Finally I found a video that explains to my satisfaction what using Google Glass is like. It’s a display that you wear, that uses clever optics to give the appearance of looking at a 25 inch screen 8 feet away.

Parts of this video are welcome-to-the-future moments.

By the way, these voice commands already work on your phone; tap the microphone symbol top right and say something like “wake
...continue What using Google Glass is like]]> Incoming from Rob Fisher (to whom I owe him a blog posting about this talk that he gave at my home a while back – short version: it was very good):

Finally I found a video that explains to my satisfaction what using Google Glass is like. It’s a display that you wear, that uses clever optics to give the appearance of looking at a 25 inch screen 8 feet away.

Parts of this video are welcome-to-the-future moments.

By the way, these voice commands already work on your phone; tap the microphone symbol top right and say something like “wake me up at 8am”.

My phone being the Google Nexus 4 that I have been going on about lately, for example in the previous posting here.

I won’t be watching this video in the immediately immediate future as I have other things to be getting on with. But I definitely will very soon.

What Rob says about voice commands is interesting, I think. I have long suspected that a big computer leap would occur when we stopped communicating with computers by typing on them, and instead just talked to them. “Jeeves, what’s that thingy where the thingamajig I was talking about yesterday is yellow instead of black?” “Do you perhaps mean this, sir?” “Yes, that’s the thing. You’re a genius Jeeves!” “One does one’s best sir.” Etc.

Ammunition may be a tad harder but where there is a will, there is a way.

- Andrew Zalotocky, commenting on this, here, about #HackedOff, many weeks ago.

I had this all ready to be
...continue Samizdata quote of the day]]> If you want to introduce someone to libertarian thinking, encourage them to try this experiment. Spend a few days reading nothing but technology news. Then spend a few days reading nothing but political news. For the first few days they’ll see an exciting world of innovation and creativity where everything is getting better all the time. In the second period they’ll see a miserable world of cynicism and treachery where everything is falling apart. Then ask them to explain the difference.

- Andrew Zalotocky, commenting on this, here, about #HackedOff, many weeks ago.

I had this all ready to be an SQotD right after it first got said, but then another SQotD happened, and I forgot about it. Today, I chanced upon it again.

I argue that all that is needed is for incentives to align in a certain direction. The awarding of grants, the publication of papers and the media attention all point in one direction and there is positive feedback between them.

As reported in the New York Times, Diederik Stapel literally made up results of psychological experiments that were never done. It is not necessary to go quite that
...continue The economics of bad science]]> A typical reaction to global warming skepticism is to point to all the institutions that endorse global warming and argue that this would require a grand conspiracy if global warming were false.

I argue that all that is needed is for incentives to align in a certain direction. The awarding of grants, the publication of papers and the media attention all point in one direction and there is positive feedback between them.

As reported in the New York Times, Diederik Stapel literally made up results of psychological experiments that were never done. It is not necessary to go quite that far.

Fraud like Stapel’s — brazen and careless in hindsight — might represent a lesser threat to the integrity of science than the massaging of data and selective reporting of experiments. The young professor who backed the two student whistle-blowers told me that tweaking results — like stopping data collection once the results confirm a hypothesis — is a common practice. “I could certainly see that if you do it in more subtle ways, it’s more difficult to detect,” Ap Dijksterhuis, one of the Netherlands’ best known psychologists, told me.

Journals and reviewers can play a part:

If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.

The adjective “sloppy” seems charitable. Several psychologists I spoke to admitted that each of these more common practices was as deliberate as any of Stapel’s wholesale fabrications. Each was a choice made by the scientist every time he or she came to a fork in the road of experimental research — one way pointing to the truth, however dull and unsatisfying, and the other beckoning the researcher toward a rosier and more notable result that could be patently false or only partly true. What may be most troubling about the research culture the committees describe in their report are the plentiful opportunities and incentives for fraud. “The cookie jar was on the table without a lid” is how Stapel put it to me once. Those who suspect a colleague of fraud may be inclined to keep mum because of the potential costs of whistle-blowing.

So there are incentives to take an easy path of painting a simple, neat picture because it is more persuasive and saleable.

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said.

…

What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman.

It is not just money; the rewards are the respect and admiration of one’s peers. In my talk on open source software on Friday I mentioned that this is one of the reasons individuals give away their source code or donate their time to open source projects. It feels good to make something that others find impressive.

