perhaps you are so young - lucky young you - that you don't. But I am old and I remember. In those long gone days, the big catastrophe was going to be resource depletion and overpopulation. The entire population of India was supposed to starve to death by 1980, or whenever it was. And I can recall thinking even then that this would sound a bit daft come 1981, in the event that India failed to oblige and still contained lots of people.

That failed scenario of resource depletion and overpopulation was then replaced in anti-capitalist agitpropped minds by the gradually constructed intellectual edifice that is Global Warming. But this time around, at first, once burned and now wisely shy, the agitpropmasters were careful to say that although they knew that climate catastrophe would happen, and by and by to say that we humans were causing it, and that we humans could prevent it, nevertheless it was impossible to say exactly when catastrophe would strike if their prophecy went unheeded. They were careful, that is to say, to avoid adding that I to CAGW. Sooner or later - it might happen next year, but maybe not for a couple of decades - those deadly feedback loops would go positively loopy, unless something drastic was done. Like handing the world economy over to a collectivist global government. But as to when the catastrophe would manifest itself if we failed to prevent it by mending our ways, who could say?

The more sophisticated of the CAGW-ers even said, and say now, that catastrophe might never happen. But, they then added, and add still: don't let's take the chance. Better safety, by taking all kinds of precautions, rather than sorry because not. And of course if unnecessary precautions are taken, and disaster then does not strike because it never was going to anyway, then we would never know of the pointlessness of the precautions. What are you doing? Scaring away elephants. But, there are no elephants. Yes, it's working!

I for one have always accepted - indeed, as one agitpropper to another, admired - this argument. If you are in a burning building from which you must either jump dangerously or die horribly, then fretting about the potential cost of jumping, about broken limbs and so forth, is entirely beside the point. Yes, the fact that lots of people are now feeling the pinch and are now particularly reluctant to pay to prevent CAGW is true, and makes the argument now at lot easier to have, but the crucial question is: is it happening. If it is, and if we have it in our power to prevent it, then the cost simply must be endured.

But then came the Hockey Team, the IPCC, etc. They did put a date to doom. They put the I into ICAGW. They crafted a graph that disappeared off the top right hand corner the page at an actual, stated time. At the bottom right corner of their concoction there were actual numbers, referring to actual years. One of the many Hockey Team problems - apart from the small matter of it being a pack of lies - is that by now, doom was supposed to have happened, or at least to be happening. That it is unclear whether the world is now getting warmer or colder or what is itself a catastrophe for the Hockey Team, because their graph said that by now, there would be no doubt. Indeed, by predicting a catastrophe that had to happen within their own professional lifetimes, these scientists were setting themselves up for personal disaster, and potentially dragging the entire Global Warming industry with them into this disaster.

In this Guardian editorial last Saturday, we can see one of the shapes of climate battle to come.

If you don't think you have any position to retreat to, then you stand and fight to the death. The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them loose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied. This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all. The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians. And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri.

In among lots of tribal nastiness about how nasty the enemy tribe is, this Guardian leader identifies the position that many CAGW-ers now intend to defend:

... the settled core of our knowledge on climate - the fact of increasing atmospheric carbon, the rising temperature trend, and the heat-trapping mechanism linking the two - ...

Ah yes. "Settled." And "peer reviewed" as well, I dare say. We shall see. Actually, the debate concerns not only that, but whether, if CO2 does indeed cause warming, that warming is caused to any great extent by humans, and above all whether, anthropogenic or not, this warming will at some future date turn catastrophic. To put it acronymically, the CAGW camp will still be fighting over all of those remaining initials. It's not just a matter of whether CO2 is causing the W. This is the terrain of the next big battle.

Don't get me wrong. Crushing Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, sending Pachauri packing, making the letters I, P, C and C spell L, I, E and S in the minds of all thinking people, getting the Met Office to stick to short-term weather forecasting, ripping the panda pants off the WWF - these are very important tasks. When pursuing your enemies after you have won a battle against them, it is important to ensure that as many as possible of the defeated ones do not keep any undeserved shreds of reputation with which to fight again. This is not an either/or thing. The climate skeptic blogosphere is big enough and clever enough to do it all, pushing the old media along with it (UK), or not and just replacing the old media for the duration of the battle (USA) - or the war, or for ever, for everything - as the case may be. But in among sneering at the disgraced Hockey Team, chuckling over the multiple lies and lavish living arrangements of the rascal Pachauri, and gags about how many inches of global warming have just descended upon this or that American city, we should also be getting stuck into the next fight.

