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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Yes folks, this is a quiet Friday and it is Strange Photographs by Brian time.
This time, what we have is a fake Thunderbird rocket, which has been temporarily installed in Trafalgar Square in honour of the new Thunderbirds movie, which opens in London around now. I took the photos yesterday.
There have been all kinds of ideas floating around about what objects to put in Trafalgar Square, next to Nelson, and (I think) Havelock, and the lions. I think this is one of the better ones.
Here is the general context, which means lots of tourists clambering about on the lions and photographing one another:
Here is the one where the rocket is dwarfed by an earlier and more famous erection:
Here it is looking a bit like a rival church. What this also shows is that actually not much attention was being paid to the thing, because it is actually rather small:
And here is the Samizdata friendly shot:
Apparently quite a few of the scenes in the movie are set in London, and feature many of London’s famous landmarks, old and new, including the new local politician hutch that London has just recently had inflicted upon it.
This is the New York Times quote of the day, from Stephen Hawking, he of the technologically enhanced vocal chords:
“I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.”
Until now I have taken it for granted that any idea that black holes might ever make a contribution to long haul transport was black pudding in the sky. But now I am not so sure.
I do not know exactly what Hawking means about information being preserved, just as I am seldom completely clear what he means about most things, but the rest of this quote reads so very like those it-will-never-float it-will-never-fly only-six-computers-will-ever-be-needed electric-guitar-groups-will-never-catch-on prophecies which are periodically gathered together into anthologies of Things They Wish They Had Not Said, that I suddenly find myself becoming more optimistic about the possibility that one might one day be able to hail a Black Hole Cab and take a trip to another universe.
It seems that you can make a very popular movie (apparently it was described in the New York Times as his best so far – could well be) without it being popular everywhere:
When singer Linda Ronstadt praised Michael Moore’s anti-war movie Fahrenheit 9/11 during a concert at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, the audience walked out.
What’s more, hotel president Bill Timmins was in the audience and took action himself.
Says a spokeswoman: ‘Her suite was cleaned out, her things were collected and security escorted her. She wasn’t happy, but we were very polite.’
She might have been wiser to say a few nice things about Spiderman 2, which has been described by Mark Steyn as:
… the spinning, squirting, swinging antidote to the stunted paranoia of Fahrenheit 9/11 …
Showbusiness. You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can please some of the people all of the time, but …
I’ve done several posts at my Education Blog on the theme of the educational gains to be got from blogging, by the blogger. Of course writing things communicates to others. But it also organises the thoughts of the writer, and makes them more likely to be remembered by the writer. Failing that, it makes it easier for the writer to access his written thoughts later, if only because the writer is likely at least to remember having written on that subject.
I did another such posting yesterday, in connection with something Michael Jennings said to me last week in conversation about how he blogs about computer matters with this benefit in mind.
Rob Fisher commented on this post, in a way that emphasises the point:
I certainly find that the act of writing a blog post forces me to get my thoughts into some kind of order, which is useful. The part of my website that gets the most feedback is a tutorial I wrote about how to use Linux to edit digital video; and I wrote this mainly because I knew I would forget half of it if I didn’t write it down – and if I’m going to write it down I might as well publish it.
I think this could explain the presence of a lot of the wide range of useful information available on the web.
I’m currently investigating the possibility of using a Wiki for publishing useful information. Wikis are interesting because they make web pages so easy to change; and even more interesting because they let other people add and amend information.
By the time I understand that last paragraph I will have had to have made some educational progress myself, although I am sure it is straightforward enough once you understand it. Educationally helpful comments, anyone? “Wiki”? I have heard that word, and the presumably related word “wikipedia”, but what does this stuff mean?
Blogging, it seems to me, blurs the distinction between the private and the public. It is not that this distinction is now of no importance. But blogging does shift the economics of (what do we call it?) message management? … towards combining the public with the private, wherever that can be done without too much risk. Simply, by doing both private and public communication simultaneously, you can save both time and effort, and that might make it economical to engage in forms of communication with oneself and with others that would previously not have been possible.
I think, as I said in my original posting, that this is one of the big reasons for the success of blogging. Constructing a helpful set of notes as one learns a subject area might be too difficult, and hence beyond you. Writing material good enough to reach a wide readership, ditto. But licking your notes into shape and sticking them on a blog, which obviously can be read by millions, but need not be in order to be an economic proposition, adds up to something that can make a lot of sense.