I am lucky enough to work in software. There, the most aesthetically pleasing solution is usually the best one. And software can not easily be faked; it becomes apparent very quickly if it does not work. I can imagine software that appears to do what it claims to do without actually doing it, such as an encryption program that leaks your secrets. Open source software has largely solved this problem. In fact, science could learn a lot from open source software.

H/T Watts Up With That?

These are my notes for the ‘introduction’ section of my talk. I think this should give you a flavour of what to expect:

I am going to talk about open source software.

I am calling it “open source” but as we will see there are variations on that theme.

I will talk about the history because it tells us things about the motivations of the people who work on open source software.

I will also talk
...continue Rob Fisher talking about Open Source Software]]> My next Last Friday of the Month speaker, this coming Friday (April 26) will be Samizdata’s own Rob Fisher, who has emailed me thus:

These are my notes for the ‘introduction’ section of my talk. I think this should give you a flavour of what to expect:

I am going to talk about open source software.

I am calling it “open source” but as we will see there are variations on that theme.

I will talk about the history because it tells us things about the motivations of the people who work on open source software.

I will also talk about the nature of software in general, to put open source in context.

I want to talk about what it is like to develop software, and to develop open source software and proprietary software. I have done a little of the former and a lot of the latter – developing proprietary software is my day job.

And I will tell you about how open source looks today, what kinds of software are open source, who is developing it, who is using it and how an open source project is run.

And I will talk about ways I think open source software is saving the world (from a variety of bad things that would happen without it).

I don’t have a grand thesis to share, no big new idea. What I’m talking about is mostly well known, but my aim is to provide an overview so we can think about what it all means in a broader economic sense, and I’ll share the few thoughts I have about that.

I am looking forward to this a lot, because I expect to learn a lot. I particularly like the sound of that “saving the world” bit.

This stuff is likely to be central to many of the most vexed political and legal arguments of the next few decades. Intellectual property gets ever hotter as a topic, as they continue to lengthen the number of years it lasts. And as “3D printing” gets into its stride, that is adding a whole new dimension of relevance to such arguments. Open Source manufacturing, anyone?

It is already clear from emailed acceptances that there will be a good turnout. There is room for it to be slightly better, but only slightly. Email me soon (go here and click on “Contact”), if you would like to attend.

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment
...continue On the joys of climate change conferences]]> James Delingpole has a nice posting about a recent excellent performance by Peter Lilley, the Tory MP who seems, unlike many of them, to have retained a large measure of common sense. This is what Mr Lilley said recently about the constant run of conferences held to discuss environmental issues:

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment where they are cut off from reality and the rest of the world, where they can indulge themselves in demonstrating their lack of realism and reality, and where the original objective of obtaining a legally binding agreement between nations to reduce worldwide emissions has itself been displaced by the alternative objective of reaching an agreement to meet again—and to agree to reach an agreement at some distant future time. That is displacement activity on a massive scale, and it involves a massive degree of hypocrisy, given the huge emissions incurred by these eco-warriors as they swan across the globe in jets and hire fleets of limousines, so emitting more CO2 than a small African country.”

It is Earth Day today, by the way.

He opens by talking about someone who lost all his Bitcoins when his computer was hacked. This is avoidable by storing funds in an off-line wallet, which is just a file containing a private key used to transmit funds. It is not much different from storing gold, except that it takes up less space, backups can be made, a thief would need to both steal your wallet and know your password, and it
...continue Felix Salmon on Bitcoin]]> Since the Cyprus crisis the price of Bitcoins has rapidly increased. Felix Salmon wrote one of the better articles about this. But the article has its problems.

He opens by talking about someone who lost all his Bitcoins when his computer was hacked. This is avoidable by storing funds in an off-line wallet, which is just a file containing a private key used to transmit funds. It is not much different from storing gold, except that it takes up less space, backups can be made, a thief would need to both steal your wallet and know your password, and it is possible to pay money in to an off-line wallet. You only need to expose your wallet to the Internet to pay money out of it. All this requires a certain amount of skill and knowledge but so does any method of storing value.