I've done my best to include a sprinkling of decent links, to reports and to celebratory whoops from this last battlefield, but these are now potentially infinite. A few weeks ago I went on a foreign trip and was largely disconnected from the internet for the best part of a week. Since then, I have been trying and failing to catch up with Climategate. Last weekend, the story pretty much escaped from anyone's single purview, so large and so complicated has it now become. Basically, a huge retreat in multiple directions is going on, and a huge pursuit, ditto, with CAGW defensive position after CAGW defensive position being overrun by advancing Skeptics. The IPCC citadel, its outer walls having crumbled when Climategate first broke, is now being comprehensively sacked.

Anti-CAGW-ers like me have recently been giving more attention to the Hockey Stick than to that "settled core" that the Guardian refers to, but that battle has long been joined at the merely intellectual level, just as the Hockey Stick itself was actually cut to pieces several years ago, to the satisfaction of those doing the actual cutting. What I am getting at is that this CO2 argument is going to be the next big arena of widespread media and blog conflict. More arguments, of the sort that the likes of Steve McIntyre have been engaged in for years, will now go very public. If the intellectual standards of the protagonists on each side of this battle turn out to be similar to the corresponding standards of each side in the Hockey Stick debate, as I suspect that they will, then the CAGW camp will face further multiple humiliations.

Meanwhile, now that the Hockey Team is being abandoned to its wretched fate by its own former cheerleaders, this means that we can at least hope for some quite spectacular defections from among their ranks, along the lines of: "You're right, it was a fraud. Let me tell you all about it from the inside. Let me tell you what that felt like telling lies to other scientists, and what I thought of them and think of them for believing the lies. Amazon, £8.95." Hollywood may not want to tell this story until the crime has been tricked out as a tragedy, so there is tragic money to chase here.

Looking further ahead, what of the CAGW camp as a whole? Might they also find themselves abandoned? What if the Global Governors decide to dispense with Greenness altogether, all Greenness? These people dumped Marxism, at any rate in public. Might they soon dump "the environment" in similar style. Again, we shall see. If the CAGW-ers start seriously losing the whole CO2 war, as they well may, what with the basic principle having now been thoroughly established that scientists can also be liars, cheats and bullies, that could well happen. This is the line that Richard North has long been taking. It was always, says he, about power and about money, and once the power and money have been accumulated, the Green Movement will have served its purpose and be left to rot.

Trouble is, much of the money involved is based on demonising CO2. And if they (a somewhat different "they" now) do retreat entirely from Greenness, what argument will these villains then retreat to? What other excuses for their villainy will they be able to seize upon and proclaim? Where will they find new "experts" to serve their purposes? One of the reasons why the CO2 battle looks to me like it could get nasty is that it is now hard to see where the Global Governors could then retreat, if they lose that one. No doubt they'll think of something. And we will all be watching out for the relevant memes.

Or maybe, they will just stop bothering with mere arguments, based on alleged facts, about alleged catastrophes that only they can save us all from. Maybe they will just say, oh to hell with arguing, let's just tell them: we are in charge now and there is damn all you peasants can do about it. As with the EU, they will simply announce that their dominion is inevitable, and that only fools will persist in challenging it.

But this would also, I think, be a somewhat high risk tactic. These people really don't want to be declaring themselves in unchallengeable command of the world unless and until they really are.

(15)

There has just been a burst of speculation about whether a certain Paul Dennis leaked the Climategate files. In a comment on a posting at Bishop Hill, Dennis denies it. The police did talk to him. But that's all, he says.

A few weeks ago, in among the comments on this posting at Watts Up With That?, I came across the following comment from Anthony Watts himself, following earlier comments speculating about who the leaker was:

You missed the joke, the "mole" was CRU's own incompetence, they left the file out in the open. The mole was whoever left it there. Steve McIntyre can confirm this, as can Steve Mosher. We were all just having a bit of fun with CRU until they figured out their own blunder, and when they did, they started erasing all sorts of public data on the FTP server.

http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/31/the-cru-data-purge-continues/

I got half way through doing a posting about this at the time, but then I thought, what do I know? I am about as much of a journalist as I am an astronaut. I mean, if I had noticed something, how come nobody else had?

But did I perhaps stumble upon the simple truth of this, told to me by the people who actually know? Simply, the CRU people (Jones?) just left a lot of stuff lying around in a what they thought was a private place, but which was actually rather public, to anyone who knew their way around. Then CRU realised this, and scrubbed it. But by then the bird had flown, as speedily as such birds can nowadays, and, over the next few weeks, it was a skeptic or skeptics quite unattached to CRU who put together that Read Me file. He/They started out that editing process with a lot more stuff.

Dennis did send some emails asking about the leak, but he did not initiate process. That is what he says in his comment at Bishop Hill, and I do not think he would lie in a blog comment. Not now, or ever if he's the kind of guy I now guess him to be. And not there. If he was the leaker, he'd now be working on a big splash admitting it (proclaiming it), and meanwhile telling no lies, or very many truths come to that.

