We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D’Afrique under General D’Allonville).
The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped “Here goes the last of the Brudenells”, his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).
Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.
Portable phones are wonderful things, but not, it is widely agreed, wholly wonderful.
Have you ever been at something like a church service or a classical music concert, and found your attention diverted by portable phones ringing?
Help is at hand.
MONTERREY, Mexico – It was the reporters who noticed first. Unable to call their editors while covering the weddings of the rich and famous, they asked the priest why their cell phones never worked at Sacred Heart. His reply: Israeli counterintelligence.
In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the Madonna and statues of the saints.
The jarring polychromatic din of ringing cell phones is increasingly being thwarted – from religious sanctuaries to India’s parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains – by devices originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart phone-triggered bombings.
Jamming other people’s portable phones is one of many practices where you need strong property rights in place to enable disputes about the rights and wrongs of it to be easily decided. But even in an age of weakened property rights, this device will surely prove to be a great boon in protecting the rest of us from compulsive communicators and their irritating noises.
Human problems are hard to fix. So instead, fix the machines they are using to cause the problem.
This being Sunday, let us turn our minds towards matters otherworldly. Today’s Telegraph contains this devilishly diverting story:
Chris Cranmer, a naval technician serving on the Type 22 frigate Cumberland, has been officially recognised as a Satanist by the ship’s captain. That allows him to perform Satanic rituals aboard and permits him to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan should he be killed in action.
My immediate reaction was, of course: What the hell is the world coming to? But thinking about it some more, I reckon that a Satanist would be able to throw himself into a battle at least as enthusiastically as your average Christian.
A spokesman for the Royal Navy – echoing that Rowan Atkinson Church of England Bishop, who noted the forces of good, and of evil, and who said that the role of the Church of England is to strike a balance between the two – assures us that all is well:
A spokesman for the Royal Navy insisted that Mr Cranmer’s unconventional beliefs would not cause problems on board ship. “We are an equal opportunities employer and we don’t stop anybody from having their own religious values,” he said.
The report ends with this further quote from the same source:
“Nobody is suggesting there is anything at all dark about this.”
Perish the thought.
If Moses had turned right instead of left, the Jews could have had the oil, and the Arabs would have got the oranges.
– Harry Hutton
So hapless Prince Harry takes a swing at some paparazzo who bashes him in the face with a camera, and the British press have apoplexy tut-tutting over his behaviour.
To use internet parlance, WTF? If some pushy bastard negligently clips you in the mouth with a camera whilst in search of a few quid, the correct response is to return the favour with interest. That is not ill-advised or thuggish or incorrect, it is an entirely appropriate means of male-to-male comminication at such a time. I am glad to see that there is a member of the royal family who actually has personality traits that approach those of the Crown’s normal everyday subjects.
It seem quite appropriate that not only should he not apologise for his reaction to the incident, he should be advising Christopher Uncle that if there is a next time, there should be some expectations of a royal boot in the bollocks as well.
Earlier this week I received a telephone call at work which left me trembling with rage and disgust. Had I been asked to make a donation to Hamas or buy a Michael Moore DVD? Had a born-again Christian harangued me about my evil atheist views? Was I trying to get some data from our Paris office? Had I been told that my soccer team, Ipswich Town Football Club, was about to be merged with Norwich City FC?
No, it was none of these things. I had just been lectured about what I should consider paying for a house by a early twentysomething estate agent.
Now, like a lot of people, I realise that the process of buying a home can be stressful. I work in the London financial market, which is a pretty stressful place full of aggressive folk and also some of the smartest, nicest folk around, too. In my decade or more of working here, though, I have never encountered such a rancid mix of rudeness, patronising attitude, overlaying a rather obvious desire to grab my money as fast as possible. A very British set of character failings, in fact.
During my recent and wonderful trip to the United States, I used to chuckle at some of the real estate advertisements, with expressions such as “We don’t just sell houses, we sell dreams.” Smug Brits may laugh at such cheesy imagery and words, but frankly, I will settle for a bit of American cheesiness and cheery good manners over the British alternative every time.
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.
– from So Long, and Thanks for all the Fsh by Douglas Adams.
(We miss you Douglas)
Blogging may be a bit light tonight (or not) as there is a Samizdata.net Blogger Bash at Samizdata HQ tonight…
We shall be trying to impress a certain Texan blogger with Chili Con Chelsea!
A lot of bloggers (e.g. the indefatigable Stephen Green) have been posting electoral maps and trying to anticipate who is going to win based on the latest and greatest polling data. But Green, who had posted many such maps over the past few months, finally threw in the towel on Tuesday, declaring:
Say it with me now: It’s all a bunch of crap.
The polls all suck, for reasons gone into by people way smarter than I am. The predictions all suck, because everybody is working from the same assumptions, based on voting patterns from the last election.
… And yet everyone – myself included – still bases all their predictions on a tight race? I don’t know how this thing is going to pan out. Neither do you. But right now, I feel as though the electorate is going to play all of us pundits – amateur and professional – for fools.