Salmon uses the word “anonymous” carelessly. Bitcoin is not anonymous and not intended to be. It is pseudonymous. Every transaction is visible, and it is possible for the government to find out, for example, which bank account was used to buy some Bitcoins. You can probably take steps to make this so expensive that law enforcement could not afford it. But that is a practical point, not a mathematical one, and it would be a mistake to think that anonymity is built in.

Salmon complains that Bitcoin needs too much technical expertise to use. But not everyone need use Bitcoins directly for them to serve as a store of value, any more than people need to handle physical gold themselves. That one has the option to do so if one does not trust others is nice, but trusting others for convenience is possible too. If Bitcoin were widely adopted, I would expect to see secondary currencies backed by Bitcoin to be used as cash, and the equivalent of Visa and Paypal to be implemented by someone.

Salmon points out that the value of Bitcoin is very volatile and closely tracks media coverage of it. This is because there is a fixed supply (there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins) and new people are still discovering the currency. After every media report the number of people who want Bitcoins increases. Once everyone knows about it who would want to buy it, the price should settle down as the overall demand for money is not so volatile.

Salmon’s main point is that Bitcoin is doomed to fail because as it is adopted its price will increase rapidly, which hyperdeflation will mean no-one spends it. But such a situation can not persist; as soon as the price settles spending will resume.

Although I am optimistic, there are plenty of ways it could fail. Something better might come along, or governments may attempt to put a stop to it and may succeed enough to make it fail.

Or in twenty years’ time you could find yourself having bought one 21-millionth of the global money supply for a very good price.

It so happens that I have recently acquired and have been reading Matt Ridley’s excellent book, The Rational Optimist, which Johnathan Pearce has often blogged about here, in this posting, for example. (Here is a piece by Ridley, defending his book against Monbiot.)

And it further so happens that The Rational Optimist contains a very interesting passage (pp. 308-310), which I already had in mind to flag up here, even before this latest news of another flu outbreak, about
...continue Matt Ridley on how flu epidemics evolve away from being very deadly]]> It seems that another pandemic panic may be about to strike. (Thank you Instapundit, who seems a bit panic-stricken himself.)

It so happens that I have recently acquired and have been reading Matt Ridley’s excellent book, The Rational Optimist, which Johnathan Pearce has often blogged about here, in this posting, for example. (Here is a piece by Ridley, defending his book against Monbiot.)

And it further so happens that The Rational Optimist contains a very interesting passage (pp. 308-310), which I already had in mind to flag up here, even before this latest news of another flu outbreak, about the spread of infectious diseases, which explains why any pandemic panic that now materialises is likely once again to be greatly exaggerated:

In the 2000s influenza, too, proved to be a paper tiger. H5N1 strains of the virus (‘bird flu’) jumped into human beings via free-range ducks on Chinese farms and, in 2005, the United Nations predicted five million to 150 million deaths from bird flu. Yet, contrary to what you have read, when H5N1 did infect human beings it proved neither especially virulent nor especially contagious. It has so far killed fewer than 300 people worldwide. As one commentator concluded: ‘Hysteria over an avian flu pandemic has been very good for the Chicken Little media, authors, ambitious health officials, drug companies … But even as many of the panic-mongers have begun to lie low, the vestiges of hysteria remain – as do the misallocations of billions of dollars from more serious health problems. Too bad no one ever holds the doomsayers accountable for the damage they’ve done.’

I suspect this is too strong, and that flu may yet mount a serious epidemic in some form. But the H1N1 swine flu epidemic of 2009 that began in Mexico also followed the usual path of new flu strains, towards low virulence – about one death for every 1,000-10,000 infected people. This is no surprise. As the evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has long argued, viruses undergo natural selection as well as mutation once established in a new species of host and casually transmitted viruses like flu replicate more successfully if they cause mild disease, so that the host keeps moving about and meeting new people. A victim lying in a darkened room alone is not as much use to the virus as somebody who feels just well enough to struggle into work coughing. The modern way of life, with lots of travel but also rather more personal space, tends to encourage mild, casual-contact viruses that need their victims to be healthy enough to meet fresh targets fleetingly. It is no accident that modern people suffer from more than 200 kinds of cold, the supreme viral exploiters of the modern world.

If this is so, why then did H1N1 flu kill perhaps fifty million people in 1918? Ewald and others think the explanation lies in the trenches of the First World War. So many wounded soldiers, in such crowded conditions, provided a habitat ideally suited to more virulent behaviour by the virus: people could pass on the virus while dying. Today you are far more likely to get the flu from a person who is well enough to go to work than one who is ill enough to stay at home.