Or have I got the completely the wrong end of completely the wrong stick? Apologies all round if I have totally misunderstood this situation. This is one of those postings that may find itself with an ADDENDUM, saying ignore all that, see comment number whatever from so-and-so. But, maybe not.

(46)

Every now and again I have one of those "It's amazing what you can buy nowadays" moments, when I am confronted with some aspect of the modern world that is working really well. As parts of it most definitely are, even as other aspects of human civilisation remain shambolic or worse. So it was yesterday, when I saw and snapped this, through a rather grubby and blurry shop window, just across from the ticket barriers at Piccadilly tube station:

I know. 32 gigabyte SD cards have been around for months, and for many were no big deal in the first place. I actually seem to recall seeing a 64gb SD card yesterday also, somewhere in Tottenham Court Road, but for some reason this didn't amaze me so much, probably because the price was so huge that I wasn't so gobsmacked by it. It was the fact that the above 32gb SD card wasn't just in existence, somewhere foreign and only reachable via the internet, but in existence right there in a pokey little shop window like this one that hit home to me. This was a 32gb SD card, and it was no big deal. That was why, for me, it is such a big deal. For me, all this is amazing. I can remember having a hard disc in my PC that was only 30 megabytes.

SD cards matter to me a lot, because I like to take photos, such as the one above, and such as the one I posted at my personal blog yesterday, of a new tower at the Elephant and Castle to which the finishing touches are even now being put, or the snaps I took the day before yesterday of the Shard, another implausibly tall new London building, which is still going ahead now despite everything. Or just of strange things that I see around town.

Not so long ago, when out on one of my photographic rambles around London, I had to keep changing the SD cards in my camera, because they kept running out of space. Then came vast 2gb SD cards, vast when I first got one, and the changes became rarer. Now I have two 8gb SD cards, one of which comfortably lasted for an entire recent break in Spain which lasted for the best part of a week if you include all the travelling. Those 8gb SD cards can each store over two thousand of my snaps. And now, presumably for not a lot more than I paid for my 8gb SD cards, or before that for my 2gb SD cards, you can get a 32gb SD card. Amazing.

The point about quantitative leaps of this kind is that there comes a point when quantity becomes quality. 8gb SD cards meant that I no longer had to worry about running out of space, no matter how many snaps I snap. For me, taking still photos, 32gb would be overkill, unless I decide to investigate the world of RAW.

But imagine how much of a difference these cards are now making to those who like to make movies, as they roam about the world. Time was, I presume, and not so long ago, when taking enough footage - with enough takes, done often enough to be good enough - to make a reasonably good home-movie-type movie, as opposed to the sort of home movie I am used to, was just out of the question. But now ...

In earlier times, what about that moment - which seemed only to be a moment, looking back on it - when fiddling about with photos on one's home computer went from ridiculously time-consuming and cumbersome and hard-disc eating, to just plain easy? All because of quantitative things like speed and hard disc space. Then as now, idiot techy columnists asked: "Do we really need ...?" - this much hard disc space, this much memory, this much space on a card, this much speed, this ... much? Well, maybe "we" didn't need such things then, but we soon found things to do with all this this-much-ness that meant that we did need it. Want it, anyway.

The point of this posting is not just to celebrate the seemingly endless creativity of capitalism, although I trust it does this. It is also to make a comparison between different ways of doing things. During the Cold War, it was possible to make starkly geographical comparisons between entire economic systems, between economic philosophies even, between moderately underanged, and totally deranged, in two instances (Germany and Korea) even between separated bits of the same countries. Although the catastrophe that is North Korea still staggers on, it is now harder to make such comparisons. But it is still possible. It is still possible to look at the rules governing how SD cards are made, and at the rules governing the management of state schools and NHS hospitals, to the extreme advantage of the former. Imagine a world in which healthcare was getting better as fast as digital photo storage space is now growing.

Strangely, I was yesterday looking for SD cards that were only 2gb sized. This is because I have a digital radio that records onto SD cards but only onto the primitive sort which are 2gb in size, maximum, everything bigger being "SDHC". See the picture above. And it turns out that 2gb SD cards have actually got more expensive than when I last looked. This particular variant of the SD format has now arrived at the past-it-but-still-wanted-by-a-few-weirdos category. Supply and demand sometimes plays funny tricks.

(13)

I am going with my son to the Royal Institution on Friday to hear the debate between Roger Pielke, Jr, and Bob Ward, of LSE's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (Bob Ward recently starred in a Samizdata post by Brian Micklethwait). The debate is titled 'Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?' Not hard to guess Bob Ward's answer. A flavour of Pielke's position is given by this extract from a Wall Street Journal opinion piece (not by him) from last June. According to the WSJ, a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum (prop. Kofi Annan) warns:

that climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts 'mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness' unless countries agree to 'the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated' at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.

To which Pielke Jr replies:

... 'To get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and disasters,'... the Annan 'report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many 'moving parts' over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind.'

