The chaps who dismiss Bush as a moron forget that what counts is what a guy does when he’s not talking.
– Mark Steyn
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May 3rd, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A wondrous row has erupted between two fat, middle-aged, uncouth, bearded geazers, one of them the British Minister of Education, and the other the Chairman of Chelsea Football Club. Mr Clarke is plugging a scheme to get sports clubs to help out with teaching the 3Rs to recalcitrant youth, and Mr Bates’ Chelsea are the only football club not to be cooperating. Mr Clarke slagged off Bates, and now Bates has been slagging off Clarke, pointing out that the British state education system is appalling and getting worse and he, Mr Clarke, should see to it instead of attacking defenceless football clubs. I have dealt with some of the boring educational angles of this story in another place, but the interesting aspect is that Mr Clarke has now said that he wants West Ham to beat Chelsea in their forthcoming and crucial Premiership clash tomorrow. Or, to put it another way, he wants Liverpool and Newcastle (rather than Chelsea) to qualify for the European Champion’s League next year, and even more controversially, Mr Clarke supports West Ham in their desperate effort to avoid relegation, and accordingly he must favour the idea of one of the clubs above West Ham, such as Bolton, Leeds, or Fulham, getting relegated from the Premier League instead. Bolton, did you get that? I can’t remember a Cabinet Minister wading into sport like this. Supporting your own team in a new-laddish, post-modern sort of way is one thing, but to mix this kind of thing with serious politics is new, surely, and frankly rather unsavoury. Since Ken Bates is making trouble for a politician, we here presumably all now support Chelsea against the abominable West Hamsters and the even more abominable West Ham support Clarke. And that’s quite aside from the Samizdata HQ being in Chelsea, and David Carr already being a Chelsea season ticket holder. I’m a Spurs man myself, that is to say, for the benefit of Americans, a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. But Spurs are never involved either in trying to get into Europe or in being relegated because they come eleventh in the Premiership every year. Very dull. So by now I don’t care what they do tomorrow and am happy to swing into line behind Chelsea also. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Chelsea game tomorrow and keep everyone posted. Go you … Chels? May 2nd, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I watched a Channel 4 TV documentary about SARS. Meanwhile, according to the Radio Times, over on Channel 5 they were showing the movie Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo. Sometimes Britain’s broadcasters cancel things at the last minute if they feel that the bounds of bad taste are being crossed, so I made a point of checking if Outbreak was actually being shown. It was. The way that SARS is, we were told, being contained, is that the various people who took the lead in spreading it are being restrospectively tracked in minute and individual detail, so that all their contacts can in turn be tracked down and placed in quarantine. The movements of the “super-spreader” Professor Lee, who took the contagion from South China to Hong Kong, were recounted as if doing the research for the disaster movie script that all this will surely yield in due course. The scene where the already coughing Professor shares a lift with a young businessman called something like Johnny Chang will undoubtedly be in this movie, with very scary music. April 29th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is the first posting in what may or may not turn into a series on the general theme of the historic impact of the ever changing and evolving technology of communication, thoughts provoked by the talk that Michael Jennings gave at my home on the evening of Friday April 25th. One of my fondest memories is of an earlier talk given by Sean Gabb in this same ongoing last-friday-of-the-month series, about the impact of the printing press. He described this not in the usual way, by telling the story of the printing press itself, and how it spread, and what it caused, but by describing how things were done before printing existed. He described how documents were copied before there were any printing presses to copy them, the central point being that such documents only lasted so long and it was all that the copyists could do to keep existing texts in continued existence. In such a world it was very hard for knowledge to grow. On the contrary, the only thing it could really do was shrink, which does a lot to explain why the Golden Age in those days tended to be placed in the past, rather than in the future as we now tend to prefer. But another way to look at the arrival of printing is to look at it not just as a means of data storage, but also as a means of data transmission. Consider. With any means of communication there are basically two problems to solve. First, you have to concoct the message in the first place. Second, you have to transmit it. Now, look at printing from these two points of view. Clearly, it does wondrous things to the first process, but equally clearly, a little compression aside, it contributes almost nothing to the second. Getting a book from Antwerp to Rome still depends on the speed of a donkey, just as it always did. This simple fact had huge consequences for the way that printing impacted upon the wider culture. → Continue reading: How printing caused nationalism April 28th, 2003 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Friday evening Aussie blogger based in London