Of course the pessimists could be right, in this or that particular instance. And of course we here are very pessimistic about the future course of the world’s current financial crisis. That is surely going to get far worse before it gets much better. I recall reporting here on a debate on that subject, where the other side was taking it for granted that the crisis that had just happened was now over and done with, and the only question concerned how best to “manage the recovery”. We here regard the people who talked like that, then, as the Chicken Little Panglossian tendency.

And Matt Ridley himself is careful to include doubts about future flu outbreaks maybe not all being so un-apocalypctic. “Flu may yet mount a serious epidemic in some form.”

Nevertheless, interesting. And it will be interesting to see how this latest flu flare-up plays out.

A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

How does it work?

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular
...continue Has an armaments maker just saved the world with cheap water?]]> I have no idea if this (which I got to via Instapundit and then Walter Russell Mead) is for real, but it sure sounds good:

A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

How does it work?

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin – just one atom in thickness – it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

So, is this a genuine prospect, or is it, to use a phrase from an earlier techno comment thread here, geek porn? Mead is careful to say that whereas such inventiveness is, in general, good, this particular inventiveness may come to nothing.

At most sites these days there are either too few comments to be bothering with, or far too many comments to be bothering with. Mead has no commenters at all to tell him if it makes sense to be optimistic about this new technique or not, and Instapundit only has occasional emailed-in updates.

Here, on the other hand, we not only do have comments, but we get a middlingly useful number of comments on most of our postings, and what is more comments that are often well worth reading, especially on subjects like this one.

So, might these carbon membranes work their water purification magic, or is this just hype?

LATER: Tim Worstall explains it a bit more, and there are some interesting comments there also.

Those looking for an excuse to expand the role of the state tend to assume that art and science come from the thoughts and actions of an educated and powerful elite, and then flow downwards, bestowing their blessings upon the worlds of technology and entertainment, and upon the world generally. Science gives rise to new
...continue Some thoughts about where science and art come from (and about why governments don’t need to pay for either of them)]]> One many significant dividing lines between, on the one hand, enthusiasts for free economies and free societies, and on the other hand those who favour a large role for the state in directing and energising society, concerns where you think art and science come from.

Those looking for an excuse to expand the role of the state tend to assume that art and science come from the thoughts and actions of an educated and powerful elite, and then flow downwards, bestowing their blessings upon the worlds of technology and entertainment, and upon the world generally. Science gives rise to new technology. Art likewise leads the way in new forms of entertainment, communication, and so on.

While channel surfing a while back, I heard Dr Sheldon Cooper, the presiding monster of the hit US sitcom The Big Bang Theory, describe engineering as the “dull younger brother” (or some such dismissive phrase) of physics. The BBT gang were trying to improve their fighting robot, and in the absence of the one true engineer in their group (Howard Wolowitz), Sheldon tries to seize the initiative. “Watch and learn” says Sheldon. Sheldon’s attitude concerning the relationship between science and technology is the dominant one these days, because it explains why the government must pay for science on the scale that it now does. Either governments fund science, or science will stop. Luckily governments do now fund science, so science proceeds, and technology trundles along in its wake. Hence modern industrial civilisation.

If the above model of how science and art work was completely wrong, it would not be so widely believed in. There is some truth to it. Science does often give rise to new technology, especially nowadays. Some artists are indeed pioneers in more than art. But how do science and art arise in the first place?

Howard Wolowitz is the only one of The Big Bang Theory gang of four who does not have a “Dr” at the front of his name. But he is the one who goes into space. He builds space toilets. He was the one who actually built the fighting robot. Dr Sheldon Cooper, though very clever about physics, is wrong about technology, and it was good to see a bunch of comedy sitcom writers acknowledging this. After “Watch and learn”, Sheldon Cooper’s next words, greeted by much studio audience mirth, are “Does anyone know how to open this toolbox?”

