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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I have recently got myself a laptop computer with built in 802.11b/g wireless, and I have therefore spent a fair bit of time looking for hotspots in which I can connect to the internet, preferably for free.
There seem to be three business models for public WiFi access points at this point. The first one seems to be provide it for free in your cafe or restaurant and hope it increases custom, or at least ensures that custom does not go elsewhere. The second involves charging extortionate amounts of money, and hoping that enough people who are really rich and/or travelling on expense accounts will pay for it for you to make some money. The third is for people with existing internet infrastructure to plug wireless access points into their infrastructure and figure out how to make it pay later. The obvious candidates to try this third option are owners of existing internet cafes, who have wired ethernets present already, lots of internet capacity already, and for who the total cost of buying an access point and plugging it in is around £40.
All three of these models are present in the UK. The most common is sadly the second. There are lots of wireless access points in Starbucks, other coffee chains, in McDonald’s restaurants and the like that are trying to charge me £6 per hour or similar. Now this pricing is ridiculous. I can use a terminal in an internet cafe for £1 per hour, and the costs of running such a business are vastly more than providing WiFi. (I have my own WiFi hotspot in my home. This cost me £69.99 for the all in one router/DSL modem/wireless access point and the DSL internet access costs me £25 per month. A business would be able to reclaim the VAT on that and get it ever cheaper. This is not something that requires enormous capital investment)
This second, high charging option tends to involve the owner of the cafe outsourcing the WiFi provision to an existing telephone company. T-Mobile are providing WiFi for Starbucks, and BT, Britain’s former public sector monopoly and the largest telephone company in the UK, is providing infrastructure for a variety of establishments. (The problem with this model is that the provider has to make a buck separately from the cafe). BT is a reasonable company at a wholesale level, but they have a legendary cluelessness as a retail business. Although they own most local loop telephone lines in the UK, their ISP is nowhere near being the market leader. I was a customer, but I switched due to poor service and high prices. (Even less impressively, although they had huge incumbency advantages and about ten year’s head start on the third and fourth entrants, their mobile phone business managed to come in fourth out of four in the UK in terms of customers when they eventually spun it off).
I suspect that the owners of such services have discovered that they are not doing much business, and a shakeout is starting soon which will end up with prices more closely reflecting costs. In any event, BT are now providing a variety of free trials, presumably in order to collect information about likely customers, and in the hope that some people will sign up for the pay service after the free trial ends. A 30 day free offer seems to be included with many laptop computers, and this week BT are offering a free trial for anyone who registers. Okay, sensible move on their part. They get my personal details and I can then get some free internet access. Fair trade.
So, this morning I found a BT hotspot in a cafe. I sat down, and got myself a cup of coffee. They asked me to register. I gave them some information about myself, including my e-mail address. After clicking through a couple of pages, I was told that my registration was successful, and that my password would be sent to me by e-mail. However, I was not logged in, and therefore I couldn’t access my e-mail and get the password. To use the free trial I was required to connect to the internet somewhere else, download my e-mail, and then go back to the BT hotspot to log in.
As Douglas Adams once said, ten out of ten for style but minus several million out of ten for good thinking.
Beautiful thoughts from Lileks on Monday, at the end of a piece which starts with him complaining in a humdrum way about some humdrum journalists saying that space program money ought to be spent instead on curing cripples:
Just thought of something: What holds the paraplegic in their chairs? What keeps them from shooting around the room, stopping their progress with a finger, floating from desk to desk?
Gravity.
And gravity isn’t a big issue . . . where?
I love the internet. And especially the bit where I or other intelligent people have chosen to stick something up every day, but allow themselves to put up boring nonsense if that is all we can think of. That way, two bits of boring nonsense (space programme money should cure paraplegia instead, no it should not) combine and catch fire, while you are doing the piece. Thesis (yawn – but I have to put something so I will complain about this particular something), antithesis (yawn again – but I am right, aren’t I?), synthesis (just thought of something … wow!).
There is an interesting and deeply depressing article in Time Europe about how EUrope is falling behind the USA in the funding of scientific research. European scientists are flocking the research labs in the USA, where the money and conditions are far better.
The article reveals the usual EUro-procedure whenever catching up with America is the agenda.
Question asked by EUropeans: how much money is America spending? Answer: A lot.
Question not asked by EUropeans: where does all that American money come from in the first place? Answer: by having lots of trade, done by tradesmen.
Question also not asked by EUropeans: who is spending all this American money and how? Answer: American research money is, a lot of it, spent by those same tradesmen, who spend it quite sensibly, in ways that produce innovation and profits.
Next question asked by EUropeans: what is to be done? Answer offered by EUropeans: EUropean governments must spend a lot more on research than they do now. Result: EUrope as a whole has even less money for tradesmen to spend on anything, and research in EUrope becomes even less sensible and even more stupid. Total spending doesn’t grow very fast, which is just as well, because if EUro-governments spent as much as “America” (i.e. the American government and all those American tradesmen, added together) spends on research, that would bankrupt EUrope completely. → Continue reading: The decline of EUro-science
Arts & Letters Daily links to this Virginia Postrel article about Friedrich (and I’d thought I’d supply two links here, hence this interruption – I preferred all that to just putting “von”) Hayek.
