Atomic Razor

Location, Location, Location

House for sale : Combe Florey, Taunton, Somerset - Knight Frank | United Kingdom UK | View details

Evelyn (and Auberon) Waugh's old pile is up for sale. It's on at £2.25M, but I suspect in the current climate you might be able to get it for £1.95M. (I wonder why the Waugh family are selling now? It doesn't seem the best time, which might suggest they've been forced into it, but it is also, I suppose, possible, that recessions don't much affect the price of this kind of property, given the shortage of supply. To be honest though, I'd have thought that it were more likely to be affected as the marginal incomes - the banker's bonuses - of the sorts of people who might buy a house of this type are highly dependent on the state of the global economy.

No mention of whether or not it still has the private chapel, but it does have come with a tennis court and [b]ehind the house is a lovely large walled garden surrounded by open paddocks and woodland extending to just over 35 acres."

"Work Suspended" is a fragment of a novel that Waugh began in the late 1930s and abandoned after the outbreak of war. It concerns a successful popular novelist, John Plant, who, after the death of his artist father, has decided to settle permanently back in England. The narrator describes the kind of house that he is looking for:

"I had a clear idea of what I required. In the first place, it must not cost, all told, when the decorators and plumbers had moved out and the lawyers been paid for the conveyance, more than £3,000; it must be in agricultural country, preferably within five miles of an antiquated market town, it must be at least a hundred years old, and it must be a house, no matter how dingy, rather than a cottage, however luxurious; there must be a cellar, two staircases, high ceilings, a marble chimney-piece in the drawing-room, room to turn a car at the front door, a coach-house and stable yard, a walled kitchen garden, a paddock and one or two substantial trees - these seemed to me the minimum requisites of the standard of gentility at which I aimed, something between the squire's and the retired admiral's."

This sounds a great deal like Combe Florey. What is particularly striking is that it must cost no "more than £3,000, all told". £3,000 in 1939 corresponds to ~£130k according to prices and ~£500k according to wages in 2008. It is possible that Combe Florey with its 35 acres is somewhat grander than the house Plant is seeking, but the fact that it is on for £2.25M gives an indication of just how property prices have risen over the last 70 years. If only one had a time machine.

Waugh discussed these kinds of houses and the kinds of people who lived in them in several works from the late 1930s (for instance, the short story "An Englishman's Home", which features Much Malcock Hall (formerly and still popularly "Grumps)", Much Malcock House, the Manor and the Old Mill) and early 1940s (for instance, Put Out More Flags). This got me thinking - and looking. There are houses of the type Waugh describes all over the place whether in Lancashire or Oxfordshire (the drive between the M40 junction and Crowmarsh Gifford is thick with them). As a jobbing writer, one may never aspire to live in such a house, but plenty of people do. Who are they (there are surely only so many retired admirals or even colonels)? What do they do for a living? Given house price rises over the last decades, how do they afford them? And why does one never meet these people? (Because I live in the city.)

I'm not sure I'd want to live in Combe Florey, but I'd like to be in a position (I think I'd prefer a three bedroom duplex apartment with a view of the Thames or substantial terraced house in Wingate Road) to be able to afford to. Combe Florey would make the perfect writers' centre. Perhaps some banker could give the Arvon Foundation his bonus so they could buy it for the nation.

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

Interesting stuff, and not entirely a surprise to me but some of the findings are worse than I would have anticipated.

" In March 2004, acting on a number of reports from general aviation pilots that Samsung SPH-N300 cellphones had caused their GPS receivers to lose satellite lock, NASA issued a technical memorandum that described emissions from this popular phone. It reported that there were emissions in the GPS band capable of causing interference. Disturbingly, though, they were low enough to comply with FCC emissions standards."

I know that we've had engineers invest heavily in potted plants to place between them and working prototype handsets when they saw the radiation and radio output data for them.  I've also seen a theoretically ready to ship 3G handset that could "talk" to its test rig without the cable across the lab.

I've certainly left my phone on a couple of times by accident.

