This is one scary, scary animation… It may seem exagerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore
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This is the New York Times quote of the day, from Stephen Hawking, he of the technologically enhanced vocal chords:
Until now I have taken it for granted that any idea that black holes might ever make a contribution to long haul transport was black pudding in the sky. But now I am not so sure. I do not know exactly what Hawking means about information being preserved, just as I am seldom completely clear what he means about most things, but the rest of this quote reads so very like those it-will-never-float it-will-never-fly only-six-computers-will-ever-be-needed electric-guitar-groups-will-never-catch-on prophecies which are periodically gathered together into anthologies of Things They Wish They Had Not Said, that I suddenly find myself becoming more optimistic about the possibility that one might one day be able to hail a Black Hole Cab and take a trip to another universe. July 22nd, 2004 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It seems that you can make a very popular movie (apparently it was described in the New York Times as his best so far – could well be) without it being popular everywhere:
She might have been wiser to say a few nice things about Spiderman 2, which has been described by Mark Steyn as:
Showbusiness. You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can please some of the people all of the time, but … July 22nd, 2004 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
…but not all the time. If you don’t look at the listings page and life’s busy schedule halts the urge towards the sofa, then television may take up two hours tops a week, unless Euro 2004 is on. The invasion of reality programming provides no real attractions. Big Brother, Survivor and the Sex Diaries of Ayia Napa don’t entice. (The last one is made up but the outline is on my desk, if there are any budding producers out there!) The only time that couch potato indulgences come into play is on holiday. A recent vacation in Visby provided insights into the enthusiasm of Swedish tv for US sitcoms. Square eyes are developed after a couple of snifters before hitting the clubs (pre-season doubles of scotch are obligatory given Swedish beer prices). It was during these preparations that I came across the programme, Swag. The series was first introduced on porn-lite, history heavy Channel Five in 2003, under the auspices of Guy Ritchie, and involves enticing the criminal element and potential lawbreakers to demonstrate their stupidity on camera. Some of the celebrity stunts are clearly staged but others demonstrate a naive verisimiltude that only chavs could provide. In the first series, one likely lad was so enraged at being trapped in the car, he stabbed a cameraman with a screwdriver. Two examples of the programme will suffice: an open lorry with boxes of goodies, tempting for the greedy, and transforming into a cage which is driven around calling upon onlookers to look at the imprisoned thief; or the driver, who took a disabled spot, and returned to find her car encircled by a chain of wheelchairs. Reality television has included a number of themes over the past decade: preying upon the self-indulgence of the would-be famous, manufacturing celebrities out of the public and wielding the intrinsic voyeurism of documentaries. Ritchie has demonstrated that this medium can also tap into other basic human reactions: the anger that people feel when they see a clear transgression such as theft, and a sense of justice at the comeuppance of a budding criminal. July 21st, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a stirring of campaign groups to oppose the EU constitution ratification in France. My latest posting on Combat links to the ‘acceptable’ opposition groups. To these we could add the far-right, who will no doubt be excluded from the ‘official No campaign’. Our biggest problem at the moment is the total lack of a mainstream anti-EU press. This is not that different from the Maastricht campaign of 1992, and at least the Internet is reducing the organisational advantage to the political establishment. We may also have funding problems, though this is not the concern right now. At the moment, the main job is trying to establish who can vote and where. The big questions concern foreigners. Can they vote? Can they donate funds to the campaigns? I shall keep posting. The good news today is a rumour of dissent in the French Socialist Party. The leadership has committed the Party to voting ‘Yes’, wheras many members would have liked to wait until the text was actually available in September before deciding. July 21st, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now where did that come from? Japan’s economy is actually growing at more than a statistically obvious rate for the first time properly since the 1980s. The fact that a heatwave is being credited with boosting business leads to the obvious conclusion. Global warming is Good for Capitalism. Light those brown coal fires now! Chop down those hedgerows! Hunt those whales! Bring back leaded gasoline! July 21st, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Trade union members in France and Germany are becoming conscious of the need to break the law if they are to keep their jobs. At present