Quote:
Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.
Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly “irrational” customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today’s rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today’s fragmented and specialized markets, today’s emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today’s multicultural challenges.
Hayek’s 1952 book, “The Sensory Order,” often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. “Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names ‘connectionism’ and ‘parallel distributed processing.’ Remarkably, Hayek is never cited.”
I can still remember how a paperback series called “Fontana Modern Masters” did not contain a Hayek volume in it, because the lefty academic in charge of the enterprise simply forbade it. Robert Conquest dissecting Lenin was acceptable. Lenin might be a bit bad, but he was at least important, you see. Anyone writing about Hayek, however critically, was beyond the pale. He was not part of the agenda. He didn’t count. It would seem that, thanks to the championship of people like Steven Pinker, he is seriously starting to. Evolutionary Biology is a bandwagon with too much momentum for a few clapped out Marxists to halt it, and if the Evolutionary Biologists decide that Hayek matters, he matters.
Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it looks like on Mars.
That is the vista that will greet the first humans to set foot on that planet. I do not expect to be around to share in that experience but I still tingle with excitement at the prospect.
After returning to the office for a few hours, I spent the usual wasted minutes deleting scores of spam emails from my inbox. I expect the same goes for most of this blog’s readers. Anyway, in a continuation of my festive spirit and seasonal good cheer, here is a link to a rather amusing collection of ideas for knocking off the spammers, courtesy of those ubergeeks at Wired Magazine.
In conversation with Perry de Havilland of this parish some while back, he likened spammers to horse thieves. Horse stealers were dealt with harshly for threatening the very economic viability of the regions in which they acted, since horses were vital to life prior to modern locomotion. The Internet is just as vital now, so the argument runs.
Hang the spammers? Well, I am sure quite a few of us have thought on these lines. The Wired article has less draconian solutions. Enjoy.
Well, the truth is that at a party someone handed out a link to this dropping ball simulator, descibed by its author as using “physics simulation of elastic masses to make a controlled metaphysical musical system with simple rules that mimic nature”. Actually, my knowledge of physics suggests that it doesn’t mimic nature all that closely, but none the less it is possible to get some nice demonstrations of chaos like things and emergent behaviour if you try.
Plus of course it is more addictive than crack. That is our dirty little secret. The Samizdatistas have spent the last three days staring at our screens watching little white balls bounce backwards and forwards and listening to beeping noises. Occasionally something really extraordinary like the sound of a French woman’s voice or perhaps a cricket match is enough to rouse us briefly, but it doesn’t last long……
(Link via Bruce Sterling).
If anything odd happens to the weather, they blame Global Warming and say that therefore it will get worse and that we are to blame. We Brought It On Ourselves. But it must be admitted that it, in this case, is rather startling:
BARCELONA, Spain — A Spanish-American scientific team will be scanning the United States this winter for what might be one of the weirdest byproducts of global warming: great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call “megacryometeors” — or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
“I’m not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head,” said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. “I’m worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn’t exist.”
Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people’s heads.
How very odd, as we say here. And as you constantly say if you are a regular reader of Dave Barry.
It’s tempting to start speculating where, and upon whom or what, we would most like one of these things to land.
Robert Mugabe, that noted expert on the alleviation of Third World poverty, has been holding forth at a UN meeting in Geneva about the Internet. He may have left the Commonwealth, but he hasn’t lost any of his certainty of his own rightness and wonderfulness.
Here is my favourite bit of this BBC report:
He said there was no point in providing poor people with computers unless they were also given electricity and a phone network to run them.
Good point. And come to that, what’s the point in people having computers if they are starving to death or being beaten up or killed by government thugs?
I also liked Mark Doyle’s nicely ironic final paragraph, inviting comparisons between the monster Mugabe and all the other tyrants down the years who have also been rather bad people …
Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe may condemn Mr Mugabe for acting oppressively at home; but here in Geneva, many delegates – whether they agreed with him or not – were impressed by a lively speech.
… but who have likewise softened their various blows by making lively speeches which impressed everyone, whether they agreed with them or not.
Another evening meal with a fellow Samizdatista, and out of it another question. The Samizdatista was Michael Jennings, and the question now is this:
If the cost of getting stuff into earth orbit is seriously reduced, what kinds of things will be done in space that are not done now?
I am not asking how this big price reduction will be contrived. (As I understand it, it’s either better rockets or a giant stepladder, but commenters: don’t bother with that please. As I recall, we’ve had that argument.) I am asking what the consequences will be if, as and when this reduction in cost is contrived.