The core issue is that outside of the critical phases this should be less of a problem anyway, (although the input on the effect of the Samsung phones on GPS is interesting, especially as built in GPS becomes a standard in 3G devices).  Part of the problem with spectrum "noise" is an artifact of phones not being designed to (a) move at multiple hundreds of kph and (b) be 5 miles _above_ the radio landscape.  Both of these factors lead to a very unhappy core network on the ground.  Put a normal phone into a landscape like that and it'll crank up the power trying to handshake with a basestation (or in the case of CDMA lots of basestations) and keep doing while moving.  It's a mess.

What will happen in the near future is the plane will have a micro-cell onboard which means the phone will lock onto the local cell a few metres away and broadcast at minimum power.  That shouldn't be a serious problem.

Of course, the more serious problem is passengers fighting their natural urges to beat the leaving hell out of the ass on their phone for an 8 hour transatlantic flight.

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Internal Exile

I was going to say that the election of Boris Johnson is a catastrophe for London and a catastrophe for Britain, but as the Weasel has pointed out, Johnson's election has already generated more hyperbolic comment in the blogosphere than can be possibly be justified or sustained. Which isn't to say that I'm not very angry at the people who should have known better - those who voted for a "progressive" third party candidate as number 1 and Johnson as 2. They are guilty ones and I do and will blame them for inflicting upon us a racist, sexist, homophobic buffoon. But the reeducation camps aren't just around the door and our lives must go on as best they can.

Of course, the real fear now for us anti-Tories is that Johnson will surprise us all and prove competent in the role. There is absolutely nothing in Johnson's own background (other than a modicum of native intelligence) to suggest that he will be competent, but I suspect that a great many people at Central Office, along with their friends, will be really, really, hoping that he doesn't mess and will be prepared to offer Johnson all the support he needs (whether he wants it might be another matter). 

For the foreseeable future, as we career towards an almost certain Cameron victory in 2010 its likely shattering consequences (the end of the United Kingdom for one),  I intend to adopt the attitude of bourgeois intellectuals in the DDR: an attitude of psychic internal exile from the body politic.

Free Neal Stephenson...

...and John Clute at Gresham College next Thursday for the symposium on Science Fiction as a Literary Genre. (Crassly the college's homepage's puffs the event with the tagline "Sci-Fi and Literature" and a picture of the Starship Enterprise, so managing to get three things wrong in one go.) I heard about the symposium a few weeks ago, but only signed up this week - I has assumed that all the places would have gone by now, but I wrong. Of course, I feel ashamed that I didn't sign up as soon as I heard about the symposium. I mean - Neal Stephenson! And for free! I wonder how Gresham managed to bag him? I suppose Gresham College might push some of his baroque buttons. The college is at least aware of what they have got to a certain extent: he is described as the keynote speaker in the letter I received this morning. It doesn't give a name to the title of his talk, but the website does: "The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture", which does sound like a Stephensonian topic - he is certainly a geek (unlike many slipstream writers), indeed he is proud to be a geek, but there is a sense in Stephenson's work that he stands slightly apart from the fetid core of the genre (unlike, say, Charles Stross).

And in the evening I am going to see another literary hero of mine, although this time unfortunately the event isn't free. David Lodge is talking about his new novel Deaf Sentence at the place that filled the void left by the closure of Compendium Books (eternal thanks to the Weasel for introducing me to its wonders) as my spiritual home the London Review (of Books) Bookshop. There appear to be tickets still available, a snip at £6, although that's not quite the same as free - as they say what's not to like about free Neal Stephenson?

Perhaps Lodge and Stephenson should collaborate on a novel. After all Stephenson has written a campus novel (The Big U with several other novels heavily featuring students and universities) and Lodge has written a novel about artificial intelligence (sort of) (Thinks...). As two of my favourite writers it is hardly surprising that they have much more in common that might meet the eye. And I sure that Stephenson would agree with Morris Zapp (or Jacques Derrida) that Every Decoding is Another Encoding. No, they aren't that far apart (I know, I know!).

And afterwards it will be City Lit Writers' Club drinks. Can my brain, stomach and liver cope with so much literary richness in one day?       

Cantar de Mio Cid

Blog A Penguin Classic – Penguin Books Ltd

Thanks to The Magician for the tip: the Blog a Penguin Classic blog is open again to new reviewers, so register now for your free book. I've been assigned The Poem of the Cid. Yesss... OK, I can't say it's the book I would have chosen myself, but it is a work that stand at the very threshold of Spanish literature and thus is, in its way, the perfect introduction to a decade of Borgesian studies. Furthermore, who can forget the ending of the film? And the book is a lot shorter than Don Quixote.

