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 occasionally buy a magazine called The Week, which contains, or so it claims on its front, “the best of the British and foreign media”. How pleasing to see Britain counting unapologetically for about as much as the rest of the world put together, and as the first of these two equals. Quite right.
Joking aside, on page 26 of the Feb 28 issue, there is this letter:
To: The Guardian
As a scientist of no fixed political position, but deeply involved in climate science and sea-level changes, I agree with Diana Liverman that we must exercise caution with the Earth. Likewise, we must not confuse facts and fiction, nor justify wishes with falsification.
As president of an international commission on sea-level changes and coastal evolution, I launched a Maldives research project. Observational data obtained by our international team of experts shows conclusively that the sea level is not rising, unlike fictions propagated by many who are not specialists.
Nils-Axel Morner, Stockholm University
I have read more grammatically perfect written English than this. I mean, what exactly does it mean to “justify wishes with falsification”? And although the attempted meaning of that final sentence is clear enough, its actual wording is something of a muddle. One expects better English from Scandinavians. Nevertheless, the most important bit, where it says that “the sea level is not rising”, is clear as clear can be.
That international commission would presumably be these people.
Interesting, I think. And good on The Guardian for printing the letter.
Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist gave a lecture this evening (this was posted after midnight but still that same evening – ed) at the Adam Smith Institute in London. A number of the Samizdatistas were there. Lomborg’s arguments are familiar to those who have read his book, but it was a rapid, powerful, to the point speech in which he demolished many of the arguments of the “The world is facing impending environmental collapse” school of Greenery with ruthless efficiency. His ten minute demolition of the case for the Kyoto accord was particularly impressive.
Lomborg walked on stage wearing a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, and looked just like the thirtysomething Greenpeace member and quintissential Nordic person of more traditional environmentalist views he once apparently was. He spoke with a rapid intensity, clearly wanted to get a lot out in the relatively short time he had for the lecture. And perhaps the rapidity of speech was covering up a certain natural shyness, but if so this was mixed in with what was clearly a burning desire to get his message out.
Lomborg told the familiar story of how he found himself in this position. → Continue reading: Bjørn Lomborg at the Adam Smith Institute.
Malaria and the DDT Story
Richard Tren and Roger Bate
Institute of Economic Affairs, 2000
This is a short “Occasional Paper” of about 100 pages, including Introduction and Bibliography, which I read without reviewing when I received it . After reading Robert Ross’s Memoirs, Honigsbaum’s The Fever Trail and Rocco’s The Miraculous Fever Tree, books about cinchona/quinine and Sallares’ Malaria and Rome, I thought I had better re-read it with more attention.
DDT (Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) is the safest, most efficient and cheapest insecticide used to eradicate Anopheles, the mosquito that transmits malaria from person to person. There are three species of malarial parasites in humans, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariae and Plasmodium falciparum (a pedant would add a very rare fourth), of which falciparum is by far the most deadly and essentially the cause of the problem under discussion. → Continue reading: Not rolling back malaria
According to yesterday’s Observer the HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands and around the world (and which later visited northern Australia, which ultimately led to Australia’s northernmost city being named after one of the greatest of all scientists) has been possibly located at the bottom of a marsh in Essex. There are no records as to where the ship was taken after being sold for scrap in 1870, but some historical detective work by Robert Prescott, a marine archaeologist from St Andrews University, followed by a radar survey appears to have tracked it down.
Given that this is the vessel onboard which one of the greatest of all scientific revolutions began, it would be wonderful if this ship could be raised out of the marsh and put in a museum somewhere, or perhaps it could be turned into a museum. Thematically it would be perfect in the Science Museum in Kensington, but I suspect that the 90 ft brig would be a little big for the building. And while it would presumably be possible to transport it up the Thames on some other vessel, transporting it through Chelsea to Kensington might be a little bit of a nuisance. So perhaps the Maritime Museum in Greenwich would be a better bet.
(Link via slashdot).
Friedrich Blowhard’s latest and pleasingly whimsical posting is called Visual Google. What he was doing was typing in words, albeit words with visual connotations and consequences. Hello “clouds”. Hello “sky”.
Says Friedrich:
It may be an exaggeration to describe a Google search as “found art” but I generally like the results at least as well as a John Cage musical composition.
Indeed.
But now here’s what I thought Friedrich might have been writing about. For some time now I’ve been wondering how you search the net for a picture, when all you have to go on is a bit of picture yourself. Suppose you have a rather blurry or unsatisfactory image, or perhaps a fragment of an image, or maybe a quite good drawing of an image, and you want the Giant Computer in the Sky to tell you what it is, and to show you a far, far better version of it … can you now do that? Are there truly visual search engines out there? And how about a visual description (“cubist woman, with transparent handkerchief in front of her face, crying, lots of yellow, red and blue”) but not the official title? Can search engines now – or will search engines ever be able to – respond intelligently to a query like that?
And how about music? Can you now, or will there ever be a day when you can, go “you know that thing that goes Dah dah de dah dit kabang swoosh …” and get five suggestions for the original track listed for you and ready to roll?
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
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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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