Doubtless he will be boggling our minds on Friday along these lines.

I did not realize untill I started writing this post that RPj and Ward had such a long history with each other. Just lately there has been massive to-ing and fro-ing between the two of them on RPj's blog. Ward helped with the notorious report produced by the boss of the Grantham Institute, the Baron Stern of Brentford. The report just took a serious hit from Pielke, for silently correcting an important number in a table after publication:

Interestingly, it looks like Stern chose to change the report rather than issue an Errata. Either way (though an errata would have been more proper from an academic standpoint), the issue lies not with a typo, but what problems are revealed once the typo is corrected. ... Correcting the typo does not make the analysis correct, just obviously wrong... None of this excuses altering a published government report quietly and without notice, after its publication and wide dissemination.

Bob Ward does not hesitate to use the 'vested interest' smear against opposition. There is an interesting piece on the Grantham Institute's own vested interests at Climate Resistance.

This is going to be interesting. What a change there has been in the climate-change climate these last few months!

(11)

Tiger Airways flight 308 (Singapore - Hanoi). Jan 31, 2010.

Just out of interest, although this couple were watching a movie together on an iPhone screen in an impressive display of marital harmony, they did have his and hers iPhones regardless. Perhaps even more impressively (if you are Steve Jobs, anyway) all five people in my row on the plane were at one point using iPhones or iPod touches simultaneously. I think all of us would have our experiences enhanced using the larger tablet.

On the other hand, Apple victim as I am, I don't think I will be getting one myself. For me, the killer issue is the lack of an SD card slot. Normally, I travel with a netbook, and I am constantly taking photographs and backing them up. I do not want additional accessories that I have to remember to bring with me and can lose along the way. I certainly do not want additional accessories that have proprietary Apple connectors and that I cannot replace in obscure shops in strange parts of the world. No SD slot but works with USB card reader = annoyance. No SD slot and card reader with proprietary connector = deal breaker.

This is a shame, because iPad as media player, web browser, and photo management tool that would import my photos to iPhoto and then sync with my Mac when I got home would be great.

Plus there is the small matter of VLC and a bit-torrent client, which for unstated reasons that are fairly obvious, are much more useful to me when on the road than when at home, but let's not mention that. This may be less of a deal breaker, as I suspect there are teams of jailbreakers and hackers on the job already.

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The Channel Four report on the issue can be seen here on their internet TV viewer (which ought to be called the FourPlayer, but is regrettably known as Channel4OD). Their report is clearly from a green perspective, but does at least cheer us all up with a snippet from the Hide the Decline video.

Choice quote from Bob Ward "if you are less than transparent then people think you might be hiding something". To which one is tempted to respond that if you say you are hiding something, people might also conclude that you are hiding something. Like a decline for example.

- Bishop Hill stays right on top of the ongoing Climategate story. If you have not already done so, order your copy now of the Bishop's recently published book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science.

Before Christmas, the Bishop (aka Andrew Montford) talked with me over the phone. Be warned that there are some seriously annoying clicks right at the start of this, but after a couple of minutes they go away and the remaining half an hour or so is okay. That caveat aside, listen to that here.

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Someone called Andrew K is using the excellent Bishop Hill's blog to help him to compile a database of environment correspondents, complete with educational qualifications or lack of them. Says Andrew K of this project:

This is as much as anything an appeal for information: to do a little crowdsourcing.

Commenter MikeE is not sure he likes the tone of this post:

... I am not sure I like the tone of this post.

Yes, interesting. One of the biggest frauds in the whole history of our species is still being attempted, but don't let's be too nasty to the newspaper cheerleaders still trying to promote it. Let's not get the tone wrong. I say that Andrew K's tone is spot on.

Bishop Hill himself defends his guest-blogger:

One of the most interesting aspects to the history of AGW is the sheer unquestioning awfulness of the media coverage. This is an attempt to explain that phenomenon, and is not unreasonable.

Well, I think it goes beyond that. This is indeed quite nasty, as MikeE says, but only in the same sort of way that a prison sentence is nasty for a criminal. It is nasty but thoroughly deserved. Nasty but still the exact right thing to do. Just as I am in favour of prison sentences for criminals, I am also thoroughly in favour of the spotlight being shone on these (mostly) ridiculously unquestioning environmental correspondents. I said when Climategate first broke that once the "science" had been given a good seeing to, then next in line would be people like the idiot journalists who had been passing this "science" on with such enthusiastic credulity, them being a big part of the story itself. Excellent. What a difference an internet makes, eh?

So, if you can help with relevant information, please go to the Bishop's blog and provide it. Comments about the general goodness or badness of compiling lists of bad people can go wherever that makes sense to commenters. Personally, as I say, I am all for it.

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The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now - even, now, in central London - but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.

Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this ki