The two big things done in earth orbit at the moment are, it seems, looking down on earth and seeing things (such as crops and crop diseases, military installations, urban growth, the weather), and: helping to send messages from earth persons to each other, via communications satellites. If that all gets cheaper, there will clearly be a lot more of it.
A reduction in the cost of getting stuff into near space will surely result in a surge of space tourism. Money must even now piling up in earth bank accounts, waiting for the day when day trips to space are available at, say, a million quid a throw.
If only because the increases in what is already going on will alone result in a far greater general human presence in earth orbit, it is to be presumed that many other activities will become possible and will follow.
So, what other things will soon be done in space that are hard or impossible to do on earth?
Switching off gravity on earth is hard, but contriving a vacuum is fairly easy by comparison, so vacuum based manufacture will accordingly still be easier to do on earth than in space. But just because switching off gravity where it is is so hard, going to where it isn’t may bring huge manufacturing benefits. In particular, Michael tells me, it may be far easier to make three rather than merely two dimensional computer chips (very desirable apparently) in zero gravity.
In general, nanotechnology, whatever that is exactly, is relatively easy to do in space, compared with other sorts of technology, on account of it being so small, and hence relatively cheap to get up there. What, in English, might nanotechnologists be able to do that they can’t do on earth, if earth orbit became as easy to get to as a desert is to get to now?
And another ‘in general’ is that, in general, anything involving space travel beyond earth orbit, whether manned or unmanned, will get massively easier to organise if the getting of stuff, human or mechanical, into orbit can be organised separately from the business of going beyond earth orbit. Or so it would seem to me. Two obvious applications? Space tourism beyond earth orbit (see above). And, filling the solar system with unmanned gadgets for looking at our neighbour planets in more detail than has hitherto been possible, in the manner of that gadget that plunged into Jupiter not so long ago, but more so.
Because of all this orbital activity, it is a sure bet that many space service industries will thrive, such as rubbish collection, which I assume to be quite an art in space. (Mishandle a piece of junk and it could vaporise you.) Will there be specialist construction companies? Specialist firms of spaceship cleaners? Where will the advertising industry fit in? Sponsors will surely be heavily involved in space? They’ll want their logos flashed about. Won’t they?
Back here on earth, much new activity will ensue in support of and in response to what is going on out there. There’ll be zero-gravity training courses for tourists, for media people, and for ceremonial visits by senior management and bigshot politicians. There will be vast new bureaucracies to process all the new information that will come flooding back to us, vast new industries made possible by those few magic components that can only be made in space. There’ll be …
Well, those thoughts were the result of about an hour of very casual cogitation. There must be cleverer answers to my question out there, and I’m looking forward to hearing a few of them.
Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest
Kim Sterelny
Totem Books, 2001
This relatively short book (156pp., no index) should, perhaps be taken at a gulp, which I have not done. Much is made of the ding-dong controversy between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould on the mechanisms and implications of evolution (“punch-ups … notorious for its intensity … savage battle …” – from the blurb), but unfortunately not in the words of the two antagonists. Instead Sterelny (a male, by the way) sets about describing what they disagree about. Perhaps unfortunately, as tends to be the way in Biology, it does not seem possible to set up some experiment, or look for a crucial observation, that will settle their differences.
In fact, these fall into two categories, one theoretical and technical, the other philosophical.
For the first, there is the disagreement between Dawkins’ theory of selection at the level of the gene as against Gould’s emphasis of the species as the selective unit (if I understand this aright). While Dawkins seems happy to accept the assumption of a gradual, steady, uniform pace of evolution, Gould has espoused the theory of “punctuated equilibrium”, in which selection acts in short concentrated bursts after some catastrophic alteration to the environment, such as the impact of a meteorite, which has resulted in the wiping out of most other species, as with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.
However, as Sterelny says, these disagreements are not adequate to explain the antagonism and in Chapter 12 (p. 123) he gets down to the more philosophical ones. “Dawkins is an old-fashioned science worshipper” he states (and lines up with him), while “Gould’s take on the status of science is much more ambiguous. … In Gould’s view, science is irrelevant to moral claims. Science and religion are concerned with independant domains.”
It should be said that Gould is as much an atheist as Dawkins, but whereas Dawkins sees religions as erroneous explanations of the world with usually unfortunate consequences, “Gould … interprets religion as a system of moral belief” and seems to think that science is in danger of being contaminated by its social milieu. Sterelny does not quite make the point that Gould is scared that science will lead him where he doesn’t want to go, but this is certainly implied by his statement, “Gould hates sociobiology.”
And surely this is simply the old Marxist dogma that human psychology and behaviour have no innate characteristics, but are infinitely plastic and manipulable, together with the social systems that have been and can be founded upon them.
Gould has died. Is that the end of the controversy? After all, as Max Planck said, he didn’t need to convince the opponents of his theory: “They died.”
A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images. The Opte Project uses a networking program called “traceroute”. This records the network addresses that a data packet hops between as it travels towards a particular network host. The project is free and represents a lot of donated time.
Click for larger image and enjoy
via Network Edge
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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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