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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August 1st, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 According to a Janes newsletter:
The era of the ray cannon has arrived. July 31st, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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). July 30th, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. July 28th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. → Continue reading: At the 2010 Farnborough Airshow July 27th, 2010 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.” July 16th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. July 9th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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:
Hilarious. → Continue reading: Made in Critical Land July 7th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.
I do not believe she immediately grasped the sheer transcendent irony of the moment. July 7th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. June 24th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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:
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:
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. June 9th, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. And what, pray, is the European Union’s solution to this REAL problem which has already led to riots and death in one country and which could well lead to many more in the horror years to come? Why, to impose on its already hamstrung, over-regulated, over-taxed businesses yet further arbitrary CO2 emissions reductions targets, which will make not the blindest difference to the health of the planet, but which will most certainly slow down economic recovery and make life harder and more miserable for everybody. 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. May 26th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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