Nepal to ban independent trekking. Public safety, job creation and ‘stimulus’ all in one; how long before other nations follow Nepal’s lead?
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Yesterday some Samizdatistas met up on the roof of a multi-story car park in Peckham, where there just happens to be a semi open air restaurant (i.e. open air but under a canvass roof), which operates over the weekends of the summer. I first blogged about it here, but never since, I now realise, even though this is not the first time we’ve all met there. It is a splendid place, which looks like this:  That shot was taken during a favourite photography time: during sunshine, after rain. The rain cleans the air, and the sun then shines through it, to delightful effect. Believe it or not, that cement muddle thing in the foreground is Art. But it was Art that was really suffering from the rain. Art in the outdoors shouldn’t do that, should it? Well, maybe it would be better if quite a lot of outdoor Art did just get rained out of existence, like a sandcastle being washed away by the tide (and many a sandcastle has deserved better than that). And boy did the rain rain. Rain is not easy to photo, in my experience, but this rain was so violent that, what with the marginal cost of digital photography being zero, I just snapped and snapped, hoping I’d get lucky. And I did:  I wasn’t the only one of us taking photos:  That’s Rob Fisher, whose wife and young son were also present, which made it all a lot more fun. → Continue reading: Sunny intervals and scattered showers – as seen on a roof in Peckham August 6th, 2012 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 August 5th, 2012 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
The investment strike is one the government would do well to bust, writes Michael Burke in the Guardian. When I read the headline I gave him the benefit of the doubt. The Guardian subs do not cope well with nuance. But the headline fairly represents the views of the man:
I bet them fancy-pants government ministers are kicking themselves now they see how easy the solution is. You just redefine thousands of separate people and organisations not wishing to risk their money in the present economic climate as a ‘strike’. Then you break the strike. Don’t knock Mr Burke’s logic – when the British government redefines pretty much any behaviour it does not like as ‘terrorism’ and then uses anti-terrorism powers to suppress it, the tactic seems to work just fine. August 4th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Telegraph, Tom Chivers asks: what would it take to change your mind? It’s a good question; I’m forever using it in imagined arguments with socialists. It’s good because it helps distinguish beliefs that are rational from those that are religious. If you can answer it without being facetious or coming up with an impossible and improbable test then your beliefs are rational. If not, they’re religious. It’s a question I ask myself from time to time, as in: what would convince me that freedom is wrong? Chivers here is specifically referring to global warming – he is a warmist. I’m not: I think it is a pack of lies. But if I’m claiming to be rational I should at least have a go at answering it. Before I do I should point out that it doesn’t matter that much. Global warming is only part of a much larger issue: CAGWIT (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Inspired Tyranny). Warmists have to prove all of that. They can start by proving that tyranny works or even that a watered-down version of it works. I’m not holding my breath. Next they can prove that AGW is C. Haven’t heard too much on that front either. But that still doesn’t quite answer the question. What would change my mind? On the AGW bit, that is. In trying to answer it right from the start I hit a huge snag: I can’t rely on the authorities. You need only ask yourself what would happen if they turned around and said: “Terribly sorry, we’ve got it wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.” You can almost hear the sound of research grants drying up. Scientists are people too. They have families and cars and mortgages and titles and positions and they don’t want to give those things up. If they tell the world there’s a crisis the money keeps coming. If they don’t it doesn’t. They’re compromised. However, I am still going to have to refer to some sort of authority. I do not have the ability to determine whether the planet is warming up or even if CO2 concentration is increasing. Or even if one begets the other and which way round. But if I am not prepared to believe the state-sponsored scientists who am I prepared to believe? The non-state sponsored ones? Or to remove the (mythical?) ones who are funded by big oil (just as dubious) – the non-sponsored ones. If Macintyre, Bishop Hill or Watts et al changed their minds I would be all ears. But having said that I am not entirely happy with relying on such a small number of people. And I’m getting very close to coming up with an unrealistic test. Has anyone out there got any better ideas? One last point. I have to take issue with Chivers’s idea that taking advice from climate scientists is analogous to taking advice from a doctor (assuming, that is that anyone ever does take advice from their doctor). The reason I take issue is that the medical profession has a track record of both diagnosis and treatment. Climate science has to confine itself to diagnosis – treatment (should it prove necessary) is for economists. The problem is that even when it comes to diagnosis it has no track record – its theories are as contentious now as they were 40 years ago. August 2nd, 2012 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