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Vote Early, Vote Often

According to the latest YouGov poll Boris is 11% ahead of Ken. How can this be? Who are these people who are prepared to vote for Boris Johnson (I leave aside discussion of the opinions of certain people)? Boris Johnson! This isn't the OUSU presidency we are talking about here. This is the mayoralty of the most important city in the world. There is no place for an eccentric joke candidate. Ken has many flaws, but he has a proven track of running London, while Boris has a proven track record of running... The Spectator. New Labour might be finally imploding under the combined weight of a global economic slowdown, battle fatigue and its own internal contradictions, but that doesn't mean that we can afford to risk putting the reins of power in London in the hands of an absentee landlord. And does anyone seriously believe that Johnson will be anything other than asleep on the job? Worryingly I haven't received a pollig card, although I am as sure as I can be that I returned the electroral register form months ago and I did get an official pack of electoral material from the Returning Officer yesterday. I will have to head down to Green Dragon Primary School with my passport and hope in my heart tomorrow. I ought to feel a lot more depressed about this than I do. The only explanation I can adduce is that I am suffering from hysterical suppression of the symptoms. Anyway, tomorrow, if you can, vote Ken 1.

Just What I've Been Looking For

LI've long been ashamed of the paucity of my vocabulary. I remember when I was 15 being asked by a fellow pupil at St Cuthbert Mayne RC High School what "imperious" meant. I blustered, but Michelle Ogden came in with a terse and accurate definition. I've carried the scar for nearly a quarter of a century now. I bought the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary on CD-ROM a few years ago (as discussed in these pages in August 2005 - it seems much longer ago), but I found it inadequate to my needs - the C21stD is a mere shadow of my Chambers English Dictionary from ~1990. For Christmas 2006 I received the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, with CD-ROM, a great improvement on C21stD. My appetite was whetted and for Christmas 2007 I received the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ("contains all the vocabulary in general English worldwide from 1700 to the present day, plus vocabulary from the Bible and Shakespeare"). You take things for granted for decades , but when, for whatever reason, you start examining them in detail, you realise that you didn't understand them nearly as well as you thought you did (if it all). Recently I've been become concerned about the exact meanings of various common (and perhaps not so common) prefixes derived from Greek and Latin that are such a useful and ubiquitous element of so many of the words of our language. Condemn, connect, confuse, cislunar, translunar, cryptography, metastable, paranormal, pseudoscientific, quasielastic. I know what the words mean, but what exactly do the elements mean. For instance, the Trans-Siberian Railway goes across Siberia, but translunar space is beyond the Moon just as a transhumanism is beyond a human (in whatever sense). Across/beyond. Yes, there are linked concepts (there we go again!), but it's obvious that they ought to represented by the word (whatever languages are, they are slippery beasts). SOED has helped me with coming to grips with a problem I didn't even know I had, but this site is, I think, going to help even English Language Root Search - PrefixSuffix.com. But the truth is that after four months of using SOED, it's clear to me that it doesn't fully meet all my requirements. I need more words, fuller etymologies, a much wider range of quotations. I think for Christmas 2008 I am going to request for the Oxford English Dictionary itself.

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Now Then! Now Then!

What in the name of living buggeration is Carol Thatcher wearing on The Apprentice: You're Fired!? Not only is she wearing a Jimmy Saville blouson, not only has she got Jimmy Saville hair, she appears to have had plastic surgery to look like Jimmy Saville. I think she is even wearing his jewellery. What's going on? With Sir James pretty much retired these days, has she identified a potential vacancy in the hierarchy of the nation's affection?

Thinking About the Immortality of the Crab

So that's what I've been doing all these years.

I really think I ought to move to Buenos Aires, learn Spanish and pretend to the Twenty-First century Jorge Luis Borges. Well at least I now know what the title of the novel (or, perhaps, in homage to Borges, it ought rather to be a collection of short stories or even a single short story) I will write there will be. (Many thanks to the estimable Greg Williams at the WikiWorld Project for the marvellous cartoon.)

