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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There are some people in this world who do such a good job of discrediting themselves you need hardly bother. I refer you to the public attack on Dr. Glenn Reynolds by a Mr. Mark Modzelewski.
I double checked the impression given by his writing with a physicist friend who runs into him on a regular basis and will for political reasons remain anonymous. “The guy is a PR Flack” and “He knows nothing” were perhaps the kindest remarks I heard, and this is from deep within the ranks of people Mark deals with.
So I’m a Drexlerian by his lights? I find that a label to be proud of.
At least I can pronounce it.
Ever since I struck the chords of some of my libertarian friends with my Libertarian Alliance piece entitled The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy, I and several of the friends have been on the lookout for new uses for the phrase “fixed quantity of [insert new something whose quantity is not fixed] fallacy”. Well, here is another. See title above.
The beauty of the FQ?F is that all you have to do is state it. Much of the argument is made simply with the phrase. Jobs. Happiness. Travel. Linoleum. Blogging …
The point is that simply altering the price of something massively increases the demand for it. And when economists talk about demand, they are not merely discussing potential consumers standing about with stupid plackards and stamping their feet and getting in a rage – as in political ‘demand’ – they mean actual ‘effective’ demand, demand that counts for something, demand with cash to back it up.
Just to get the linking thing out of the way, I here give thanks to two recent articles which stirred me into saying what follows, one the already much linked-to Wired piece about how Indian programmers are now turning Silicon Valley into a dust bowl, and the other being a piece in today’s New York Times in which you can see the beginnings of the dawning light in the Western Official Mind that this might not all be entirely bad news after all.
So, let us think about this Fixed Quantity of Programming Fallacy. It applies, of course, to the row now raging about the way that those sneaky Indians are stealing all our – I use the words “sneaky”, “stealing” and “our” ironically – computer programming jobs.
Now I do not doubt that there are many computer programmers in the West who will, in the short run and maybe if they can find nothing else to do in the longer run as well, suffer severely. But it is also true that the availability to the West of much cheaper Indian programming power will create massive new economic opportunities in the West, and everywhere else.
Basically, what it means is that Western computer experts will have to stop writing programmes and start, well, demanding them. In less florid language, they will have to switch from writing programmes to writing specifications for programmes, from making programmes to saying what a new programme must do.
At the moment it is simply assumed that ‘writing a computer programme’ is something that only someone very rich can afford to finance. → Continue reading: The fixed quantity of programming fallacy
Michael Jennings has a fascinating posting up at his own blog about the introduction of colour photography, the point being that it was very gradual.
When you look into this a little, it is possible to find brilliant, clear, full colour photographs from the last decades of the 19th century. The reason for this is relatively simple, which is that if you can take black and white photographs you can take colour photographs. Just split the image into three, run one through a blue filter, one through a green filter, and one through a red filter and record each image on a piece of film (or actually, at the time, on a glass negative). You have three images. Given those three images you have everything you need to print a colour photograph. However, designing a suitable process through which you can print that colour photograph clearly was initially a little tricky, and 19th century colour photographs could not be readily and accurately printed in the 19th century. However, they can be printed today, and I have seen some spectacular colour photographs from the 19th century, which are as clear and beautiful as photographs taken any time since. (In particular, I once saw a wonderful collection of photographs of Russia, but I cannot find any online).
Michael goes on to say that perhaps the decisive moment in this story, if there was such a thing, was when colour television arrived on the scene in the nineteen sixties. That was when black and white rather suddenly came to seem old fashioned. That was when they stopped making black and white movies, even though they had been making some movies in colour for about a quarter of a century.
But the titbit that got my attention was that bit about colour photographs taken in Russia over a hundred years ago, despite them not knowing how to print them on paper. Michael says he could not find any of these photos online. Can anyone in our ultra-knowledgeable commentariat do better than that? It would be fascinating to see such photographs, if they are anywhere to be seen.
Glenn Reynolds has an article on the rapidly escalating Nano-War of Words. The technological possibilities outlined 25 years ago by Dr. Eric Drexler have the poor spin doctors (like Mr. Modzelewski) and a number of other Johnny-come-lately’s in the science world all bent out of shape.
It is, after all, not Dr Drexler’s fault lesser minds are jealous he got there first and rightfully will have his name in the history books as the Father of Nanotechnology. Whether he is correct in detail or not is irrelevant. The fact his detractors will not even debate him without veering off into ad-hominem attacks rather than meet him fairly on the field of equations shows the serious weakness of their position.
I will make no absolute claim that a Drexler Assember/Disassembler is buildable. Neither will I accept claims backed up by bluster and lack of experiment that such is impossible.
And yes, I do know Eric. Quite well in fact.
Dr. Eric Drexler (center) with Dr. Peter Vijk (left) at
the May 2003 National Space Society conference in San Jose, California
Photo: Copyright Dale M. Amon, all rights reserved
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.
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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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