Perhaps the writings of Terence Kealey are starting to have some effect upon the popular culture. A scientist himself, Kealey is now one of the more prominent writers who has confronted this Science Causes Technology equation by pointing out that the truth is almost entirely the other way around. Technology, Kealey asserts, is the foundation upon which the best science tends to be built, technology itself quite often having been developed in defiance of rather than in accordance with existing scientific doctrines, with science only later catching up. Only when some particular sort of technology becomes very widespread, and a supply of people is needed who understand the principles upon which it is based, does the relevant new scientific “discipline” get established, paid for by those commanding the technology that the techno-workers now need to understand. Primitive steam engines preceded the correct scientific understanding of gases under pressure. Germ theory began as an exercise in chasing germs and saving lives, not in the brains of already established scientists applying their grade A scientific education to a real world problem only after they had obtained that education. Historically, technology had been jogging along quite impressively for many centuries before science, of the sort we would recognise as such now, got into its stride. And even today’s university-based scientist-entrepreneurs are often really load-fire-take-aim, suck-it-and-see technologist/go-getters, who treat university science faculties more like mad-inventor garden sheds than regular academic venues. They prove their science to be science by making it work, by making it do something useful.

None of which requires government funding. Just venture capitalists, crowdfunders, generous aunts and uncles, or just hobbyists with time and money to spare paying their own way. One of Kealey’s central points is that an economy’s total science spending is not dependant at all on how much the mere government puts into the pot. As political money gets ever tighter in the years to come, Kealey’s argument, despite him being, academically speaking, in a minority of approximately one, will be sucked into greater prominence, by politicians looking for an excuse to cut funding for science, and for everything else.

And what of art? Let me again quote from that book about medieval English history, Nicholas Vincent’s A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485), that I have recently been reading, because he happens to describe where art comes from rather well, in this passage on page 362, about a notable maker of church bells:

The London bell-maker, Richard of Wimbish … was so well regarded that at least seven of his bells still survive to be rung today in parish churches from Devon to Kent and from Oxfordshire to Suffolk. We know this because, like some glass-painters and a few of the more exceptional masons and skilled artisans, Wimbish ‘signed’ his work. From the ranks of anonymous labour, the artist had been born.

Almost anything, if done really well and if done repeatedly, can be art. Having an eye, and in this case also an ear, for aesthetic considerations goes hand in hand with profit, providing whatever it is that is being contrived so artistically has a foundation in continuing usefulness. The useful arts mutate into Art.

Vincent’s next paragraph is about big guns, then typically made by the same kind of people and with the same metallurgical skills as those who made big bells. The Chinese, Vincent notes, may have invented gunpowder, but gunpowder is no good for anything besides fireworks if you can’t make guns that can accommodate and direct the resulting explosions without themselves flying into lethal fragments. I dare say that the development of those early artillery pieces was accompanied by pompous proclamations from the official “scientists” of the day that the laws of science, or God, or whoever, ordained that such devices could never work, and certainly never in the way that people of the Richard Wimbish (and Howard Wolowitz) sort were actually getting them to work. And then, when the Wimbish-Wolowitz tendency had proved that particular sort of science wrong, science was amended.

Notice how, in attempting to change my subject from science to art, I found myself veering back to science again. This is because both science and art spring from the same soil. They are different ways of thinking about things, different ways of making and appreciating stuff. Does it do the job? How and why does it do the job? What’s going on here? And: Is it a thing of beauty? What’s so beautiful about it? Would having one in my house or my garden or my church impress my friends or my subjects? Questions like that are asked of the same things, again and again down the ages.

Bringing the story towards our own time, when people now speak about “art” they typically mean painting pictures or making sculptures. But such activities did not begin as “art”, in the sense we now mean by the word, when speaking of art galleries and such. They began as attempts to impress, and later to record likenesses.

So it was that the invention of photography had a profound effect on “art”. Picture making having been going on for so long that it had become thoroughly accepted as art (as well as just something that was useful to advertise and to record likenesses), what were all the “artists” to do with themselves when the economic foundations of their trade were snatched out from under them? Many painters became photographers, keeping their clientele while changing their techniques. But what of the rest?

Recently there was a comment thread here about modern art, about how ghastly it is, how badly it bodes for Western Civilisation, etc. etc. But I believe that to be as pessimistic about the future of the West as some of those pessimistic commenters were, merely because of a lot of stupid abstract paintings, is to fall into the trap of regarding artists in the way they like to regard themselves, as a vanguard of civilisation (an “avant guarde”), rather than as mostly a rearguard. You simply cannot understand Modern Art without appreciating that it takes place in a technological space first developed by, and then abandoned by, the industry of making pictorial likenesses. Abstract art is, in many ways, a rationalisation of the fact that likenesses are now no longer demanded, on the scale of former times, from “artists”. It is primitive picture making, done in a part of town that used to be very grand but is now either stuck in genteel poverty, or in the other kind of poverty: a slum.

