Atomic Razor

No Man is an Island

There is, or was, a black-painted metal spiral staircase that goes from the third floor of the Physics building at Queen Mary, University of London (as it is) to Gallery 273, the tearoom on the second. On the day Mrs Thatcher resigned as prime minister in November 1990, I remember walking either up or down the stairs and feeling as though a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I didn't feel quite like that when the Tories were finally removed from office in 1997, which goes to demonstrate just how much of the psychic oppressiveness of the 1979-1997 Conservative administration came from the charisma of the Hag, as my dad referred to her, herself. 

I wonder how we found out the news back then? There was no BBC news website. Did someone email me as the Weasel did this week? It probably came from the someone hearing it on the radio. Do people still listen to the radio in offices?

So she has been gone now for 22 years and her death leaves me feeling nothing additional to how I felt then. Her weight went then for me. There have other weight to bear since. What I do find sickening is the sheer level hagiographical fawning over the past few days. The death is still the main headline on the BBC news website this morning. She's not going to get any less dead this side of the Singularity. No-one denies that she was a significant and decisive figure. She is probably joint first in the pantheon of post-wat prime ministers with Atlee and ahead of Wilson and Blair. Thatcher after all did not manage to destroy the postwar social-democratic consensus no matter how much she may have wanted to, or damaged and distorted it in trying. But what I find most offensive is this whole pseudo-state funeral. No other postwar prime minister has had such a funeral with the exception of Winston Churchill, how is in a difference class, for all his flaws, to Thatcher. (And the funeral was under a Labour administration.) I imagine all prime ministers are offered such a funeral; all others have had the good taste to turn the offer down. Her acceptance demonstrates her fundamental lack of taste, although I suppose she cared more about making one final grandiose gesture of power and spite to her enemies. Cameron and his cronies are milking it for everything they can. And, yes, I am taking the offence.

So how just important was Thatcher? The answer is both very and not much. "Very" in that a lot of what happened in the 1980s might have gone differently under a different Tory prime minister (the Falklands, the miners' strike, the poll tax, possibly the monetarist experiment) and everything is contingent. "Not much" in that the Conversative Party had adopted neoliberal policies under Heath at the Selsdon Park Hotel in 1970 for that year's election manifesto. Although these were mostly abandoned under Heath, they were clearly in some sense the coming thing in Tory thinking having been around since the 1950s at the IEA and in Hayek's work WWII, drawing, of course, on much nineteenth century thinking (Victorian values). The oil crisis, stagflation and the phase change triggered by living standards reaching a point in which enough people were now middle class to be threatened more by inflation than unemployment meant that any Tory prime minister was likely to be influenced by Nicholas Ridley and similar figures towards neoliberal policies. This change in the economic landscape might partly explain the crisis of Labour/labour: militancy both in the party and trade unions. (I wonder how much of what happened in the 1970s and early 1980s was influenced directly by ripples from the Easterrn block.) So Whitelaw/Healey in the early 1980s probably wouldn't looked very different from Thatcher/Foot. However, the tone would certainly have been different. Had Callaghan gone to the polls in 1978, we might have had a Labour government in the early 1980s and perhaps a kinder, gentler Tory administration under a quasi-wet (Haseltine? Hurd?) in the mid-80s. It is likely that the end of the Cold War, globalisation, the rise of China and the technoeconomic gales from exponentially accelerating ICT would have transformed the world scene, Thatcher or not. But certainly without Thatcher, it is entirely possible that the UK in 2013 might look at lot more like France and Germany (even Italy) in a good way than it does in our timeline.            

All Graphite and Glitter

To BAFTA on Thursday evening for the 11th Annual Economist Innovation Awards. The actual awards, well compered by Tom Standage, were doled out before the dinner allowing the maximum amount for networking (and, even more important, drinking and eating) with the 200 (other) movers and shakers of the global innovation community. I work for Europe's leading science university. We ought to be a mover and shaker of the global innovation community. I had never been to a black tie event before. Perhaps I am finally living the life. At least I managed to tie my bow tie without any problems. I suppose, like learning to fall off a log, once you know how to do it, you never lose the knack. Both the canapes and the actual meal were delicious and my kind of food, although strictly that's my red meat ration used up for about a month. No Ronnie Corbett in the toilets though.   

I suppose if you are The Economist it might make sense to give awards to to recipients such as ESRI, Google and Elon Musk. Elon Musk isn't going to get any prizes for public speaking. I have seen him before speaking on a Tesla video. I don't suppose he'll be losing any sleep about that. You can't deny his energy or the impact he has made several disparate fields of business and technology. I do disagree though with his analysis of the three most important areas to focus research and development effort on. Of course, Musk has the advantage over most of us of being able to choose to spend his own money on whatever he wants to do, which in his case, are energy, networking technologies and space exploration. Personally, I'd choose A(G)I, life extension technologies and (molecular) nanotechnology. I see these as synergystic: life extension technologies, based perhaps on Aubrey de Grey's SENS, might give us the extra few years to crack A(G)I and MNT; MNT might give us nanomedical technologies and the nanocomputers (mechanical, electronic and quantum) needed to provide the raw computing grunt for A(G)I; for A(G)I ultraintelligences, solving the problems of MNT and life extension technologies might be a month's, morning's or moment's work. And, of course, MNT and A(G)I would be helpful in solving the outstanding many problems of sustainable energy, food and water, and space exploration.