it is illegal to ask any worker in France to work more than a 35 hour week, except in special cases determined by political lobbying. Not surprisingly this has led to the closure of low-paid jobs at an accelerating rate with relocation to Eastern Europe the current favourite. When I was last in Slovakia in May this year, a deal had recently been struck to move a Peugeot factory from France. On my previous visit in 1993, unemployment threatened to hit 80 per cent in some towns. The power struggle between Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac now encompasses the scrapping of the 35 hour week. Chirac did not veto the measure when the Socialist government passed the law, no doubt under the influence of his then influential leftist political advisor – his daughter. So now Chirac cannot face anything more than cosmetic reform of a job-destroying law, without looking the cretin that he his. Of course, leaving things as they are makes him look thick-headed, or a “veau” (calf) as we say in France. So in the marketplace the obvious solution is emerging: factory workers are agreeing to work an extra hour a week without pay. How this is better for social justice than letting people work and get paid for the hours they want beats me, but if it makes them happy… July 21st, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
How many of you grew up playing ‘RISK’? Yes, I see a bunch of hands up… no less than I would expect from a bunch of Samizdata readers. So… with everyone’s mind now in the proper context, I give you the before and after maps of the middle east and central asia created by American Digest. Many of us have had this image in our minds as we wrote on the current world war over the last few years, but many in the general public have failed to put this together. This is not their fault. It is in the nature of headline news to lose connectedness betwixt events separated in time and space. Afganistan is one story, now fading; Iraq is another story; the war on terrorism is yet another story. Except they are not. Let us imagine for a moment we are military attache’s from Epsilon Eridani. We know nothing about human politics. We have not evolved for religious belief. But… we do know our warfare. We know our tactical and strategical levels. Now look at the map from before. Look at the map afterwards. Can anyone imagine a better move to more thoroughly disrupt one’s enemy? I certainly can not. July 21st, 2004 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon. After creating this wonderful capability, the Government did what Governments do. They squandered it. They threw it away. The State is not your friend. July 20th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The New Yorker(!) teed off very nicely on the rather stuffy account of a certain testy exchange between VP Dick Cheney and Senate Minority Lead Pat Leahy. The background: The Veepster has been accused by none other than The Honorable Mr. Leahy of profiting (via Halliburton) on the blood of American soldiers spilled in Iraq. When Leahy approached Cheney at Senate function recently, full of smarmy bonhomie, Cheney told him to fuck off, or to go fuck himself (accounts vary, but everyone agrees the F-bomb was dropped). The Washington Times reported this as follows:
The New Yorker, well, took it to the next level. July 20th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve done several posts at my Education Blog on the theme of the educational gains to be got from blogging, by the blogger. Of course writing things communicates to others. But it also organises the thoughts of the writer, and makes them more likely to be remembered by the writer. Failing that, it makes it easier for the writer to access his written thoughts later, if only because the writer is likely at least to remember having written on that subject. I did another such posting yesterday, in connection with something Michael Jennings said to me last week in conversation about how he blogs about computer matters with this benefit in mind. Rob Fisher commented on this post, in a way that emphasises the point:
By the time I understand that last paragraph I will have had to have made some educational progress myself, although I am sure it is straightforward enough once you understand it. Educationally helpful comments, anyone? “Wiki”? I have heard that word, and the presumably related word “wikipedia”, but what does this stuff mean? Blogging, it seems to me, blurs the distinction between the private and the public. It is not that this distinction is now of no importance. But blogging does shift the economics of (what do we call it?) message management? … towards combining the public with the private, wherever that can be done without too much risk. Simply, by doing both private and public communication simultaneously, you can save both time and effort, and that might make it economical to engage in forms of communication with oneself and with others that would previously not have been possible. I think, as I said in my original posting, that this is one of the big reasons for the success of blogging. Constructing a helpful set of notes as one learns a subject area might be too difficult, and hence beyond you. Writing material good enough to reach a wide readership, ditto. But licking your notes into shape and sticking them on a blog, which obviously can be read by millions, but