Call me selfish, but the only life I want to ruin is my own. – A rather (I think) noble sentiment, expressed in a recently-shown-on-Brit-TV episode of the show by one of the 2 Broke Girls, the dark haired one who has always been poor as opposed the blond one who used to be rich. Find a bit more of the conversation during which this was said, by scrolling down here, to where it says “Brokeback Girls”. Lesbians eh? Wherever they look, they see more lesbians. Mind you, the brunette character is called “Max”. August 1st, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a long and detailed review of a gadget which might be more at home on a specialist tech blog than on Samizdata, but it serves also as a snapshot of the world of mobile electronics, a world that is perhaps less encumbered by regulation than is usual, which might explain the rate of improvement. By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved capabilities comes along about every 18 months or so. A lot of learning is going on about what kinds of devices work best. The original iPhone had a 4-inch touch screen and only one button. Since then physical keyboards have somewhat gone out of fashion, tablets have appeared in various sizes, netbooks have disappeared, ultrabooks have appeared, and phones have got bigger, in contrast to a few years ago when everyone was trying to make them smaller. The point is that no-one really knows which kinds of devices fit in best with people’s lives and which do not. With formerly successful companies dying out, capitalism is mercilessly finding out. No company is having more fun finding out than Asus. They pioneered the netbook — a small, cheap laptop — with their Eee PC. They combined the tablet with the netbook with their Transformer series of devices by making the screen detachable from the keyboard. And just recently they have taken this idea to a new extreme by sticking a smartphone inside the tablet. → Continue reading: Asus Padfone August 1st, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is said, probably apocryphally, that in rejecting an appeal for the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to be spared the guillotine, the revolutionary judge said, “The Republic has no need of scientists”. The great Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel prize for science, has been written out of Pakistani history for being the wrong sort of Muslim, writes Rob Crilly in the Telegraph. Among the saddest aspects of this story is that when reading this I could not wholeheartedly join in with Mr Crilly’s wish that Professor Salam’s name should again be honoured in his homeland. While public and elite opinion in Pakistan remains such that it does not wish to claim a great nuclear physicist – and one of the architects of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme – as its own, better for the world that Pakistan gets its wish. August 1st, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“So the Games have managed to achieve what even Hitler failed to accomplish with the Blitz: the total evacuation of London’s working population. Well, not quite total. There are plenty of poor devils who are still trying to scratch a living in the wasteland of empty restaurants, shops and streets. The trouble is that the the usual customers – the great mass of people who normally commute into central London every day – have been terrorised into staying away by a hugely successful Transport for London promotional campaign.” She writes about how so many Londoners have fled the country. I am one of them. More than 7 months ago, dreading what I feared might be the impact of the Games, I booked two weeks’ holiday in southwestern France, staying in the lovely small town of Marseillan, in the Languedoc region (nearest big city is Montpellier). I am actually doing some work down here although I have handed most responsibility to a colleague. My wife and I are having a great time – the weather is glorious without being raspingly hot; the food is amazing and good value; the locals are very pleasant; and last but not least, there is a most gratifying lack of Brits to remind me of home. I do check in on the internet occasionally, but although this might strike some as unsporting, I just haven’t got the “Olympic bug” at all. Yes, I thought parts of the opening ceremony were fun (glad to see Brunel honoured as the great Victorian civil engineer he was), and thought the James Bond routine was hilarious, and was not even all that annoyed about the National Health Service propaganda. (I thought the bit about the Industrial Revolution was actually not bad – all that celebration of carbon emissions and molten steel! But I am just not all that enthused. The greatest sporting festival this year has come and gone (the European football championships), and the Tour de France was also a gloriously unexpected highlight of the year. And as Brian says, there was also the cricket. Always the cricket. By the way, Bradley Wiggins, winner of the Tour, cycled past where I am now staying, and the locals worship the guy. He has become a bit of a cult in France. They like his character, guts and behaviour. My blogging output is going to be light for the next 10 days. You see, they sell cheap but excellent red wine here by the litre. July 31st, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Aside from doing grumpy postings like this one about them here, I am pretty much ignoring the Olympics. But today, while waiting for a BBC Radio 3 piano recital, I heard the BBC Radio 3 version of the news. And one of the big stories was that Lord Moynihan (he is some kind of British Olympic big cheese) was defending a gold medal