I got the chance to chance to have a chat with Salim Ismail of the Singularity University. There is much to be said, from a number of different perspectives, about the Singularity University and the fact that their Global Ambassador was at an Economist event. I would love to get the chance to go to a SingularityU course. Perhaps one day, there will be an Institute of Singularity Studies at Imperial. I do hope that, in the not distant futures, that more funding does become available for singularity-enabling technology whether from high net worth individuals, large corporates, venture capitalists or government agencies. And the very existence of SingularityU might help contribute to bringing that about.

The Register must have been there and picked up on Musk's comments about Hyperloop. I do think that one day we might be able to use nanotechnology to do amazing things with tunnels. Presumably that isn't what Musk has in mind, but it'll be interesting to see exactly what he is proposing. The future might be vactrains and personal autogyros yet.  

A House Divided

Interesting article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the latest New York Review. If you're not a subscriber, you should be. It seems pretty clear that Obama saved the US and probably the world from a depression through the stimulus from 2009. This presidential election shouldn't even be close. It should be 1936. And yet if the Republicans had managed to nominate a charismatic moderate, they would almost certainly be going to win on Tuesday. Of course, the Republican Party does not exactly have an oversupply of charismatic moderates. My tip, if I were a political consultant to them, is that they should find some. The problem for Obama is that he and the White House have been unable to control the narrative over the last few years so that that "stimulus "has become a dirty word like "liberal". But here's the thing: the auto industry isn't just the Big Three, it's an entire ecosystem. And a lot of people who are still in a job working for suppliers to the Big Three, thanks to the stimulus and the rescue of the auto industry are in Rust Belt states. Like Ohio. And will vote for Obama on Tuesday, Which might give Obama Ohio and with it the presidency.

Obama and Romney might not get on, but they are fundamentally alike: Harvard-trained technocrats who spent some of their most formative years overseas. A significant difference is that Romney is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist who refuses to provide an adequate account of his tax affairs. I don't know how much the Democrats have managed to make of that. Certainly no-one is going to be going for a beer with Romney, but Obama is hardly a regular guy.. He might have saved the auto industry, but he doesn't look like the guide of guy who would drive an American car, if he had a choice, or drink a domestic beer. The election is a toss-up because a lot of angry white men look at the president and they don't see themselves when they look at the preseident. As I said back in 2008, Obama represents a cosmopolitan, urban, cerebral America: Smartland, not Heartland. Someone like Clinton might have had the charisma and the background to bridge that divide at least to the extent of a larger lead in the polls. I don't know if there is any such figure who might be able to bridge that gap for the Democrats in 2016 or, indeed, for the Republicans.

And the truth is, as someone said on Sam Wang's blog, the Republicans should stop whining about Nate Silver being biased to the Democrats: 80%-20% is a toss-up. I'm just glad I'm on the 80% side, but I remember my old Call of Cthulhu days. Of course, it Sam's right, the odds are more like 98%-99.8% for Obama. I'll take those. It seems there aren't quite enough angry white men who prefer Romney. Perhaps some the angry white men have still got their jobs in the auto sector.

Obama has been a disappointment in many ways. It is ever thus in politics. Without Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, he will be heavily constrained. But the Executive Branch still wields enormous power in the US System and perhaps he might wield more freely without the concern of re-election. And we can hope for more payoffs from initiatives begun in the first term. Take, for instance, electrofuels from ARPA-E. Perhaps there is some hope after all.         

Fiddling Small Change

Which, of course, the Galactibanks refuse to deal in.

I recently read Life, the Universe and Everything. It's not very good, is it? OK, the bistromatics bit is quite fun, although the idea is more fun than the implementation in the nove and I know JRB liked the bit about flying. Was there a dramatisation of he bistro on The South Bank Show programme about Adams. I'm pretty sure I've seen it somewhere and The South Bank Show definitely had the electric monk. It seems clear that Adams did pretty much run out of ideas by the early 1980s. We can, I think, be glad that there wasn't a second tv series HHGG based on LtUE, although one based on the second radio series would have been (would still be) wonderful (perhaps BBC4 could do one). I can't say I'm terribly inspired to read the last two HHGG novels (I picked up the three in a charity shop in Brighton recently), but they are very short. And there is still that play I want to write about Adams (or an Adams-like character) locked up in a hotel with his publisher (Sonny Mehta or a Sonny Mehta-like character) trying to get his novel finished. I suppose I had plough on with the Adams, especially as it's nearly November and thu, for me, the Time of Short Books for the last two months of the year.

You'll Believe a Bird Can Fly

I came across this the other day. Which I thought was pretty impressive. The birds think it's a real bird. And then I came across this, which, if anything, I thought, was even more impressive. In fact, I suddenly felt as I were living in the future and I almost burst into tears in the middle of the office. I couldn't find a UK supplier of the Avitron, although it appears to be available in France for €79. Both it and the SmasrtBird have been around for a little while now (the TED talk was last year), so I am surprised that there hasn't been more of a buzz about these. Perhaps I am just not looking in the right places. Ornithopters have quite a long history, It may also be that I haven't been paying enough attention.

In Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach, they talk of an example of using a form to machine learning, policy search of reinforcement learning, for a system to learn to perform flips with a model helicoptor based on just four minutes of flying by a human expert. This was a problem that had stubbornly resisted the mathematical analytical approaches of traditional control theory. I don't if either Avitron or SmartBird use this kind of technique, but it is hard to believe that something won't come of both this and ornithopters. There is obviously much that can be done in making the form of flight even bird-like, improving take-off and landing and increasing the amount of intelligence the ornithopter has. I have to admit that I for one am not looking forward to giant intelligent dragonfly ornithopters appearing in our skies.

One might ask why one would want to do this at all. After all, we already have birds and other flying animals that are far more wondrous and subtle than these crude simulacra. For the same reason that we have model helicopters or chess programs; because it is an interesting thing to do. And they tell us something about the world and make us appreciate even more the genius of evolution in producing such magical creatures. And we don't know for how long our ornithopters might stay so crude. There might come a day, perhaps in the not that far future, when I, for one, will be welcoming our new ornithopter overlords.   

And He's Back in the Room

I can't believe it's almost two and a half years since my last post. And people wonder why I am depressed. 1 January 2010. David Tennant was still the Doctor on 1 January 2010. Gordon Brown was still prime minister.

I have been been feeling the urge for a few weeks. I know I have to get back into the Zone. I reactivated the TypePad account a couple of weeks as it had been suspended back in 2010 because my credit card had expired. So at least I haven't been paying for it all this time and TypePad didn't delete the account. The other day the Weasel said that he had been reading some of the old entries and said that I should write more. He's right.  

And 1 January 2010 is before the last time I went to Arvon. Off to Moniack Mhor on Monday, jetting off from Gatwick, so don't have to worry about landslides on the railway line. Just hoping that the other participants manage to make it. Apparently the temperature is going to be 6^oC on Monday. At least that's up from the 5^oC forecast for Sunday. I have packed my hat, gloves and scarf. So I might not be doing much walking. All the more time for writing. I am going on a retreat like last time at The Hurst in Shropshire. The problem with Arvon is that it is a sprint not a marathon. It's only four days, five nights. My plan is to average 2,000 words a day, 10,000 words for the week. The thing is that is only about 10% of my novel. I have probably about 35,000 at the moment. So I still won't be halfway through. But at least it will be a boost. Of course, keeping it up, along with all the other stuff, when I get back to the real world won't be easy. 55,000 words in six months. That's barely more than what NaNoWriMo asks for in 30 days. Well, indeed. And there's the Razor and the Doctor Who reviews.

I'll go on.  

Tens for the Tens: Politics

A ++Politics might be good. But we're apes with a thin veneer of language-based reasoning smeared on top. Some political systems are better that others, but they all involve politicians (or people who become politicians when they get inside the system).

Anyway, in the seventeen UK general elections since 1945, only one (1970) has involved a party of one political stripe with a working majority being replaced by a party of the opposite political stripe with a working majority. Of the two elections most like the 2010 one, in 1964 Labour was returned with a small working majority, and in 1992 the Tories were returned with a small working majority. My gut feeling is that Cameron will become PM this year, but likely of a minority government or with a small majority that could be eaten away at by-elections thus opening up the possibility that his stay in power might not be an extended one (with Hague becoming Leader again in the Australian style).

But, of course, four months is a long time in politics. If Labour (i.e. Peter Mandelson) can run and effective campaign - if it can make something of the Eton/Bullingdon Club/braying Tory Boy images - and that something does backfire, if some squalid scandal slithers out of the fetid pit of Cameron's or Osborne's past, if Brown can land a couple of punches on Cameron in the debates (and we haven't seen televised debates in a UK GE before, so their impact is unpredictable - if unlikely, in the final analysis, to be actually that significant), if enough voters still just don't trust the Tories (as they didn't Labour in 1992), maybe Brown could just sneak back in.

That would make 2010-2015 a rerun of 1992-1997 unless Something Happened. It is very difficult for a party to reinvent itself in power and it might preferable for Labour to lose now and perhaps under Alan Johnson or, more likely, James Purnell (an apparatchik, but of the NuLab apparatchiks, probably the one who possesses the closest approximation to an actual human personality, and certainly plausible as an all-purpose Cameron clone) reinvent itself as some kind of (radical, progressive) social democratic party for the Twenty-First Century. Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. But, the truth, it that one would still always prefer to have one's own team in power.

Cameron in power might cover himself with some Red Tory/Blue-Green rhetoric, but he will likely be in practice, a by-the-numbers social authoritarian/economic neoliberal. His mantra will be: (a) privatise what you can privatise (so the banks will sold for a song to private equity investors); (b) outsource what you can't privatise; (c) managerialise what you can't outsource. After thirteen years, being a public servant over the next half-decade might not be a terribly comfortable situation to be in. (As Irvine Walsh might put it, if you liked New Labour, you'll love the Tories!)

If Cameron is elected, the next few years are likely to be as dominated by the constitutional crisis as they are by the economy. Scotland could vote for independence as early as this November, although probably more likely in 2011 (assuming the Nats win a majority in the Scottish election that year). It's possibly that some - many? - Tories might look favourably upon the prospect of an England with a perpetual Conservative majority. But there is the issue of Faslane. Extraterritoriality seems a doubtful option. I suspect that Cameron would try and cut a deal offering the Scots full home rule expect for defence, foreign affairs and certain macroeconomic issues. But would this be enough for Wee Eck?