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Hanging One More Decade on the Line

There is a Woody Allen film, Husbands and Wives, I think, in which a birthday party is thrown for minor character, the brother of one of the protagonists, something of a wastrel. During his speech, the character opines that "The one good thing about turning 50 is that you don't have to do it again."

 

At least that is one is how I remember the line, although Google seems strangely silent on the matter.

 

It's probably nearly fifteen years since I saw the film, but that line has stayed with me. It's also true of 40.

Got Posy Simmonds's Literary Life and Tamara Drewe. Superb stuff. Went to Chez Bruce for dinner. Superb stuff. I had a share of persillade of snails with polenta, red wine and jabugo ham and rabbit schnitzel with fried quail’s eggs, anchovies and capers followed by calf’s liver with a sweetbread, bacon and rosemary crust, venetian style onions, potato gnocchi followed by crème brûlée (I think - things get hazy about this point). Margaret from The Apprentice was there and now I want to live by Wandsworth Common. Perhaps when I am 50...

By Any Other Name

What's in a name? Our reputation, for a start | comment | EducationGuardian.co.uk

Buckingham Chilterns University College, which had a certain ring to it is now called Buckinghamshire New University (known as Bucks New University), which doesn't. Curiously, Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham (an institution discussed here in a recent post) spends most of the above article complaining about the decision of the Privy Council to allow Bath Spa University College to rename itself Bath Spa University on the grounds that "the confusion of names can only obscure Bath's reputation for world-class research excellence", presumably on the grounds that he can't complain about the confusion of names between the University of Buckingham and Buckinghamshire New University obscuring Buckingham's reputation for world-class research excellence because it doesn't have one.

Nevertheless, the names of many of new universities are offensively stupid. Take the University of Central Lancashire (I wish someone would - Boom! Boom!). At least it has been called that since it gained university status in 1992, but it is an ungainly name. It should have been the University of Preston or, better, Harris University. There are rumours of a name change, but really, as a rule of thumb, stick to what you've got even if what've you got isn't ideal. Changing a name creates confusion and an institution grows into a name over the years and decades. The thing is to get it right in the  first place (not that hard really).

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Great Minds Think Alike

In this case my mind. See this and this. At least I am consistent (perhaps a little too consistent!), but I find it slightly disturbing that I have absolutely no memory of making the earlier post. Only slightly disturbing. There is only so much memory one can assign to remembering replies to blog posts. John Gribbin mentioned the block universe on the generally actually not that bad (for Radio 4 6:30 comedy slot values of "generally actually not that bad") The Museum of Curiosity on Wednesday night. (Why does John Lloyd refer to himself as Professor of Ignorance at the University of Buckingham? The audience treat the University of Buckingham part as a joke. But Buckingham isn't intrinsically funny in the way that, say, Hull is and these days there is a university of practically anywhere. But, of course, there has been a University of Buckingham since 1976. Is Lloyd is making some sly dig at the U of B as a degree mill/retirement home for superannuated Libertarians and antediluvian hangers-and-floggers? Or am I missing something?) Of course, time and space are pretty much muddled together in an Einsteinian universe and ever since I read Gregory Benford's Timescape in 1987 I've been aware that last year is a point in space. Perhaps the fact that there are (in some sense - perhaps) me's out there forever responding to ReadySteadyBlog posts of reading rates will save me from having to remember that I have already posted the same thought twice. Humh... Perhaps we are dangerously close to Sue Blackmore territory here...

Cringely's Law

I read Robert Cringely's latest column and I have to admit to being less than impressed with it for a number of reasons:  I, Cringely . The Pulpit . War of the Worlds | PBS his thesis is that while Moore's law etc... might double every 2 years, the rate of "adoption" of new technologies is a generation - i.e. 25-30 years.

An example from his article brings up why I think he is demonstrably wrong: "Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I'm just too damned old."

In an old British word: Bollocks.

Ok, so Robert is somewhat older than me, 15 years in fact (more than I thought actually), but I know quite a lot of people who have no problem with text messaging.  The issue is not the age of the users but the way in which the adoption happens.

