Samizdata

NASA have attached a web cam to the shuttle’s external fuel tank and will be transmitting during the launch on the 2nd of October. There is a link on this page that takes you to NASA television.

Flight director Phil Engelauf (as quoted on the BBC web site) said:

the video’s “wow factor” should be high.

I stumbled across this site by accident. It’s getting almost scary when you can find and order copies of Meet The Press from the 1940’s! The list of names is a who’s who of that period of history.

The September 2002 issue of Scientific American contains a truely amazing statement in “Clocking Cultures’ by Carol Ezzell:

Levine and his colleagues have conducted so-called pace-of-life studies in 31 countries. In ‘A Geography of Time’, published in 1997, Levine describes how he ranked the countries by using three measures: walking speed on urban sidewalks, how quickly postal clerks could fulfill a request for a common stamp, and the accuracy of public clocks. Based on these variables, he concluded that the five fastest paced countries are Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Japan and Italy; the five slowest are Syria, El Salvador, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico. The US, at 16th, ranks near the middle.

I don’t know about you but… Ireland???? I suppose this means everyone emigrates from here to New York City for the laid back lifestyle?

A piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times (Sept 8 2002 – page 1.24) deals with the creepy subject of children having computer chips implanted into them, so that their parents can keep track of them and stop them being abducted and murdered by mad sex-fiend serial killers. The technologist at the centre of this is Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University, and maybe we ought to plant a chip in him to keep track of him, because he’s a rather strange person himself by all accounts.

On the face of it, planting chips in people is a clear violation of liberty, fraught with the danger of many further violations of liberty, especially when governments start planting chips in criminals, and then in people suspected of being criminals, and then in people, and then finally (checkmate) in all people.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t think children nowadays have nearly as much freedom of movement as they might have. They are now mostly expected to show up at the same place, day after day for months at a time, whether that makes sense or not.

Time was when schools really were educational institutions first and surveillance operations only incidentally, but that balance is shifting all the time. Put it this way: if there were a massive year-long strike by the teaching profession, which of their contributions to society would be most missed? Their teaching of children or their mere keeping of tabs on children. Parents and other responsible adults want children to be “educated”, but what they really really want is to know where their children are and that they aren’t getting into evil company, if not second by second then at least hour by hour.

This is surely why portable phones are now so popular as gifts from parents to children. But they’re hardly foolproof for this job. Portable phones can be stolen by other children. They can just be lost. And there can’t be a great missing child panic every time that happens. (A wrist watch portable phone might work better, and no doubt the techies are working on that.)

To put it another way, the choice for children is not so much between children being kept track of by some kind of electronic communications device, or not; it is between children being kept track of, or being made to stay put in one or a few known-in-advance locations. And being made stay in fixed places is not exactly what we libertarians call “freedom”. Paradoxically, childr-tracking technology is what may make freedom of movement for children much more common in the near future.

Of course this kit can be used by parents and teachers to drive children crazy. But children are already at the mercy of adults. For those adults who want children to have freer and happier lives than they do now, this sort of kit, used with humanity and with common sense, will surely be part of the answer.

Maybe Professor Warwick isn’t such a creep after all.

I’m going on the radio this (early) evening for a few minutes to talk about this stuff, and happily they’re not expecting me to come crashing down on only one side of the argument. The radio station is Ondacero International, which is basically Spanish but which also does English language broadcasts for Anglo expatriates living in Spain, of whom there are at least a million. I couldn’t find any hint of English at the Ondacero website, but maybe you can. If you do contrive to tune in by some magical means or another, the show goes out at 7 pm Spanish time, which is 6 pm London time, and whatever that might be your time. Who knows? – maybe some Samizdata readers are themselves Anglo-Spaniards within regular radio range of this. I’m fixed to be on for a few minutes at around twenty past the hour. My thanks for making the contact to my good (and good libertarian) friend David Botsford, who’s been on this show several times himself.

I can’t remember exactly when it was, but one evening something like a fortnight ago, David Carr, Adriana (I think she was there), Perry and I were gathered at Perry’s in the small hours of a morning and we were discussing that newly erupting Transnationalism article. The various properties and qualities and signs of Tranzis and Tranzi thoughts (we were already using David’s word, I seem to recall) were itemised. I offered the thought that Tranzis probably prefer Linux to Microsoft, but was squashed by the assembled majority. Linux is libertarian and the Tranzis don’t like that do they? Course not. I said no more.

But now have a read of this article by Steve Lohr, and then tell me I was wrong. Anti-American governmentalists everywhere (especially from the Tranzi heartland: the EU) queueing up to support the Penguin and to trash the Evil Gates, whom they regard as the personification of US corporate imperialism.

I think personal computer software is a natural global monopoly, if you’ll pardon the expression. What I mean is that at any moment there is a global winner which it makes sense for nearly everybody to use – Tranzis, anti-Tranzis, Americans, anti-Americans, everybody – simply because everybody else does. And any year now, it would seem, the world may do a switch. But I confess to being biased about this, because I placed a sort of bet four years ago in a Libertarian Alliance piece about Linux!, and if Linux ever does topple Big Bill I will look very prescient.