Samizdata

Jesse Walker has a nice piece in Reason magazine about whether U.S. state agencies like the FCC should ban cinemas from trying to jam calls to mobile phones. Seems a pretty clear-cut case to me – so long as the jamming is made clear to customers before they buy a ticket, then the cinemas, if they are commercial entities and privately owned, are entitled to do this. Cinemas that are privately owned can set whatever rules on the behaviour of customers that they like, including telling them, on pain of expulsion, to turn mobiles off or to silent, to observe minimal standards of dress code, and whatever.

In my own cinema-going experience in Britain and the United States, I have hardly ever been inconvenienced by mobile users, although I may have been lucky. Once, in a stifling hot cinema in Chelsea, I sat next to a rather annoying French couple, one of whom insisted on phoning her friends several times and who finally shut up after another customer told them to do so. Most people seem to get the message to turn the things off or to silent mode.

I guess what this story tells us is how people are almost surgically attached to their phones (one day that may literally be true, perhaps in a few decades time). I have occasionally gone out from my flat without a mobile phone and felt almost naked without it, but also experienced a certain freedom of being out of reach for an hour or so. It is almost as if I have forgotten what it is like not to be contactable instantly via these machines.

A final etiquette point is that I notice people are often less punctual for meetings sometimes because there is this assumption in the back of folks’ minds that they can just “phone ahead” and say that they are going to be late. Before mobiles existed, if people did not keep an appointment, it did not happen. Perhaps one side effect of mobile phones then is to make us less rigorous in sticking to a schedule. It is not a good or bad thing, but that seems to be the pattern.

On the British Airways flight from London to Shanghai yesterday morning, there were the usual announcements about recommended rental car partners and hotels and the like. With respect to getting into the city of Shanghai, they simply announced that “We recommend that you take a taxi”, as these are apparently cheap and relatively quick. I have a certain aversion to taking taxis in unfamiliar cities, as unscrupulous taxi drivers exploit tourists in many cities of the world, and I can never really tell what will happen if I get in one. (On the other hand, the recommendation from the airline probably suggests that a taxi caught from a rank at the airport in Shanghai would have been fine).

However, there was no chance I would take the advice. Because let’s face it, there are some things that I am not capable of resisting. A sign saying “Magnetic levitation train” is definitely one of them.

As a practical thing to build, the maglev to Shanghai airport qualifies as almost entirely useless. It cost some ridiculous sum of money, the railway station is a little too far from the airport terminal (and is badly signposted), the city destination is an obscure part of Pudong from where one has to get the subway or taxi to anywhere one might actually want to go to, and there is only one train every half hour on the maglev. If one has to wait for 25 minutes, then this rather negates the fact that the 30km journey into Shanghai only takes seven and a half minutes. It would have made far more sense to simply extend the subway line that goes to the city maglev terminal all the way to the airport. A train journey from the airport would have then taken perhaps an hour, but it would have been a sensible way to get to and from the airport. The maglev was built so that they could build a maglev. That was all it was.

However, this is just about the only transport journey I have made in my life that passengers have got excited about just because it was. Riding a Boeing 707 in 1958 was perhaps like this. There was an LED readout on the train giving the speed, and as the train really got going passengers got up and took photographs of the indicator. I was one of them.

Normally, I am nearly as bad as Brian Micklethwait. I take seeing people take photos of something as an invitation to take photos of them. However, in this case I did not do so. It was just the indicator itself I was interested in. For Christ almighty that was fast.

Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine’s correlation to B12 levels, then we’d all owe Metabolite licensing fees just for existing in a state of B12 homeostasis.

To play devil’s advocate, I read the patent as applying to the observation of the relationship. As such, it is a bit as if Galileo had filed on his observation that the earth orbited the sun. At the time, his view certainly met the USPTO’s criteria of originality, utility and non-obviousness.

There is a dangerously bumpkinesque notion afoot, which holds that patents obstruct progress. This is (pardon the pun), patently false. Why is it that the most vociferous critics of the patent system, the citizens of the web – people who can understand that markets are conversations – can not seem to grasp that patents are conversations, too? Patents protect the free flow of ideas within our business, academic and entrepreneurial cultures.

Before we blitely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more… → Continue reading: The non-obvious utility of patents

Those who have a superstitious aversion to nuclear power on the grounds that “the waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, man!” really ought to learn to ask, ‘what?’ and, ‘how much?’

Medical (and industrial) use of radioisotopes is happily accepted (or at least ignored) by the same people. Medicine is good. Industry is hidden in a black shade of ignorance. But power stations are bad. Like the Bomb.

This rather misses that medical materials can be very dangerous. Those “thousands of years” for power waste also indicate lower specific activity. Is a long period of mild, static, buried, danger really a thing to have nightmares about, when really fearful stuff is to be found loose at the end of the street?

Perhaps this story will lead to better public understanding:

The Oxfordshire-based company was transporting part of a piece of cancer treatment equipment, which had been decommissioned at Cookridge Hospital in Leeds, to the Sellafield complex on 11 March, 2002.

But a “plug” was left off a specially built 2.5 tonne container to carry the contaminated material on a lorry.

Mark Harris, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, said: “Through pure good fortune no-one involved in the removal, containment and transfer of the source may have been directly exposed to the radiation beam.

“The risk of such exposure was undoubtedly present – at Cookridge, during the journey and at Sellafield.”

He said detected radiation at Sellafield was between 100 to 1,000 times above what would normally be considered a very high dose rate.

Mr Harris said it was beyond the capabilities of normal hand-held monitoring equipment.

Even discounting the doom-mongering approache of HSE prosecutors, this is a pretty alarming incident. But the chance of its changing public attitudes, or even inspiring curiosity about risk, is close to zero. We may get a small addition to the towering mass of safty-anxiety, but a sense of proportion? Never.

PS. Remarkable don’t you think, that the BBC story I cite is illustrated with, not a picture of a container lorry or a piece of radiotherapy equipment, but a glowering shot of Sellafield. The place where the danger was discovered and made safe is made the villain. The ‘Sellafield baa-d’ habit of mind – look, it even has the capitalist word “sell” embedded in it, what could be more damning? – cannot be eradicated by what RCD calls “pesky facts”.

Techie and futurism magazine Wired has a delightful article about how the toy company Lego is harnessing the best minds of the computer software industry to make its toys even cooler and intricate than before. I used to love playing with the stuff back when I was a small boy and generations of kids have had fun playing the brightly coloured building blocks, fashioning them in to planes, cars and houses, rather as an earlier generation used to play with Meccano kits. In its way, it helped probably fire enthusiasm for a whole generation of engineers and builders.

And the kicker is that Lego is Danish. If you have children or friends with youngsters, perform a nice gesture and buy them a pack.