I don't see my 77 year old mother struggling too much with her new digital camera and, in fact, in the last 30 years she's had lots of film cameras which she has struggled with a lot more.  Likewise she has had problems converting from an electric typewriter to a Word Processor, but she's managed.  Taking the digital camera as an example, we have a great technology which has, in about a decade pretty much displaced the previous technology completely.  Cassette tape?  I was at Brunch yesterday where a woman in her mid-40s said she was going home to make a CD for a friend.  This is radical adoption of new technologies which were pretty much unheard of a 15 years ago, let alone 30.  I was trying to work with multimedia on PCs 15 years ago and it was something of a non-starter, the memory and performance requirements alone made it impractical.

Tivo's and similar technologies are radically changing the nature of TV and how we watch it and that's happened in the last 5-10 years.

Consider this.  In the last 30 years, the default system for listening to music has gone from Vinyl, to Cassette, to MiniDisk to CD to MP3.  That's 30 years of change after 60 years of Vinyl.

Scary huh?

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The Mystery of Ms T

If things weren't going badly enough, what with my persistent virus-like symptoms (and we all know what that means) and the collapse of the global economy, Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y is on the Orange Prize longlist: Eve's Alexandria: The Orange Prize, 2008

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Not Even Wrong

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

How I chortled! I was turned on to anti-stringism by Cosma, who pointed at Peter Woit's legendary blog. OK, anti-stringism is not the equivalent of denying climate change or promoting Intelligent Design, but is it in the same class as such orthodox heterodoxies as Mike Disney's cosmological scepticism, Hoyle's steady state theory, Chip Arp's non-cosmological redshifts or Woolfson's 'Capture Theory'? It certainly has something in common with Disney's objections to cosmology (that cosmological observations are very difficult to make and that we are overinterpreting the few we have). It can be argued that it is not anti-stringism that has to provide any evidence about the robustness of string theory. Even if string theory were the only theory in towwn (which it isn't), it's lack of an empirical basis would still be grounds for deep scepticism. Of course, the niggling feeling at the back of my mind is that the fear that I am missing the point. There is no reason to suppose that the universe will be kind eniogh to offer up a theory of everything that is empirically verifiable. String theory might be as good as we can get, but I personally am hardly in a position to say one way or the other.

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Sanctuary

Amazon.co.uk: Anathem: Neal Stephenson: Books
Here is another brilliantly original novel from the cult author of "Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon".Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.

From SOED

secular /0ˈsɛkjʊlə/ adjective & noun. ME.
[ORIGIN In branch I from Old French seculer (mod. séculier) from Latin saecularis, from saeculum generation, age, in Christian Latin the world (esp. as opp. to the Church); in branch II immed. from Latin saecularis: see -ar¹.]

We cannot, of course, necessarily take any of this at face value. This could all well be a Stephensonian  jest.  We might be in a Wolfean post-apocalyptic world. The 3,400 year-old monastery (so perhaps founded ~1400 BCE; this doesn't seem to obviously fit with a Biblical timeline: it could related to a dating of the Exodus, but the novel might be set in the future) could be the redoubt of the Societas Eruditorum. More likely, we are in (some version of) the Metaverse and time and space are not quite what they might seem at first.

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The Economics of Publishing I

In The Year of Henry James, David Lodge states that he was advanced £75 for his first novel, The Picturegoers in 1960 and contrasts with a claimed average advance for a first novel in the early 2000s of £5000 and the greater pressures of expectation from publisher that such a large advance brings with it.

£75 corresponds to £1,192.77 using the retail price index or £2,767.75 using average earnings. But are we comparing like with like? Lodge's advance was for the hardback. £2700 with a 10% royalty on £18 a copy corresponds to 1500 copies, which doesn't sound too far off the number of copies of a first novel that might be printed. But today it is unusual to issue a first novel in hardback. The £5000 would be for a paperback and quite possibly for a two book deal. A 10% royalty on £7 a copy corresponds to 7000 copies, which also seems about right (and it might be half that number of copies in actuality) - books are an elastic commodity.

I seem to recall a period when the price of books went up much more rapidly than inflation. But then it stopped and then haven't gone up much since. This must in part be because of commercial pressures (Amazon, 3-for-2s), but I also wonder how much of it is because it is cheaper to produce books in the 2000s than it was in the 1960s. Books were very expensive in the Edwardian period and writers could make very good livings by selling tiny numbers of copies. But by 1960, the relative price of books had fallen. The interesting question is when were books at their relative cheapest? My guess is that they are relatively much cheaper in 2008 than in 1988, but how does this compare to 1958? And how do the economic factors affect the decisions of publishers to take the risk of publishing unknown writers taking into account the fact that publishing in the 1960s was still (to a certain extent) a gentleman's club?