need not be in order to be an economic proposition, adds up to something that can make a lot of sense. I did not set out with my Culture Blog with the self-conscious aim of learning about new buildings in London, but that is the way it is turning out. And I definitely did start Brian’s Education Blog in order to educate myself, about education, as the ambiguous name, I hope, communicates. Brian’s Blog About Education? A Blog About Brian’s Education? Both. These friends of mine are in the business of helping businesses to set up blogs. They emphasise the benefits blogging can bring in the form of communicating with customers, and that must be right. But a company which blogs will be, it seems to me, a company which learns, individually and collectively, more than it would learn otherwise. But of course there is a further potential benefit to blogging as self-education, I have already tried to illustrate with this posting by asking commenters to explain wiki to me. Commenters can help to educate you. Not all such help is truly helpful, but sometimes it can be very helpful indeed. I would be delighted to hear about any other bloggers who have used blogging as part of their effort to further their own education. I would not be surprised if a consensus were to emerge here, or to have emerged from a comment-fest somewhere else of interest, along the lines of: this is (partly) what all bloggers are doing. July 20th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Monday night, I and Samizdata editors Perry de Havilland and Adriana Cronin-Lukas went to the House of Commons in London for the launch of the Hansard Society’s new report on blogging. Pointing out what is wrong with the report will be tackled soon enough, but the overall message of the night is what really got to me – and not in a good way. The launch was being held in Westminster Hall, where the Hansard Society has set up an exhibition called House to Home: Bringing Parliament and people together. The first thing about this exhibition – after the huge plasma screens showing shots from parliamentary debates and self-conscious, empty elements like stacks of chairs hanging suspended from the ceiling – that caught my attention was the large banner telling us that “Politics matters”. Not only that, but that “Politics shapes us as a society”. You can imagine how we each reacted to that supposed axiom from the Hansard Society, the “independent, non-partisan educational charity”…whose exhibition just happened to be sponsored in part by the government’s Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Electoral Commission. The information guide that accompanies the exhibition, copies of which were handed out to everyone present at the launch, contains even more such gems. First, some good news:
Glad to hear it. But did you know that freedom of speech – along with freedom of religion and freedom to protest – is something we only have because of the government? According to the Hansard Society:
Hmmm. Which one of these is not like the other? “Free” education is something to which each human being is entitled just by virtue of having been born, according to the “independent, non-partisan” Hansard Society’s government-sponsored exhibition. The “educational charity” also informs us that it was the benevolent Parliament that recognised this in law – and that it was the benevolent Parliament that granted us freedom of speech, to protest, and to practice religion. What is more:
The Hansard Society has also provided a handy guide to “How to have your say,” including tips on how to solve the vexing mystery of which constituency you live in. The guide advises us to decide which candidate and which party is most likely to speak up for what we believe in. But what if the answer is “none of the above”? Well:
Hey, that is helpful. Finally, on page ten of this pamphlet, the Hansard Society comes clean:
Indeed. It is about telling people that it is imperative that we “get involved” in the political process – because, don’t you know, we would not have any rights if it were not for the government! And it is about freedom of expression being something that only politics can enable. As the Hansard Society puts it:
Because expressing one’s views can only come about through the good grace of politicians. The scary thing is, the government is taking our money to fund the “non-partisan, independent” Hansard Society’s efforts to spread this message. That is to say, British taxpayers are funding this “independent” propaganda machine. Ah, well. It was a night for such things. Walking along Victoria Street from the House of Commons, Perry snapped a photo for me of one of my most loathed views in London – a government propaganda ticker that repeats the same message over and over: “London is getting safer…”
Still, the night was not all dispiriting. Leaving the House of Commons, I paused to admire a police guard’s impressive guns – two Glocks in the holster and a machine gun thingy (that is the technical name, I believe) in his hands. He was eager to show them off to me, and seemed happy to encounter someone who had respect for the weapons and his proficiency with them. It was enough to make a crunchy granola gun-control activist weep – which was more than enough to make me smile.
July 20th, 2004 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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