But all of this is politics more or less as usual. With the failure of the economic system and the failure of the political system to deal with it as well as its failure to deal issues such as climate change (consider the debacle of Copenhagen), we desperately need something fresh. Where is the new thinking (on the Left) going to come from? Will be be forced to dust off The State We're In? I suppose it would be a start. But in America, we have the very real prospect of a Palin candidacy in 2012. The 80s were the decade of Thatcher and Reagen and the 2000s the decade of Bush and Blair. Things may have to get worse - much worse - before they can get better.

Tens for the Tens: Introduction

Over the next few days, I will be presenting my Tens for the Tens - ten cultural/economic and ten technological/scientific trends or factors (defined broadly) that I think will be important in the 2010s. But in this post, I want to discuss certain topics that I won't, for various reasons, as I will explain, be discussing directly later.

Molecular Nanotechnology

We have an existence for the self-replicating nanomachine - the biological cell. We have an existance proof for the nanofactory - a device that can produce macroscopic objects out of dirt, water, air and sunlight over a period of hours to years (a tree, for instance). Clearly MNT is a hard problem. I do think that in ten years we will be able to point to systems and say that they are unambiguous MNT, but although, as Charlie has recently pointed out K. Eric Drexler pointing out, more MNT-related  work is going on than you might think, I don't think we'll have nanomachines, much less personal nanofactories by 2020 (not least because PNFs are WMDs). I do still think that my original timetable for NMT (and AGI) that the decade 2005-2015 would be the decade of research and 2015-2025 the decade of innovation, when we will see the first NMT (AGI) products come to market holds good. I think it will be the 2025-2035 period when things become potentially interesting.    

Artificial General Intelligence

As I.J. Good said "the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." There is now quite a number of active AGI groups proposing different approaches to the problem and there does seem to be an increase in interest from mainstream researchers and funding bodies. Given that sheep-level AGI would have many interesting applications, much less cat/dog-level AGI or chimp-level AGI (and that leaves aside crow-level AGI, octopus-level AGI, ant/bee-level AGI and (weird) cybernetic AGI), I do think we will see significant investment in this area over the next decade. With NMT, one feels that it is such a hard problem that it will require hundreds of research groups each with dozen of members working for many years to make much in the way of progress, but with AGI , there is always the niggling feeling that it could be cracked by a couple of people in a garage. Or more likely twenty people at JCB. If we do see human-level AGI, we will proceed directly to the Singularity, we will not pass Go, we will not collect £200 and all bets will be off. (There is an argument that it would cost a great deal to train a human-level AGI. Perhaps. But among the first things that you would want the AGI to be capable of would be recursive self-improvement, both at a hardware and software level. Although we can imagine AGIs that as befuddled in most matters as most humans, I think that is unnecessarily mysterian to assume that that is the only possible kind of AGI ("Man, we won't even be able to talk to those crazy AGIs, and they're gonna be so slooowww...") and they wouldn't necessarily stay like that for very long. We could have a bizarre stage of "child" AGI for a few years before Moore's law and recursive self-improvement kicksin . Now, that might would be an interesting time.)

Transhumanism

As Julian Huxley said "'I believe in transhumanism': once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny." I think it is difficult to argue with that sentiments. OK, people do argue with them, but I think they are wrong. I rather like the H+ symbol. It has a pleasantly retro (not steampunk) feel to it. It reminds me of the GE logo. It would I think work well as a lapel bade, although perhaps that is too close a Ayn Rand dollar lapel badge - or an American flag. I think the 10s could the decade in which transhumanism moves into the mainstream, much as feminism emerged in the 1960s. Transhumanism and singularitarianism are, and have been for millennia, deeply embedded in the human project and Francis Fukuyama described transhumanism as the "World's Most Dangerous Idea" in the pages of Foreign Policy in 2004. These ideas aren't going to go away. Which is the point. Transhumanism is not a single idea, it is a label applied to a vast complex of sometimes contradictory ideas. If we want transhumanism to become more mainstream (i.e. to have more influence on the policy on the polity and for there to be more funding for transhumanist projects), we might want to find a different name or at least a way of deemphasising the "self-indulgent, uncontrolled power-fantasies" of transhumanism. It really is about a lot more than that.

The Technological Singularity

As Ludwig Wittgenstein said "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence." The nature of accelerating change is that things change slowly until suddenly they change very quickly (my mum has just bought a second hard disk recorder so that the telly in the dining room now has one). The Singularity might be closer than we think. And perhaps this will be the decade that the idea of the Singularity enters public consciousness. Belle de Jour is already hip to it. Ten years from now, the Singularity might be the seen as the number one issue facing humanity. Perhaps. I don't think there will be a cabinet-level Department for the Singularity, but there might be a Institute for Singularity Science at Imperial College. I still think 2035-2045 is a more likely timeframe (perhaps I would, wouldn't I?), but I am prepared to surprised.