An Honest Crust

Andrew Crumey Interview « Asylum

Money quote: "Apart from the 3-year award I’ve been living on, I earn an honest crust through book reviewing and teaching creative writing."

I make no comment.

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Don't Give Up the Day Job

To the Soho Theatre on Wednesday night for the Comedy Project. Well, it was a change and it was priced to sell. The two pieces turned out to be the performance of a sitcom, Dawlish Road, by James Pearson followed by a dramatised reading of a radio script, XS Baggage, by Teresa Jennings.

Probably the best that can be said about Dawlish Road is that the acting was worse than the script. To be fair, that might be because the actors only had limited rehearsal time. A well-acted version of the script on video with proper sets and slick cuts would have worked much better. But the writer made a number of schoolboy errors

• house share sitcoms have been done to death - find a more interesting sit
• there were too many characters - three or four main characters is plenty (and keep walk-ons to a minimum)
• if you're a bloke, it's probably not a good idea to have four female main characters
• too many of the characters are cliches
• Janet Street-Porter
• sex line worker
• slacker
• landlord who is always just popping round
• swearing itself isn't funny and constant repetition doesn't make it funny
• have a plot that makes sense (why didn't Hannah turn up for her birthday party?)
• have a climax that is (a) a climax; (b) funny (I suspect that there are at least five more episodes of Dawlish Road in Mr Pearson's drawer).

I can't say I laughed and the audience barely managed to raise a titter, which, given the fact that the attendance for the second piece was significantly less than that for the first half suggests that the space was papered with the chums of the actor and writer, is slightly concerning. But there were, if not exactly jokes, at least comic ideas that could be worked on.

Nothing is wasted on a writer. British Grove is about a man trying to write a sitcom, so at least after last night I've got another chapter sorted.

I was tempted to dash for the hills, but I wanted to get my money's worth and, fortified by a large glass of red, stayed for the second half. This was much better. Better script (once I had grasped the conceit), better acted, better directed (by Kirstie Bennett). I suppose there are some consolations of maturity.

Next Wednesday features I Hate My Sister by Susan Earl (who was there - I wouldn't have said she was 5'8"), currently of the Aero hot chocolate advert, lately of Hardware. She at least has a proven track record. What is not clear to me is how the Comedy Project pieces are chosen. There was some suggestion that the producers of the pieces might pay. That makes sense. Theatre and film are, by their nature, expensive and it is thus often necessary for the upfront financial risk to be shared. The consequence of that is that theatre and film more often has a "vanity" aspect to it than publishing. But that is the nature of the beast and not something over which we should necessarily criticise the producers.         

Third Foundation

The new issue of Foundation arrived the other day, Foundation 101, the first issue to edited by the estimable Graham Sleight. Foundation has had the same cover design since issue 38 (Winter 1986-87).  Before that the cover design had remained pretty much unchanged since the first issue. I like the sense of historical continuity one gets from the design of journals remaining unchanged for decades. I recall being in St Anne's College library and looking at the sets of the Journal of Roman Studies and the Journal of Hellenic Studies. The nature and quality of the internal typography might oscillate, driven by the continually changing vagaries of typesetting technology (not that there has been any excuse for that since TeX became widely available in the mid-80s), but the external cover - what one sees elegantly arraigned on one's bookshelf - has remained a beacon of constancy in a chaotic world.

No more for Foundation. The journal has begun a new century with a new look. Unfortunately it is a look straight out of the decade that taste forgot. The cover looks like it comes from roundabout the time of WordPerfect 5.1. The problem is that have changed the design, we are stuck with it now for the best part of a decade. It would look even worse on the shelves if it were changed too soon.

