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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The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.
I’ve argued time and again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away. They just morphed into environmentalists. The red’s become green but the goals remain the same. And there’s no better way of achieving those goals than turning the lights out and therefore winding the clock back to the Stone Age. Only when we’re all eating leaves under a hammer and sickle will they be happy.
I’m serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain’s beardies only because they don’t work.
– Jeremy Clarkson
Christian Michel holds talk-and-discussion evenings at his London home on the sixth and twentieth of each month. If you want know more about these events email him at cmichel@ cmichel.com. I am doing the talk at the next one, the first of 2008, on January 6th. My chosen subject will be: the history of music making in the twentieth century. I have just sent an email to Christian about my talk, from which he will concoct his email invite to all his regulars. I am still thinking about what I will finally say and would greatly appreciate input from the Samizdata commentariat on the subject. So here is my email to Christian:
An extraordinary interlude – an aberration, you might say – in the history of music is now drawing to a close.
The musical opportunities created by modern electronics, in the form of electronic recording, radio, and then later of actual electronically powered musical instruments, were responded to by the music profession in two profoundly contrasted ways.
The “classical” fraternity concentrated first on popularising – and then on recording in opulently perfect sound – their resplendent back catalogue.
“Pop” music has been just as profoundly shaped by electronics. Indeed, it is the creation of electronics.
The most fundamental effect of electronics on “pop” music has been that popular music (by which I mean the old folk traditions) has no longer been obliged to rely either on musical literacy skills, or, for those in whom such skills were lacking, memory. “Folk” music always teetered on the edge of oblivion, relying as much of it did on the human brain as its hard disc, so to speak. And folk musicians were forced to concentrate on remembering the old songs, having little brain space to create new ones (folk music before recording was rather like literature before printing. Written manuscripts were about as perishable as the people who created them, for they lasted about as long).
Recording, for folk/pop musicians changed everything. No longer did the lowest class of musician depend upon their own memories to keep their previous creations and inherited repertoire alive. They could compose at their instruments, and record it, confident that it would then survive, and they were thus liberated to get on with creating the next would-be hit. And pop musicians were as uninhibited in their use of new, electronic instruments as the classical fraternity were mostly stand-off-ish about them (I know: Boulez, Stockhausen etc. They’re worth a mention).
This is a complicated story. Technology takes time to develop and get cheap, and it’s still hurtling along of course. Electronic recording (and CDs) took nearly a century to get good enough to do justice to Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. At it took a similar time to get cheap enough for working class teenagers to play with it in bedrooms and garages.
The classical recording enterprise is now basically concluded. Oh, there are still occasional gems to be found in among the dross at the battle of the barrel. But, the great works are now recorded, and re-recording them again and again cannot count for as much now as making similar recordings did fifty years ago when classical fans were still hungry to hear their core repertoire. “Classical” musicians must now look to create new repertoire of a sort that can earn them a living, the inverted commas there being because a lot of them won’t really be “classical” musicians anymore and are becoming a lot more like pop musicians, from whom they have much to learn. The music profession will once more be a single (if huge and sprawling) entity, full of varieties of taste and of technique, but without that cavernous gulf that divided it during the twentieth century (in this respect it resembled and resembles politics. Discuss).
I could go on, and on the night I will, but I’ll end by briefly discussing my qualifications to do this talk. Well, first of all, I am a music fan, possessing an small-to-average sized pop CD collection and a gargantuan classical CD collection, having been a classical collector and listener all my now long life. I was a teenager during the sixties musical revolution. I have also been studying the history of the means of communication and information storage for as long as I can remember. I am no great shakes as a musician, although I did play the flute in my school orchestra, and I had a fabulous treble voice as a boy, which I used to sing in choirs of various kinds, at home around the piano and at school. But in the end, I’ll just have to hope that my audience finds my talk illuminating and enjoyable. For the truth is that they know most of the facts pretty much as well as I do. The question is, will I make more sense of those facts for my listeners? I’ll try.
Wired has a list of what it regards as the top scientific breakthroughs of 2007. Some of the technologists and scientifically literate folk who read our blog might disagree, so comment away with your own suggestions.
My knowledge of such things is close to absolute zero, but is not this, linked to by Instapundit (where more links and updates are even now accumulating) today, rather exciting?
Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
Damn right. It seems to me that if that caught on, the rules of energy would be changed for ever. Traditionally, energy has been a huge, heavily politicised industry. If only for that reason, politicians everywhere will fight this like cornered rats.
The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.
I have always found the Samizdata commentariat to be at their best when educating the rest of us about high tech issues like this one. Is this plausible? Is it safe? Will it be that cheap? Is today really April 1st and not December 20th at all?
Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the new system in Europe and America in 2009.
Bring it on. Never have I felt as optimistic about the future of nuclear power as I do right now, for this development turns nuclear power from a clunky, expensive mega-muddle that is totally dependent upon politics, to something that is small, simple, cheap and dependent only on the good sense of some people. Not everyone has to like this, and many will be flinging faeces in all directions about it. But not everyone has to. All it needs is a few countries, and a few people in those countries, to say yes.