Old school art was a business as well as an “art”. “Modern Art” became like a bunch of children who are now mostly ignored, except when they misbehave. So, to keep on getting attention, guess what they have kept on doing. It’s something of a digression, but I can’t resist noting here that the resulting publicity machine that tells the world of all this foolishness is itself heavily dependant upon … photography. Could Modern Art be even as big as it is (and hence a source of such angst to those who are anxious about how stupid a lot of it is), without photographs to spread the news of what the Modern Artists have been getting up to?

As all that Modern Art misbehaviour becomes ever more tedious, degenerating from Outrage to mere irritation, I and many others have for some time now been detecting a distinct trend in Modern Art away from Outrage and towards the Fun of the Fair. (That’s part of what Mick Hartley was saying about Roy Lichtenstein, in the earlier piece the comments on which were linked to above, which linked to this.) Many Arts enterprises are now mutating from Art Temples to “visitor attractions”, or at least they are trying to. It is no coincidence that this trend away from the pomposities of High Art towards entertainment, visitor attraction, bums on seats, bodies in galleries, is associated with a time when political money for the arts is getting tighter, and you either get some paying customers or go out of business. Art, now getting somewhat less from the politicians, and maybe in the nearish future quite a lot less, has for some time now been switching back to trying to make itself useful, by at least being entertaining, and by such related means as attracting more visitors to nearby restaurants and shops, and more eyeballs to adverts.

The danger for the many “artists” who still depend upon public subsidy for their useless activities is that if art goes on reverting to being more useful and more entertaining, the question inevitably arises: Why does the government need to pay for any of this? Clearly art will survive no matter what, and indeed it will. In a world in which entrepreneurs and then contented viewers will happily pay for high class entertainment (like such things as The Big Bang Theory), why do you need arts subsidies, for second-rate, amateur entertainers who can’t cut it as real entertainers? No wonder many arts-ists are worried by this trend from Art towards mere fun.

This has been quite a long posting, and you might think that it ought to have been two separate postings, one about government funding for science (no need) and then another one about government funding for art (ditto). But I wanted to lump these two topics together, because in a very basic sense, I think that they are the same topic. Both science and art (especially good science and good art – and that really is another posting) spring from a vibrant, progressive, progressing, go-getting, acquisitive, inquisitive, life-affirming, life-enjoying world. Is a church bell science, or art? Both.

If the politicians really want to encourage art and science, let them stop fretting about these things by trying to micro-mange them, and focus instead upon a much smaller core curriculum, that really will make the world a better place by them doing much less to prevent the good life for everyone, and hence also much less to prevent the progress of art and science. If they want to get personally involved in such things as art and science, let it be at their own personal expense.

In a series of 30 pictures, the Royal Collection Trust will show da Vinci’s distinctive anatomical drawings alongside a newly-taken MRI or CT scan. The comparison is intended to show just how accurate da Vinci was, despite his limited technology and lack of contemporary medical knowledge.

The Edinburgh Festival is mainly about the arts, rather than sciences, although in a way this exhibition transcends both. I hear mixed things about the Festival: it is, apparently, great fun but
...continue The timeless brilliance of Leonardo da Vinci]]> This news item about the anatomy drawings of Leonardo da Vinci looks like a good excuse to go to Edinburgh in August:

In a series of 30 pictures, the Royal Collection Trust will show da Vinci’s distinctive anatomical drawings alongside a newly-taken MRI or CT scan. The comparison is intended to show just how accurate da Vinci was, despite his limited technology and lack of contemporary medical knowledge.

The Edinburgh Festival is mainly about the arts, rather than sciences, although in a way this exhibition transcends both. I hear mixed things about the Festival: it is, apparently, great fun but it can be a pain getting accomodation. My wife has never been to Scotland – an omission that needs to be sorted out soon.

And of course the da Vinci exhibition in this beautiful Scottish city is a reminder of the grand tradition of medicine in that part of the world.