I did not set out with my Culture Blog with the self-conscious aim of learning about new buildings in London, but that is the way it is turning out. And I definitely did start Brian’s Education Blog in order to educate myself, about education, as the ambiguous name, I hope, communicates. Brian’s Blog About Education? A Blog About Brian’s Education? Both.
These friends of mine are in the business of helping businesses to set up blogs. They emphasise the benefits blogging can bring in the form of communicating with customers, and that must be right. But a company which blogs will be, it seems to me, a company which learns, individually and collectively, more than it would learn otherwise.
But of course there is a further potential benefit to blogging as self-education, I have already tried to illustrate with this posting by asking commenters to explain wiki to me. Commenters can help to educate you. Not all such help is truly helpful, but sometimes it can be very helpful indeed.
I would be delighted to hear about any other bloggers who have used blogging as part of their effort to further their own education. I would not be surprised if a consensus were to emerge here, or to have emerged from a comment-fest somewhere else of interest, along the lines of: this is (partly) what all bloggers are doing.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Black Swan paperback, 687 pages
This is one of the best books of scientific popularisation I have ever read. Bryson brings the skills of a hugely successful and confident travel writer to bear on the Entire History of Science, no less, and does so in a way that chalks up another huge success for him.
Being an established writer of best sellers, Bryson was confident enough of his own ability, and of the support of his publisher, to be able to spend some serious time getting to grips with his mighty subject, knowing that whatever he finally came up with would be read. Yet, he also brings to it the humility of the seasoned travel writer, who knows that he cannot possibly say everything about Science, any more than he could have said everything about America or Europe or Australia, and who concentrates instead of saying as much as he can, as entertainingly and engagingly as possible.
Tone of voice is a lot of the reason Bryson’s books are so successful. His politics are vaguely leftish to middle of the road (like those of most of his readers, in other words), and his number one aim is not to change the world, simply to explore it and to describe what he has found. He doesn’t badger you every other page with what he thinks you ought to do about it all. Nor does he have big personal scientific axes to grind. He does have his own opinions about various things, but these are secondary to his principle aim which is to learn, and to continue to make an honest living by passing on what he has learned. → Continue reading: Bill Bryson journeys through science
Joseph Brennan, one of my regularly occasional Brian’s Friday’s attenders, has taken to emailing me with useful links to things that he thinks might be bloggable. It was he who told me about these great photographs, so that I could tell you. Well, now Joe Brennan he has sent me a link to a piece by Chris Bennett, about the possibility that the world’s oil reserves may not be going to run out any time soon after all.
Personally, on the basis of zero scientific knowledge, I have never been very convinced by the idea that oil has its origins in living organisms. There just seems to be too damn much of it for that. Why has this particular life relic hung around when so much else has just vanished? And why is it all so yuckily similar looking? Life is not like that, even when it is dead. Why could oil have not bubbled up from below, on the same basis that lava does? Such were my ignorant suspicions.
Chris Bennett supplies a more scientifically educated speculation to this same effect. Oil, it is apparently now being thought, may indeed have seeped up and be seeping up still, from the depths of the earth. The organic look that it acquires is because bugs merely like to swim in it, rather than because bugs (or any other living thing) actually perished to create the stuff. From time to time, for example, oil bursts upwards into the caverns otherwise known as the regular oil fields where humans have characteristically tended to find oil before, which results in certain ever dwindling reserves mysteriously refusing to dwindle as much as they should. And so on.
If this theory comes to be accepted, this does not necessarily mean that oil companies will immediately be drilling in new ways and in new places, to new depths. It may merely, to start with, result in a general willingness to commit to continuing oil exploration and to oil-based industry, more than would otherwise have happened. It may be many decades before anyone actually gets a direct tube installed to these vast – and no doubt vastly deep and inaccessible – new oil reserves. For the time being, the oil companies may merely rely on Mother Earth having an occasional attack of the squirts into her underwear, so to speak. And on her farting too, if I understand the theory correctly. Gas is also involved in all this.
I, of course, want to believe that this is all true, if only to see the look on the faces of the environmentalists when they are eventually persuaded that the internal combustion engine is here for ever. And there is now also the fact that I have here tipped this idea as a cheap intellectual share bet, so to speak. So I am sceptical also of my scepticism about the oil-is-dead-bugs theory – or whatever is the official theory now. But this is certainly a fun fence to be sitting on.