Michael Jennings gave a talk at my place, on the subject of digital TV. What is it? Where’s it at? Where’s it going? That kind of thing. He combined knowing a lot about his subject with not talking at too great length to a degree that doesn’t always happen at these things, and I think all those present found it most informative and interesting. I certainly did. For the benefit of those as ignorant of this subject as I was at 8pm on Friday evening, I summarise as best I can something of what I learned during the next hour and a half. Around 1980, or so, governments around the world began switching to digital TV. They did this for a variety of reasons, but to a degree rare in such circumstances they all arrived at very similar technological destinations, which resulted in a new global system that involved only trivial incompatibilities. US TV corporations wanted an excuse to cling to their existing wavelengths. The British government was looking to economise on the use of existing bandwidths so that it could auction the vacated electronic real estate. In Japan they wanted to dominate the next generation of TV manufacturing. And so on. In practice it all meant the same thing. Digital TV. Which is where we now are. I now have a little box above my TV which cost £100, which has transformed a TV which emitted five channels in rather poor quality to a TV that emits something more like a dozen channels in better quality, including 24 hour news services from the BBC, from ITV and from Sky, just in time for the war. How come digital TV means more channels? Compression. Digital data can be compressed. How does that work? Well, instead of transmitting thousands of very big numbers each referring to each bit of the picture being described, you can instead emit a string of numbers many of which take the form of things like “the same as the bit next to it” or “one more than the bit next to it” and this occupies much less space. The more computing power you apply to such processes, the more you can compress, and computing power, as we all know, is leaping ahead year by year. Once all the information arrives in our TV sets we can apply steadily increasing computing power to its storage and viewing and manipulation. TV has now become something that you need to upgrade, because it is going to get better year by year, and keep on getting better. Threading its way in among this story is the related story of the rise of the DVD, to the point where it is about to dethrone the VHS tape as the standard for hiring movies from the Shop Around the Corner or buying them to have in your home. Apparently DVDs will in due couse jump to being an order of magnitude better, and I’m going to wish I’d not bought so many DVDs in their present primitive state. Oh goodie. So, an informative evening, and no doubt I’ve missed out lots. As to what all this will mean for our culture, I’ll try to have a go at that in a later posting. Or maybe postings, because it is a complicated story. UPDATE:
Yeah, 1990. I meant 1990. April 27th, 2003 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve recently been writing at my Education Blog about the noted educator and educational theorist Maria Montessori. Montessori recommended what for her time must have been a most unusual kind of object for young children to play with. She disapproved, it would seem, of the kind of complicated toys and dolls which, then as now, many parents get for their children. Instead she recommended abstract objects. What she had in mind was that children should not be overwhelmed with excessive amounts of information. Too little information, and children get bored. But too much causes them to switch off, in sensory self defence. That was her attitude. So, instead of dolls and train sets and woolly animals, she prescribed plain geometrical objects and matching sets of things like rods all the same size but of different colours, or rods all of the same colour but of different lengths. Or Montessori children may be presented with a set of identical sized blocks which different textures on their surfaces, like the different surfaces of different grades of sandpaper. Whether by coincidence or by cause and effect, the Montessorian view of childhood objects has in recent decades made remarkable headway. Look into a child’s nursery or playpen now, and you will see all manner of geometrical shapes and blocks and wheels and surfaces. Felt covered cubes. Wooden zig-zaggy things to put in zig-zaggy shaped holes. Lots of different colours and consistencies of plastic. And so on. The point I want to make here has nothing to do with the educational wisdom or otherwise of surrounding small children with such objects. No, I want to offer a theory about Modern Art, or rather, a theory about the (to many) extraordinary popularity of Modern Art. By “Modern Art” I of course mean abstract art – art that is not “of” anything, but is merely itself. → Continue reading: A conjecture concerning children’s toys and the current popularity of Modern Art April 24th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Sunday I did a posting about the new Rolls-Royce Phantom, and now that comments there have had as much say as they’re going to, I’d like to add just one more. I appealed in my posting for eyewitness accounts of new Roller, but commenters were only able to speculate about the new car’s appearance and about the impression it makes on people nearby from various photo-links we had found, until this arrived, from Joseph Beckner of Atlanta, Georgia:
One of the other commenters, blogger Charles Hueter linked to and quoted from this story, which happens to include at its top left corner, this photograph, which I think best illustrates Beckner’s reaction to this remarkable, but it would also seem, decidedly offputting vehicle. April 23rd, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Early last month I did a piece over at Transport Blog about the new Rolls Royce. This car, the “Phantom”, is interesting for several reasons. First, it costs a lot, around £250,000. That’s a lot more than a Rolls Royce has ever cost before. Who will buy such a thing? Second, will the fact that Rolls Royce is now German-owned affect sales in the USA? I don’t know, but maybe commenters from the USA can enlighten us. Presumably the German connection will ensure that the car has fewer bits falling off it than is the case with cars made by large but still British-owned car makers. But do Americans perceive the Rolls Royce now to be a German car? Or do they still view it as British, with Germans merely helping out with the running of what remains a Great British Institution? If Americans do think it’s now German, will that matter? Third, it may work terribly well, but is the Phantom a nice enough design to be worth all that money? I have yet to see one of these beasts myself. When I did my Transport Blog piece, I was merely noting the new Roller’s existence, a transport event in itself. Since then, I have heard Jeremy Clarkson’s somewhat critical views about what the Phantom looks like, and what driving about in one might say about you, and I suspect Clarkson is right. What he said was that the thing is just not beautiful enough. In fact, he said, it’s rather ugly. If you drive about in one, you’ll come across as, not to put too fine a point on it, a bastard. I don’t recall Clarkson’s exact words, but that is the gist that I recall. When it comes to car aesthetics, photographs are notoriously not sufficient to answer such worries. Some photos make the Phantom look rather small, but this could just be because the wheels are so very big. And if the Rolls is actually very big, then it could turn out to be the front that will upset me. If you follow the Rolls Royce link above, and scroll down the one of a certain Tony Gott introducing the car, you’ll see what bothers me most about this car, which is the latest version of the radiator grill. What used to look stately and classical now looks like it may be aggressive and overbearing. Rollers used to mean noblesse oblige. Well, they did until the sixties, when pop stars and drug dealers started buying them. This latest one looks more like the kind of Germanic noblesse that doesn’t give a scheisse. On the other hand this may all be effect of the photograph exaggerating the size of the radiator, and actually the Phantom is very nice. I’ve been walking about in London now for two months since this beast was launched and have yet to spot one. Could it be that it isn’t selling very well, and that others have similar reservations to mine? Has anyone else laid eyes on it? If so, what did you think of it? April 20th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you haven’t come across it yet, I recommend (as does Michael Blowhard to whom my thanks) William Shawcross’ 2003 Harkness Lecture, delivered on March 27th, in other words just as the public bit of the war was getting seriously under way, but before it had been successfully concluded. It is a very good brief summary of the state of the world now, as seen through the eyes of the USA’s neo-conservatives, and it is particular good as a brief introduction to neo-con ideas and attitudes:
In other words, it won’t end with Iraq. We live in interesting times. April 20th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m feeling guilty, because I’ve done nothing for Samizdata for three whole days, and I’m supposed to be one of the regulars. Like many bloggers I found that once that statue got taken down I couldn’t be bothered with the war, but going back from the war to the usual stuff we write about didn’t feel right either. Result: nothing. The most annoyingly memorable thing I’ve seen on the web recently has been this rather terrible song called Hippo Girl, which, inevitably, comes to you via b3ta.co, who also link to this rather nice little massage robot. Meanwhile Dave Barry guides us to this piece of grammatical advice, which all Samizdatista’s should read because its full of good advice. Nobody edit that last sentence until theyve checked the link. April 19th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Classical conservatives publicly despair of progress, but in their hearts they secretly believe in it. The Left seemingly talks of nothing else but progress, but will go to nearly any lengths rather than believe in it. April 15th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Bloody media. Always complaining. Thus Rumsfeld at the end of last week, himself complaining about all the newspapers featuring looting instead of liberation. Last night, I caught John Simpson of the BBC opining that the fall of Saddam is of no significance to any country outside of Iraq, and I don’t know where to start, so hopelessly mistaken does that strike me as being. The argument was that because Saddam’s regime was a “dead end”, it couldn’t therefore be of any greater consequence when this inconsequential regime was toppled. And then various other Talking Heads took it in turns to agree. They didn’t seem to understand that there could possibly be anything between America invading a country and smashing all its statues and bombing all its bunkers and decapitating all its leaderships, and having no effect on a country whatsoever, despite having lots of bases in a newly liberated country right next door. Twats. Nevertheless … → Continue reading: Two cheers for the media April 14th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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