Black Swans

The dotcom crash, 911, the Credit Crunch are all about Level 6 Black Swans. I do think there will be a Level 8 (WWI-level) Black Swan in the 10s. I just don't know what it will be. Those of us who have lived in the West over the last 60 years have lived in an exceptional time and place. It has not always been like this and it is not like this for the vast majority of people on the planet. And consider that middle class white boys were conscripted and shipped off by the US and Australian governments to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, so it did happen here. There could be something nasty lurking out a few years in the future. Consider 1914 (from 1909). A few months ago, the Weasel asked me for a list of Black Swans and these were the ones I came up with off the top of my head in a few minutes, but I am sure there are (many) others.

1. major terrorist attack. One or two orders of magnitude bigger than 911. Possibly a nuclear attack on London or New York from a Pakistani nuke or possibly a Russian Red Mercury bomb. What happens if hafnium bombs are feasible? This will followed by an invasion of Pakistan and the reintroduction of conscription to find an endless war in the mountains of central Asia. Possibly also a major recession/depression associated with the attack as after 911 and extreme civil liberties restrictions. So basically a Super 911.

2. massive climate-change induced crop failures. Mass famines in Africa and Asia. Huge food price rises. Food riots in the West. Depression.

3. nuclear strike. Indo-Pak, Iran-Israel, North Korea-South Korea. Leads to all sorts of kerfuffle and an endless war. Depression.

4. Double dip depression. China implodes under the weight of its internal contradictions. Taiwan declares independence. Rump of China attempts to invade Taiwan. War with the West. Goes nuclear (at least tactically so). Endless war. Depression.

5. Wars with or between various countries. Russia. India-China. Indonesia-Australia. When I was at Siemens, one of my colleagues was ex-New Zealand Army. I asked him what scenarios that had trained for when during the Cold War, expecting him to say defending New Zealand air force and naval bases against Spetsnaz attack during WWIII. We said help the Australians when the Indonesians invade. Population and environmental pressures could lead to large scale population movements. Australia is large and empty and could be very tempting to a beleaguered Indonesian regime. Wars can be driven by combinations of the usual population-environmental-energy-food-terrorism factors. Depression.

6. Global pandemic. H5N1. Super-AIDS. Mad Cow Disease. Possibly cooked up by a disgruntled postdoc in a basement somewhere. Leads to endless war. Depression.

7. North Atlantic Drift turns off. European society grinds to a halt. Depression.

8. Cat 6 Hurricane. Direct hit on Miami. Millions dead. Followed days later by Tokyo earthquake. Insurance system is the foundation of the capitalist system - far more important than banks. Global insurance systems implodes. Depression. War.

9. Tunguska-type Event leads to (full scale) thermonuclear exchange.

10. Some disruptive technology having unexpected consequences. Perhaps quantum computers or some kind of cat/chimp-level AGI or nanotech disrupting the established raw materials-manufacturing-retail cycle. And remember that a Personal Nanofactory is a WMD.

11. Singularity (soft or hard) (I don't expect this before, say, 2035).

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Tags: TensfortheTens

I Wish to Complain About This Poll

The Alpha Course has a new poster. You might have seen it. I suspect that it was inspired that atheist bus advert. The poster looks this

God exists...

* No

* Yes

* Probably

In other words, it looks like a poll. And if you to the Alpha Course website, there it is on the front page and it is indeed a poll. Leaving aside the rhetorical slight of hand that they've played (compare and contrast Lewis's Trilemma), it struck me that there ought to be some other options. I noticed when I was the eastbound platform of the Piccadilly Line the other day (just round the corner from Alpha Course HQ at Holy Trinity, Brompton), that I was the only person who thinks this. So, in the true James Nicoll style, I suggest that a more meaningful poll would look something like this

God exists...

* No

* Yes

* Probably

* Possibly

* Probably not

* Who is this God person anyway?

* The whole concept of the Christian omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenovelent God is philosophically incoherent and the question is therefore meaningless

* Some other option I will discuss in the comments

* I wish to complain about this poll

A Moore's Law of Space

One definition of Moore's Law is that the amount of computing power per constant currency unit doubles every Moore's Law period, where a Moore's Law period is typically taken to be between 18 and 24 months.

Now consider the cost in constant currency units per unit mass in Low Earth Orbit. Now does that figure in 2009 compare with the figure in 1957 or 1983? Has it declined over time? Has the rate of decline been constant? Can any kind of Moore's Law relationship be derived for launch costs? I presume the answer is no on the grounds that if one could, it would well known. Even if the Moore's Law period were 15 or 20 years, all you would have to do is wait long enough for the price to fall to a point where a rich enthusiast could fund a return to the Moon, an expedition to Mars. We might not get there quickly, but we would there get eventually.

Of course, there is no particular reasons to expect a Moore's Law to operate in launch costs. Moore's Law is not a law of nature, it is a law of marketing, and it is driven by the enormous demand for computer-based devices (i.e. devices that use semiconductor technology). There is no end, it seems, to the uses that such devices can be put to, while the uses of LEO are more limited. Furthermore, it happens that semiconductor technology exists in a physics domain where it has been possible to tweak continually production processes and get proportionally greater returns (a linear reduction in the wavelength of light used in the lithographic process will lead to a quadratic increase in the number of components than can be fitted in a given area - to first approximation). Rocketry (and most other technologies) just don't happen to be in that kind of domain (and, perhaps, as people always say, computers won't be for much longer). The development of most technologies is bursty with occasional breakthroughs interspersed with periods of incremental improvements. This seems to the case for rocketry. Which gets me back to favourite point: we should forget about space for the time being and concentrate relentlessly on the technologies that will create the breakthroughs that will allow cheap access to space: NMT and AGI.