Chris Bennett’s article was published as long ago as May 25 of this year. Has there been much discussion sparked by it? What did anyone think? Is there any truth to this notion that oil is of an entirely different origin to the one now generally accepted, and consequently that it is massively more abundant than previously assumed?
I do not have Sky Sports TV, because then all pretence of doing anything at all with my life would disintegrate. But I am a sports fan, and I am currently watching a game of cricket, on Ceefax.
You would be surprised how enjoyable this can be. Ceefax is especially good for following limited overs cricket, where each side only has a fixed number of balls to bat against, and where it’s all finished and done with in one day. These kinds of games can fluctuate wildly, and just watching the scorecard tick over can be very enjoyable, and fits in well with performing other tasks.
And there is no kind of cricket of which the above is more true than Twenty20 cricket, where each side has only twenty overs (equals 120 deliveries) to make its runs, and where the whole thing is over in one evening. And as if to emphasise the extreme extremity of this extreme form of cricket, the teams are not called boring old Yorkshire or dull Derbyshire. They are called things like the Yorkshire Hystericals and the Derbyshire Desperados.
These games fluctuate particularly wildly, and as if to make that point, one of the star batsmen of my team, the Surrey Psycho-Killers, just got out, for 32, against Kent Velociraptors. Another dismissal now, and Kent would definitely have the whip hand. More Surrey slogging and they should win. Okay, I would rather be there, especially since the Oval, where this game is being played, is only a walk away form my home. But Ceefax will do nicely, and this way I get to write this.
Last week, I swear I witnessed another game of Twenty20 cricket which was reduced, by our characteristically vile and windy weather last week, to each side only having five overs to bat each. Yes. They each had just thirty balls to score their runs. Northants Something Scary Beginning With Ns versus the Gloucester (inevitably) Gladiators, I think it was. Five5 cricket, you might say. But I can find no trace of this game on the internet. Did I dream the whole thing? No I did not. Here it is!
The point of all this is to emphasise how lively cricket seems to be in England just now, despite the fluctuating form of our national side, and in the world generally.
This guy is extremely down on these guys, just now. But however well or badly cricket’s mere administrators do, the underlying strength of the game is now a world sporting fact, if only because of the rise and rise of India, in the world generally, and as a great cricketing nation in particular.
Twenty20 cricket is already part of the Asian Games. Next, the Olympics.
David Carr will not he happy.
James Lileks today, on where anti-Microsoft mania can lead:
So I’m not a big fan. But I will come to their defense for the anti-trust suits. Minnesota just settled a suit with the state of Minnesota, where millions of consumers were apparently forced at gunpoint to buy Windows machines. Microsoft once again promised to hand over its wallet if the kicking stopped, and agreed to remain rolled in a fetal position until the money is counted. The verdict was around eleventy trillion dollars or so. When it came to distribute the organs of the corpse the lawyers got the liver, spleen, lungs and most of the brain; the consumers got some regulatory glands, some teeth and a selection of minor toes. I think we get a certificate for ten bucks off on future Microsoft purchases. If the consumers don’t claim the money, some goes back to Bill and some goes to an education fund. The trick, of course, is to get people to claim their money. Florida lead the pack: 18 % of the consumers stepped forward. Obviously they need higher participation rates, since it looks bad when you advocate on behalf of an Inflamed Public that turns out to be utterly indifferent to the supposed offense. So the state has come up with a novel means of informing citizens that Microsoft owes them money. It was buried at the end of the story in the local paper last week.
The state will subpoena local computer resellers to learn who bought PCs.
Maybe it’s just me, but: imagine the outcry if the Justice department decided it wanted a database of computer ownership in America. Who had what. Oh no you don’t would be the general reaction, even if people couldn’t quite explain why they didn’t like the idea. It smacks of typewriter-registration laws in totalitarian states, even though we all know no one will kick down the door and demand to know where you put that 386 you bought in ’92. But this is the mindset of the well-intentioned government lawyer: gee, people might not claim their rebates. How about we use the power of the state to force private businesses to turn over customer lists so we can mail informational material to computer owners? It’s for their own good. Who could complain?
Grrr.
Indeed.
On Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous looking Russian seventeen-year-old called Maria Sharapova won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title, and the media have been in raptures ever since. Personally I was enraptured ever since she won her quarter final against a Japanese lady. But when Sharapova beat Serena Williams in the final, the world really noticed.