And I think he’s 100% right about that … coloring states red or blue based on poll results is of limited use when there are so many conceivable outcomes, when we have such a hard time extricating sampling biases from polls, etc. Here is one possible way out of the dead end – instead of thinking deterministically and trying to project a winner in each state, let’s look at everything probabilistically, and run a Monte Carlo scenario to see each man’s chance of winning.
For this exercise, I assumed:
– that each candidate’s probability of carrying a state was equal to the current selling price on TradeSports.com. For example, if the price of “Bush carries Iowa” is quoted at 58, then Bush has a 58% chance of carrying Iowa in any given trial.
– No third-party candidates had any chance of carrying a state.
– Colorado and Maine are treated as all-or-none propositions.
– no “faithless electors” shun their commitment to vote for their candidate.
– all 51 events (50 states + DC) are independent.
I ran 10,000 trials, and this is what I got, based on today’s TradeSports prices:
Bush averaged 279.99 electoral votes to Kerry’s 258.01. The standard deviation of the vote was 30.78 electoral votes.
Bush got a majority of the electoral vote in 6283 trials; Kerry got a majority of the electoral vote in 3583 trials, and 134 times the race finished in (gulp) a dead heat, 269 electoral votes to 269.
In 10,000 trials, the most electoral votes Bush got in any one trial was 419; the most Kerry got was 357.
This approach is not perfect either, because it is not true that all 51 events are independent. If Bush’s 6% chance of carrying California comes through, he is probably going to win everywhere else in the country too. It would be possible to build some positive correlation into the model, but I have no idea what the correlation coefficients might be, and just saying that they round down to zero probably isn’t unreasonable.
What I find really interesting is that right now there appears to be greater than a 1% chance that this thing will finish in a tie. (In that case, the House of Representatives breaks the tie, of course, and would presumably re-elect George W. Bush, since the House has a Republican majority. My understanding is that the House vote would take place BEFORE the new Congress was sworn in, so that lame duck Reps who had already lost or retired could cast a vote to determine the presidency.)
If anyone finds this line of thought remotely compelling, I will update this (with current prices from TradeSports) a few times between today and election day.
UPDATE: An astute reader points out that the new Congress would cast the vote in the 269-269 tie scenario … the new (109th) Congress will be sworn in on 1/4/2005, and we need a new President by 1/20/2005, so there’s a two week window of opportunity there. A few of you also noted (correctly) that the House vote goes by state — the California delegation gets one vote, the Wyoming delegation gets one vote, etc. Right now, there are 31 states that have more GOP Congressmen than Democratic Congressmen … and everything is so gerrymandered now, I just cannot see that number changing much no matter what happens on election day. Of course, GOP Congressmen would be under no obligation to vote for Bush.
There has been one instance in US history where no candidate received a majority of the electoral vote and the House had to pick the next president — the election of 1824. But we have come close a few other times — in 1968, for example, if Wallace had carried one or two more southern states, Nixon might well have been unable to get the needed 270 electoral votes. Since the House had a huge Democratic majority at that time, they would have elected Humphrey even though Nixon had more popular and electoral votes.
A few of you asked a question that I had thought of myself — the individual state prices on TradeSports suggest that Bush has a 62%+ chance of winning, but you can buy a “Bush is elected” contract for about 60 or 61. So is there an arbitrage opportunity? In an ideal world, you could buy a Kerry contract for all 51 states and buy 51 Bush Wins Overall contracts, and you could expect to make money, net-net, off that, except of course that transaction costs would certainly render that unprofitable.
Tonight I attended a very interesting event hosted by the Adam Smith Institute which commemorated the 25th anniversary of the abolition of exchange controls. Speaking at this dinner were Lord Howe and Lord Lawson, the people actually responsible for the action which set off a cascade of events not just in Britain but across the world. This in no small measure led to the second age of globalisation in which we live today. The third speaker, acting as the warm up act and comic relief, was yours truly.
From yesterday’s Guardian.
The creation of spin-off companies by university researchers, one of the chancellor’s key policies, has ground to a halt because of a catch-22 in tax legislation, say frustrated academics.
Gordon Brown, who today hosted a seminar on science and wealth creation at 11 Downing Street, has been alerted to the problem, but has so far failed to sort out the muddle over the aptly named Schedule 22.
Plans for scores of companies to work on developing science and research projects have been put on hold by universities after they learned that their academics were threatened with multimillion pound tax demands as soon as the companies started operating, long before they made any profits.
To add insult to injury, the universities themselves are responsible for collecting the tax from their enterprising academics.
University business development officers believe that spin-offs have almost ground to a halt and fear that delays will be damaging to many ideas and projects.
This arose because of one of those tax loopholes that our Chancellor so loves to close. → Continue reading: Schedule 22
If this bothers you, please sod off and go read Atrios or Kos
– Instapundit
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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