Already Banal

What would the Slacker Graduate Student make of Anathem? Well, he (SGS are overwhelmingly male) would say Stephenson has read a couple of Philosophy 101 books and thought to himself "Humh, philosophy has some wild ideas. It would be really cool to write a book about philosophy. But the problem with writing a book about undergraduate, much graduate philosophy students is that I would have to spend years learning philosophy. Also I went on a retreat to a monastery  and although I don't believe in God, monasteries are pretty cool places in all sorts of ways and monks are pretty cool people and it would fun to live in a monastery, complete cut off from the mundane world and spend your time thinking about cool things for years on end, at least if you had beer and sex, OK, they do have beer in monasteries, but definitely no sex.  But the problem is that anyone who does become a monk C21st America has to be pretty pathological. So writing a novel about a monk studying philosophy in C21st America is necessarily very different from the kind of book I want to write - or could, at least without years of research. Of course, I could set in the past - The Name of the Rose! - but bloody Eco spend years studying scholastic philosophy as well as semiotics, so that doesn't help. But, heh, just a minute, there is a tradition of monastic sf - monkpunk! - well, OK, at least one sf novel set in a monastry. And... just a minute... if I set it on a kind of alternative Earth, where that has monastries that are a bit like a cross between the ones we have and Hogwarts and the Institute of Advanced Study then I could just make up the names of the philosophers and so wouldn't have to bother learning the names and views of the actual ones who came up with the ideas. And being an alternative Earth, the monasteries could have beer - and be mixed - and have sex (or at least snogging)!"

So the SGS can dismiss Anathem out of hand. "He's written a book about mathematical platonism, but no-one serious takes mathematical platonism seriously, " I hasten I don't know whether that is actually true, "and to compound the error he has decided to use made-up philosophers because he can't be bothered to use the real ones. I rest my case."

So much for the SGS. What about the rest of us? Well, few readers in history are more prepared to sit through 100 pages of philosophical dinner parties than me, but leaving aside the fact that it's a wild ride, does it all amount to anything?

The Weasel claimed that Anathem is not a Singularitarian text. I disagree. It maybe not be one explicitly, but it is certainly one implicitly. The biggest difference between Earth and Arbre is that civilisation on Arbre is much older thasn on Earth: while Earth has, so far, experienced a single global technohistorical phase, Arbre has experienced many. At one point, it is stated that the current tech level of Arbre is 7/10 (I think  it is 7; it could be 8). 7 corresponds to the tech level of early C21st Earth. We know that Arbre had femtotech, presumably corresponding to level 10 (and that there must still be someone - who?  The Ita? - running the femtotech mills somewhere). At the beginning of the novel, there is some discussion about an apparent decline in population of the unnamed city (why is it unnamed?). This seems to imply that Arbre is currently in down phase in tech terms. Of course, there is no reason why this should bother the Avout, but it might bother the Saecular (but, of course, their foods contains soma of some kind, although that does not seem to fit with the character of most of those encountered in the Saecular world). In particular, what makes Arbre drop away from a tech level that is about to produce a Singularity? Well, presumably the senior Heirarchs, especially the Inquisition, possibly in conjunction with the Ita and possibly the Powers-That-Be (in fact, how do we know that the Inquistion are not the Power-That-Is? - they are certainly one of them) manipulate events, possibly using the Singularitarian technology of Incanters and the Rhetors, their big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey stuff, to manipulate events.

Which leads us to one of the (many) fundamental problems of the novel. Does Raz have any agency? He is a curiously incurious character. OK, a self-absorbed adolescent interested primarily in physics, and lives in a particular social milieu that does not encourage interest in the outside world, but you'd think he at least know the name of his hometown and of basic things like the other continents. Now, Raz certainly does things, brave things during the books, lots of brave things. He ends up as a member of a commando cell penetrating a hostile alien starship. He's there with Fraa Jad at the crucial moment and, presumably, helps to collapse the wave packet (bring the prticular timeline into existence) by being the necessary observer. And as such it could be argued that that is enough, especially in a YA novel. But, of course, he's mostly there at the end because someone has saved his sorry ass at various points (such as by the Valers in "St Petersburg" - I think he can be save in assuming that NTS has visited there in the last few years as well as certain Mediterranean archaeological sites, as well as taking a road trip to the Far North, the kind of thing one might well do if one lived in Washington State; I wonder also if he might have been to Murmansk, with a population of over 300,000 by far the largest city in the Arctic Circle, on his Russia trip). So how far back does the manipulation of worldlines and timelines go? Why is a Raz, a fairly indistinguished fraa from an obscure, provincial concent, evoked in the first place? And why does he end up a member of a commando assault cell. He's no Valer.