winning Chinese swimmer against accusations of having been drugged. The margin of her victory in a swimming race was, according to a defeated American coach (so said Radio 3), “troubling”. And there you have what is surely the fundamental problem of the Olympics. I loath the Olympics for all sorts of reasons. The invading army of officious and corrupt imperialists telling me and my fellow Londoners how to run our own city, the costs that will be spread over lifetimes (including to those who have even less interest in the games than I do), the cock-ups caused by corruption, and by it being organised by a different bunch of organisers each time, the shameless statist propaganda in the opening ceremony (the entirety of which I have recording (sensing political rucki) but I have yet to watch the damn things and probably never will), etc. etc. etc. But this drugs accusation, whether in this particular case true or baseless, gets to the heart of the problem with the Olympics. I, and millions of others, just do not trust Olympic athletic victories any more. The wider the margin of them, the more we all distrust them. After all, science and technology have progressed at a dizzying rate in recent decades, in all other areas where it has profited anybody to make such progress. Why not in athlete doping, in ways that doping detection cannot detect? In Formula 1 car racing, everyone who pays attention knows that being and having the best driver is only half of the battle, if that. F1 is a struggle between engineers and designers, not just drivers. If your engineers fall behind, having the two best drivers on the planet driving your loser cars won’t win you the championship. Which is fine, because all of this is right out there in the open. No secret is made of any of this. One of the purposes of Formula 1 is to enable car makers to boast about their enthusiasm and excellence at technology, and maybe F1 even encourages regular car-making technology to get better. In athletics, however, the collision between the idea of individuals racing, or throwing or jumping or whatever it is, and individuals being treated more like racing cars by teams of medical experts, is not nearly so happy. In fact it pretty much destroys the entire purpose of the exercise. I mean, what the hell is the point of winning a gold medal, or for that matter winning a bronze or coming seventh, if every second person you subsequently meet (even if too polite to say so to your face) reckons you probably cheated? The problem is that whereas last year’s F1 cars are just scrap metal, or perhaps revered but still inanimate museum pieces, Olympic athletes have to spend several more decades actually living inside the bodies that were once mucked about with by Olympic doctors, so you probably can’t just allow the doctors to let rip, with any kind of biotechnology they can devise. Remember all those miserable ex-Soviet swimmers and gymnasts. But if you don’t allow this, or if you allow some biotechnology but not other kinds, you have to find some convincing way of policing it all. As of now, they are nowhere near to doing that convincingly. And one thing’s for sure. None of these problems are going in any way to diminish, in the decades to come. At present, my sport of choice, cricket, has no such doping problems, or if so they keep them very firmly under wraps. Not long ago, as I wrote about here, South Africa beat England at cricket. England didn’t just lose, they were humiliated, at home, in what everyone expected to be a very closely fought game. Yet nobody in cricket believes that this extraordinary South African triumph was caused by anything more complicated than the South African team playing much, much better than the England team did. Nobody called this result “troubling”, in the way that American coach meant it. Nobody is now suggesting that the South African team had been using illegal substances. They just batted far better and bowled far better, because … well, because they just did. Cricket certainly has its cheating problems, but they are to do with people cheating by not trying hard enough, not by off-the-field medical wizards trying too hard. July 31st, 2012 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
This coming Friday evening (Aug 3rd), there will be a talk, at my home, on the subject of Bitcoin, given by a German libertarian who is now visiting London named Frank Braun. Frank Braun is an acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter. Detlev wanted London to offer Frank Braun some kind of libertarian welcome, but many of the usual libertarian welcomers are now out of the country, on holiday and fleeing the Olympics. So, I’m doing some Frank Braun welcoming. Which suits me well because I have for some time been thinking of cranking up my Brian’s Fridays, and this will be a good way to see if that really appeals. Plus, any acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter is an acquaintance of mine. Certainly, this particular talk ought to be interesting. There is a posting up at my personal blog about the event. If you’d like to attend, and are near enough actually to do that conveniently, please email me (follow the link to see how). Now, back to all the tidying up that I must do before Friday. That has now become urgent. Which was another reason why I said yes to Frank Braun dropping by. July 30th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
World’s biggest eco-toilet scheme fails Not that I wish to discount the idea of improvements to the current design of toilets entirely. One must not be too quick to pooh-pooh new ideas. July 30th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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