The interior design isn't too bad. Can't say the same about the article on Moonbase 3, which read like a lower second class undergraduate essay and managed to say almost nothing of interest (certainly less than the Wikipedia article). I haven't seen Moonbase 3 since 1973 (when I was 5), but it would seem to me that at least  the programme could be profitably compared with 2001: a Space Odyssey, a film that a very long shadow into the 1970s as well as UFO and Space: 1999, both of which feature moonbases and both of which had production designs very heavily influenced by 2001, Doomwatch, Nigel Calder's 1978 documentary series Spaceships of the Mind and, of course, Star Cops, a hard sf series set on a moonbase. To be fair, the author does mention most of these programmes, but it's a question of saying something interesting about the connections. Which might be, for  instance, that 1960s technophilia took a long time to be killed off by the oil crisis (heck, for some of us it has never quite died) and that Moonbase 3 with Space:1999 production values would have been very interesting (if impossible!).

 

Transterrestrial Musings - In Wrong Again Shocker

The Real Space Race - Transterrestrial Musings

One of the quotes that had me actually giggling:  "In a true competition for transporting astronauts to low earth orbit, NASA would be beaten hands-down by SpaceX at this stage in the game."

Yeah, so a company who have yet to successfully orbit anything, let alone people and bring them back, is ahead of an organisation which has, more or less, been doing this for over 45 years...

I run a really amazingly successful phone software company - we're beating everybody with our concept.  We just haven't launched or finished it yet.

Seesh.

And Rand Simberg wonders why people don't take him seriously...

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The Triumph of Superior Technology

I can't see this playing well in the wingnutosphere: US aviation deal boosts UK jobs . What are the chances, in an election year, of the decision being overturned? But if Boening want to sell aircraft perhaps they should concentrate on building ones people want to buy.

The Gift of Sound and Vision

wotzon.gif (GIF Image, 1024x970 pixels) - Scaled (69%)

Seen via the Weasel.

Some points to note

• the sound and vision were broadcast on different frequencies. Does this fit in with Howards Waldrop's short story "Mr Goober's Show"?
• "From Monday, 6th September, a special film transmission intended for the Industry only will given from 11 a.m. to 12 daily." Note the capitalisation of "Industry". What was this special film transmission? Some kind of test card or engineering information? It sounds more interesting than the actual programmes.
• all the programmes seem very short. "Play Parade" seems to be the longest at 30 minutes. We only get 5 minutes of the Women's League of Health and Beauty at a time. Wads this a technical limitation?  Was it impossible to run the cameras for more than a few minutes without a valve blowing?
• why 4.5 and not 4.30?
• Thursday's talk on advertising sounds interesting, but it is only ten minutes long. Topiary on Monday got 15 minutes (was it a studio demonstration?). We can only speculate on how long "Risotto" was or even whether it was a cooking demonstration or a dramatic/musical piece.

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Primary Colours

I see that Frank Field is floating the idea of US-style primaries in the UK. (I am depressed to discover that Freedland is only a year older than me.) I remember Des Wilson floating this idea in So You Want to Be Prime Minister? I can't remember why Des thought it would be a good idea. It's not as though electoral participation is high in the US, although it has plunged in recent years in the UK. It is possible that party political participation is higher in the US. Perhaps that was why Wilson was advocating it. Thinking about it, I seem to recall that he considered primaries more democratic because of the capability for ordinary voters to influence candidate selection directly. Of course, in most countries, including the US, political parties are state-funded. That couldn't happen here, but it would eliminate the absurd funding scandals we have witnessed over the last few years. If it did happen though it would be possible to register as a Labour Party member either for free or on the payment of a nominal fee, £5 or £10. You then be able to vote in the party primaries for council candidates and PPCs. It's not an absurd idea; perhaps it would help to increase participation. At the moment, only the cabal (local and national) gets to decide who can stand as a candidate. What I would like to know is whether Field and Wilson were channelling the same idea that is continually floating around the UK political policy wonkosphere or whether this is a case of independent reinvention.

A Second Earth in Our Solar System

A Second Earth in Our Solar System

All very Firefly if you ask me.

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Today's Retro Future

By the year 2000, Mintel suggests that small pocket phones "will be ascommon as Walkmans... " People would have to develop a whole news ocial code... You could not, for example, take calls in the middle of a crowded restaurant.  Indeed, the potential nuisance effect of pocket phones (which, of course, exist at the moment, but are clumsy and extremely expensive) is enormous, though perhaps no more so than the nuisance of the transistor radio. Besides, the social value of being able to make a phone call at any time will also be extremely large.
The Guardian, May 6 1986

Well, you can't get everything right...