This is, in effect, a YA novel. Which makes the underlying cynicism of the novel all the more surprising. We know that Stephenson is heavily influenced by Pynchon. Raz is doing the work of Them, he's not asking any questions (well, he is, but they are not the right ones, or the ones we might choose to ask, no matter how interesting they might be). It's pretty clear that the world as presented to us by Raz bears only a passing resemblance to the way in which Arbrean society is actually constructed. Is this the lesson that Stephenson wants his readers to take away - that we are all being manipulated all the time by Them, even if we love (and are loved by) some of Those and the scales must fall away from our eyes, both philosophically and politically. The novel has a happy ending, Raz gets the girl and the promise of useful and interesting work in a mathic-saecular environment. He has shown courage and courage is a virtue surely. And he has suffered loss - Orolo and Jad. But he is living in the best of all possible worlds that They (the Thousanders, the Ten-Thousanders) have chosen. Perhaps that it is all any of can hope for. After all, just because your paranoid doesn't mean They're not out to get you.

Of course, the biggest fundamental problem is that Goedelian time travel means travelling to another Platonic plane. Why? Is it even possible to construct a Goedelian time machine from an Orion starship in a universe anything like ours. How fast would the universe have to be rotating? And why are the only aliens they encounter humans (with just some implausible differences at the femtolevel)? OK, this could be more timey-whimey stuff, but why? Why would you not want to meet aliens. It's a big universe out there and perhaps the aliens might have something to say about the problems of philosophy.

Et Tu, Purnell?

Come on! It was just too good a pun to resist. Whether James Purnell is much of a Timothy Michael Healy to Gordon Brown's Charles Stewart Parnell is another matter. Whether Gordon Brown will survive the weekend is also another matter. Alan Johnson is now Home Secretary presumably to apply with the old political saw that one should keep one's friends close and one's enemies closer. Purnell, a weightless Blairite apparatchik, was figured in a Spectator article in May last year as the prospective Labour leader that Cameron fears most (it is perhaps not coincidental that they both have firsts in PPE). Presumably Purnell expects to be facing Cameron across the Dispatch Box next year. He'd surely prefer Johnson as caretaker PM on the grounds that he would surely reduce the Tory majority somewhat - or even leave Cameron with none at all. Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that Purnell is an MP after the next election (plenty of Orwellian rewriting of his Wikipedia page has gone on: I had forgotten about the Liz Davies libel case and there is a definite whiff of controversy surrounding about both the use of his ministerial car and, of course - what would one expect of a Blairite? - over his expenses). If he isn't, I am sure that he will be found a cosy sinecure before he is parachuted into another safe seat.

After 12 years, the government needs a reboot if can't get, it seems, under Brown. But, of course, They are trying to force him from power because They want to make sure that nothing is done about the bonus (and expenses) culture that the neoliberal elite has benefited from in the City (more than Wall Street) over the past decade or so. Would Brown have done anything about the City culture? Well, two years, the notion that he would nationalise banks would have been unthinkable. (And yet Obama is allowed to nationalise GM. What are They thinking?) It is hard though to imagine that someone as hollow as Purnell will, any less than Cameron, offer this country anything other than the tired, stale, failed neoliberal nostrums. I can't see Britain being a pretty place to live over the next few years.

Moving and Standing Still

To my spiritual home, the London Review (of Books) Bookshop on Tuesday night for a launch event for The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries, edited by the improbably named Zachary Leader. When I entered the shop, I spotted what appeared to the name "Amis" at the top of the guest list. Could it be? I was sat quite far back in the room, enjoying a glass of red, but against the books and pulled off the shelf a copy of Alice Hogge's God's Secret Plot. This was the Harper Perennial edition with the additional matter at the back including a Q&A in which Ms Hogge when asked which writers she admires name-checked only one writer, Martin Amis, citing his style. And then Anthony Thwaite (I think) gestured towards someone in the audience - and I looked across the room (I could have done that ages before) and, yes, it was he (here I use the nominative form here rather than the accusative one for emphasis). Yes, I was in the presence of personages that night (whether Thomas Pynchon was there was another matter, no matter how much Martin was influenced by him). I was hoping for some discussion of the Movement, what it was and how and why it continues to have such a major influence on British culture more than 50 years later, but instead we had people reading poems by various of the Movement writers and then some of their own, which was, I suppose, fine. My problem is that I have always tended to be more interested in the idea of something than the thing itself, but the poems were good (quite a lot of Larkin, not surprisingly), even if my natural sympathies are more to prose than poetry (yes, as I have said, I do have to do poetry at some point). So we had Robert Conquest (92!), Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, Anthony Thwaite and Clive Wilmer (who he? - a Cambridge don, it seems) all reading.

(I will have to save for another time my thoughts on the Movement, The New Men and the Angry Young Men, the Two Cultures, anti-modernism in the 1930s, 1950s and on, why all this sill matters in general and to me in particular. But I will say that I am sure there is a decades-spanning generational saga/Great British Novel  to be written about a grammar school boy from Preston who becomes a successful novelist and goes on to trace the literary, political and social vicissitudes of our nation over the next sixty years.)

 

I didn't manage to have a second glass of wine as Zachary Leader was standing in front of the bottles and I couldn't get at them and by the time he had moved, they were empty. I was not the only disappointed person - a chap plaintively enquired of me whether there was any wine left. By that stage, I would have settled for a glass of white. Martin Amis was outside in the courtyard sitting at a table smoking a fag with Blake Morrison and Craig Raine. I should have papped them, but I thought that might have been a career-limiting move, so instead I made my weary way home. I bet Martin got a second glass of wine.