How about this as a way to sell it? If you oppose it, you are in favour of Islamist terrorism. That should loosen things up a bit. An Instapundit emailer says that this technology is old news, updated. So, it’s been around all along, has it? Do you get the feeling that some kind of political switch has been thrown? Rather than fighting like cornered rats, perhaps the politicians of the West who really matter are now willing to relax some of their their control over power supplies, if that’s what it takes to separate those pesky Muslims from their oil money.
I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo’s rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less.
More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive ‘urban renewal’ projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should “shrink to greatness”. I think it would be even better if the Feds didn’t try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar’s article especially intriguing:
And Buffalo’s dismal weather didn’t help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out – and Buffalo isn’t just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.
I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy.
With technology, ubiquity is a virtue. People use Microsoft Word because everyone else does. The CD-Rom became a more popular backup device than the Zip, Jazz or SyQuest disk because there were lots of manufacturers involved. And, of course, floppies took far too long to die simply because they were everywhere, despite being evil unreliable and having a tiny capacity. Sony Betamax failed in part because far more movies were available for VHS. JVC was also proactive in licensing the VHS technology to lots of manufacturers. Consumers did not want to buy two different video players, so in the end most chose VHS simply because of its ubiquity.
Today, in the current format war between Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD, it seems that (unlike two decades ago) the Sony-backed format is going to win. This is despite the fact that Blu-Ray discs cost more to manufacture (although, arguably, Blu-Ray is the better format).
Why will Blu-Ray win? Because, firstly, Sony equipped every PlayStation 3 with Blu-Ray capability. Conversely, Microsoft (a major backer of HD-DVD) decided to only make it available as £100 add-on for its Xbox 360. Secondly, according to Wikipedia, as of late November there were 415 titles available in the US for Blu-Ray, compared with only 344 for HD-DVD. A search on WHSmith.co.uk brings up 259 results for “blu-ray”, but only 167 for “hd-dvd”.
Yet over the coming years, some of the companies that have benefited from the economics of ubiquity may find it turns round and bites them. With OpenOffice only ever a free download away, will people keep going to PC World and paying for Microsoft Office? Schools are already questioning whether it is a good to teach on expensive proprietary software in the classroom, when if they were to use open source applications, all the pupils would be able to practice with the same software at home.
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter.
I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill …
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
… reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold.
Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either.
What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner!
If you thought spiders and scorpions bigger than humans were just 1950’s B-movie creations caused by nuclear testing then think again.
Paleontologists from Bristol University and Germany found a rather large scorpion claw in a German rock quarry:
The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two-and-a-half meters long, much taller than the average man.
This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.
This is not a critter you would want to find under a rock in your garden. Assuming, of course, you have very. very large rocks…
Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing.
The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links – climate cuttings number 14, no less – with the following:
And that’s it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.
Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot.
Recently I have been teaching a small boy the ancient art of handwriting. Make the small Ts bigger! Careful with those zeros, they’re looking like sixes! Well done, it looks very neat! Yes I know it’s hard, but keep going! And so on. Thank goodness for pencils. But there is a problem here. Is handwriting really that important any more? It was in a comment on that posting from fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings that the handwriting question recently presented itself to me.
Oh, I am sure that educational experts can correlate handwriting with achievement later on, just as in former times Latin went with being clever. But the fact remains that even highly-educated adults, and perhaps especially highly-educated adults, now hardly make any use of handwriting. We sign our signatures. If we are very pre-computer (as I still am in lots of ways) we write hand-written shopping and to-do lists, but more and more, people surely use electronic organisers for such things, if they use anything at all. And I find that the only stuff I remember now is stuff that I have blogged, because blog postings remain legible and are properly and accessibly stored, unlike my hand-written lists. If we are adolescents or young adults, we still use handwriting to take exams, in great intellectually sterilised halls, into which no information may be taken other than in one’s head. But is knowledge retention now the skill that really matters? Surely knowing how to use computers to acquire knowledge is at least as important.
Recently a friend told me of her worry about her young sons neglecting their homework, but instead becoming utterly engrossed in some immensely complicated and long-drawn-out computer game. My hunch is that they are learning at least as much while obsessing for hour after hour about this game as they would if snatched away from their computer and forced to trudge through yet more school work for a few more tedious minutes each day. But is that right?
I do not need persuading that reading remains an absolutely essential skill, with typing, in one form or another, having become almost as valuable. But: what use now is handwriting? I do not ask this in a sneering, it’s-useless way, as a merely rhetorical question. Maybe handwriting really does still have crucially important uses. If the teaching of handwriting is every bit as valuable as it ever was, I would love to be told this, and told why, so that I can proceed with my own current teaching duties with renewed enthusiasm? But, is it?
Clarkson is a hero, and Monbiot is a chicken.
– Why Monbiot is so Miserable
About 120 years ago, Mme. Cadolle figured out that it made more sense for women’s breasts to be suspended from above than cantilevered from beneath. That is, she invented bra straps. So instead of walking around wearing the lingerie equivalent of the London Bridge, women could slide themselves into a Golden Gate. This was a huge relief – as anyone who has worn a strapless bra can tell you – because the London Bridge pretty much always falls down.
– Belinda Luscombe in the course of asking Warren Buffet for better fitting bras – spotted by Amit Varma
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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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