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Do the Right Thing

Absolutely, incredibly, utterly wrong! | Anatole Kaletsky - Times Online

Well, no, actually. Kaletsky fails to make the crucial point that banks are not like other businesses and that the failure of the Rock would have been cataclysmic both economically (it would, in effect, have destroyed the UK banking sector because the Bank of England's credibility as lender of last resort (backed by the Treasury) would have been removed, which would cast doubt on the stability of other mortgage banks heavily exposed to subprime debt and probably led to the failure of other banks such as the Alliance and Leicester and Bradford and Bingley; it would also have shattered the reputation of the golden circle of the British banking club - the chief executives of the large retail banks didn't go to the Governor of the Bank of England with a joint rescue plan) and politically (first UK bank to fail since the C19th, queues around the block at the A&L and the B&B like in some banana republic, tens of thousands of (medium to large) savers seriously out of pocket).

Darling has finally done what the Razor urged him to do in November. This ought to cost Darling his job; I can only hope that it doesn't cost Brown his job. It's like going to the dentist: an ounce of courage now will save a pound of grief later. Nationialising in the autumn would have been politically unpalatable, but at least it would have demonstrated boldness and decisiveness and it would have played well in the Labour heartlands (I know, I know). We've ended up with something close to the worst possible scenario. I fear this is Labour's Black Wednesday, but I take heart from the fact that only once in the postwar period (in 1970) has a government with a working majority been replaced overnight by a government of the opposite political complexion. And Labour still has that photograph of Cameron at the Bullingdon Club...   

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Microsoft in Good Software Shock!

I'm actually a reasonably big fan of Microsoft. They do, after all, in one way or another, account for a reasonable chunk of the family household, so I have to be nice.

   

That said, their software can be frustrating and don't get me started on Vista. However, praise where praise is due. Office 2007 doesn't suck as much as I thought it did. Ok, getting used to the Ribbon took a few minutes (but only a few) and actually most of it has turned out to be pretty intuitive once I stopped trying to find the ALT menus. The layout is clear and the new graphics pleasant to look at.

 

But what has impressed is places that have made me sit back from the keyboard and go, "Whoa! Dude. Cool." Well, maybe not, I'm English and from the home counties but you get the point.

 

The first WDC moment was when I found the OneNote tab in Outlook. Right Click on a calendar appointment in Outlook and it offers the option to go to OneNote. Selecting the option takes you to a prepared OneNote form ready for meeting minutes. Nice. Plus I've started to really get used to OneNote. It's a well thought out application that actually has moved me, to a certain extent away from the huge number of note books I used to use. It's increased my follow up productivity from Mobile World Congress a few thousand percent because I can cross reference my meeting Notes with contacts and add contact notes into OneNote and then put them in the client notes section on OneNote.

Nice.

 

Second: I was taking notes in meetings and clicked on the "Make Outlook Task" button. This didn't really work in OneNote 2003, but here – BANG – task appears in Outlook preformatted and including links to the original OneNote pages. Oh joy, where has that feature been all my life? Now I can rapidly and in meetings get the actions out to people from the same application.

 

The third happened a few minutes before writing this post. I was completing some notes and used Right Click on the notes to see if I could send to somebody by email (you can't, it's a Ribbon Button next to the Outlook task button) but I was given a "Blog This" option. So, I opened a new tab in my personal OneNote folders, clicked, was given the choice of my Blog Accounts and here it is.

 

Ohhh… and look, there's a little word count at the bottom of the screen. So here's to 500 words eh?

 

This might not be a shock to the Apple types out there, I understand from some Apple types I know that Office 2008 for Mac is seriously nice. Anyway, credit where credit is due. Office 2007 works. Kudos. Vista… well, there's always Service Pack 2…

Perpetual-Motion Machine

Perepiteia Perpetual-Motion Machine May Actually Do...Something

Er...  what can we say...

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Cheap Fusion?

Is cheap fusion power around the corner? | Samizdata.net

I'll admit that I'm not clear on this.  There are several Fusion options that occur at energy points which are easier to maintain, but the typically have had problems with the Nett energy equation that comes out of it.

There are some interesting links in the thread but I'm interested in any thoughts.

I was once told by somebody (Paul?) that when somebody starts talking about Fusion with no Neutrons they're missing the point.

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