When Sharapova plays, she looks like a Bond girl. When she has won, she immediately becomes a giggly American schoolgirl. She is, from the female gorgeousness point of view, the biggest thing in tennis since the now somewhat ageing Anna Kournikova. Plus, she can really play. (Kournikova never won Wimbledon, or anything else big that I recall. Not that I ever cared.)
So, I was not surprised when our very busy-with-other-things but still very caring and concerned editorial supremo asked me last night to dash off a posting about the lovely Maria, so that we could have a picture of her up here.
However, underneath all the drooling from the likes of me and Perry, there is a more serious story here, which is why it took me a bit longer to write this than I promised last night. Yes, Sharapova is gorgeousness personified, and long may it last. But there is more going on than this. → Continue reading: Maria Sharapova comes to America and wins Wimbledon
Lord Clarkeltine of EUphoromania, in a minor speech to Moonshine News 24 this afternoon, said that the case for the EEUUGGHH! needed to be made more vigorously, decisively, forcefully and adverbially.
People say that the EEUUGGH! is an undemocratic and bureaucratic monstrosity, said Lord Clarkeltine, which is robbing the people of Europe and enmeshing them in a web of regulatory guff, and threatening to drive them back to a new dark age of economic slump and third class status, just so that a corrupt elite of EEUUGGHH!rocrats can eat free lunches for ever and live in big houses in the countryside. They say that the EEUUGGHH! will end a thousand years of Britain’s history as a sovereign nation. They say that the EEUUGGHH! is a pathetic attempt to replace the USA as the top world power which threatens to bankrupt everybody. They say that the EEUUGGHH! should be learning from the recent free market inspired progress of India and China, but is instead making a new EUSSRGGHH! in the Heart of Europe.
I will answer these claims firmly and decisively, vigorously and forcefully answering myth with fact, fantasy with reality, vicious xenophobic mudslinging with cool, clean, clear Vichy Water. No it isn’t. No it won’t. No it shouldn’t. It’s jolly nice. And we must say this again and again, time after time, repeatedly and repeatedly. The case for the EEUUGGHH! needs to be made eloquently and forcefully, decisively and realistically, realistically and persuasively, persuasively, and forcefully, and thisly, thatly and theotherly.
Asked why nobody was explaining why the EEUUGGHH! is nice and not nasty, Lord Clarkeltine was adamantly adamant:
I blame the Prime Minister. He promised us that he would con everyone about the EEUUGGHH! but he hasn’t done it. Lying bastard. The Prime Minister can explain anything. Why hasn’t he explained that the EEUUGGHH! is good? Obviously I could, but I’m too grand. The Prime Minister is ordinary. He should do it.
But what about when the EEUUGGHH! does stupid things? → Continue reading: Clarkeltine calls on PM to make case for British involvement in EEUUGGHH!
Yesterday, while out and about in London town, I espied this vehicle.
Does this Samizdatista perhaps visit London more often than he tells us, on business he has omitted to mention?
Well, probably not. This is probably just another fan of this.
All those readers of this who particularly liked Dale Amon’s reporting of and ruminating upon this, and whose reaction to this was: I want more! … should look at these.
These being, in English rather than pure linkese, a stunning set of photos taken by Richard Seaman of the first flight of SpaceShipOne into space, on June 21st 2004. (My thanks to Joseph Brennan for an email with the link.)
Great as the photos of the various air and space craft are, I especially like the very first photo, of all the people watching it, and of course photographing it. Although I doubt if many of them got photos as good as Richard Seaman’s.
Seaman used a Canon 1Ds digital SLR camera, a snip at $8,000.
Seaman is a fine photographer, but much of the genius of these photos lies in the automatic focus system that this camera has in it. More fuss should be made of the people who devise things like this, I think. Boy would I love one of these – but smaller and for nearer $80, in a couple of years time.
The 1Ds sports the same 45 point auto-focus system as its predecessor, the 1D. Users on the Canon chat group I follow insisted that the auto-focus system is not only effective in achieving sharp focus, it also does so blindingly fast. One story I remember hearing is that if you point a 1Ds and a D60 at the same object at the same time, and someone walks between the cameras and the object and keeps walking, then the 1Ds would refocus on the person and then back on the object, while the D60 wouldn’t react to the person at all!
Ideal for space ships, in other words. Although I recommend a general rootle around Seaman’s photographs. If that appeals, I suggest that this list of recent additions would be a fine place to start.
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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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