Tamiflu III

First, the Credit Crunch, now swine flu. The CDC is calling it as a Category 5 pandemic on the Pandemic Severity Index, which places it with Spanish flu (the PSI is different from the WHO Pandemic Influenza Phases - we are now in Phase 5) . The 1957-8 Asian flu and 1968-9 Hong Kong flu events are both listed as Category 2 pandemics. If this really is the case (and the mortality rates among non-Mexican patients would suggest that the severity is more like that of the 1957-8 and 1968-9 outbreaks, although, of course, medical care has, all things considered, improved significantly over the last fifty years, so perhaps the reduced mortality is a result of that improvement and we will see the mortality rate increase sharply as health systems become increasingly overloaded). If swine flu is a Category 5 event, we are going to witness a Level 8 Black Swan - 10-100 million deaths or the economic equivalent. An interesting question is what level of Black Swan the Credit Crunch is. At an economic equivalence of 1M$, if the Credit Crunch is a trillion dollar event, then that corresponds to a Level 7 Black Swan, which feels about right - a Spanish flu-type is definitely a more significant event than the Credit Crunch. The 1918 pandemic, of course, was overshadowed by the Level 9 event than was World War One.  

We Might Be Moving...

Depending on how the trial works, and if the domain redirection works, I'm trying out Square Space, you can see the Blog here.  There's a lot more functionality than we have at TypePad.  We'll make a formal notice later.

Earworm

C and I like listening to Scouting for Girls eponymous debut album Scouting for Girls while do things in the kitchen. I was listening to the album a few Sundays and couldn't find the Michaela Strachan song. So I looked up the album on the FoAK and discovered that "Michaela Strachan You Broke My Heart (When I Was 12)" is, in fact, a hidden track. The Wikipedia page lead me to this amusingly vituperative review of the album.

Now it is interesting that the reviewer contrasts The Beautiful South and Danny Wilson (Danny Wilson? Danny Wilson!) favourably with SfG. For me, The Beautiful South have long been the exemplar of MotR dinner party/coffee shop/easy listening radio music. In my early days of buying CDs, I actually bought a Beautiful South album (Blue is the Colour). I quite like their songs and I quite the like album, but I still lie awake at night wondering what on Earth possessed me to buy it. And to compound the error, on the suggestion of my life coach a few years later, I bought a Dido album, a David Gray album and even a Coldplay album. What was I thinking and what would someone think who saw them on my CD rack?

Consider, for instance, the copy of NME that Andrew Greenwood had when we went to Keithcon I in July 1997 (at least I think it was then; it was possible that it was the earlier than that or even that it was at Pandacon in 1998 - the "and" referring, naturally, to Mr G himself, who saved my life by stopping me choking to death on my vomit after drinking about a third of a bottle of cask strength whisky - my God, it's all coming back now). Andy would have been in his mid-thirties then and I did feel to me that perhaps he should have moved on, but I am 40 now and although I suspect that a 2009 copy of NME would interest me even less now that one did then, I know now were Andy was at - and even if I didn't, I'd hardly be in the place to criticise. Anyway, the particular issue under discussion contained a letter dismissing Radiohead as "middle class, white boy axe-wankery" (that might not have the exact expression and Google offers no clues; NME does not appear to be as well archived as the NYR), presumably in contrast to whichever hip hop artist was particularly popular at that time. I do have a copy of OK Computer and one might somehow feel there is something more ideologically sound about Radiohead than Coldplay, but it is not very clear to me what that something might be. Surely it is all "middle class, white boy axe-wankery"? It's just that some of it is more plangent than the rest.

One might say Radiohead are the real thing. One might say that Coldplay are pretentious and affected. One might say SfG as manufactured. One might claim that The Housemartins spend years gigging around Hull, honing their craft, before they ever made it big (although it is pretty clear that it was not, in fact, many years). One might say that the songs on Scouting for Girls all sound the same. One might say that the songs on No Angel, all sound the same, but one might say that SfG's songs all sound more the same that Dido's do. One might say that SfG's lyrics are banal, but then (pretty much) all pop lyrics are banal. One might agree with Noel Coward that it is "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." One might say that it is even more banal than usual to write lyrics referencing 1980s (and earlier) pop culture. Leaving aside the fact that some of us may have a great deal of emotional investment in 1980s (and earlier) pop culture, we might reply that they are fucking pop songs and that if I want profundity I will fucking well go and read bloody Geoffrey Hill. SfG's songs are earworms - both the musical and lyrical hooks catch the ear and burrow into the brain. They do this more than Dido or David Gray or Coldplay or the Beautiful South. I like them in the SfG's songs in the way that I like wine gums: they are not great art, but once you've had one you want another. Until you've had too many.

The thing about music (or cinema or television or sport) is that it is something that is done to you. This contrasts with reading, which is something that you do to the text. The ideas in a book can be exciting (sometimes I feel as though my head is going to explode), particular sentences or paragraphs can provide a visceral frisson, but reading rarely provides the intoxicating, immersive experience that can be had by listening to a three minute track by David Bowie (in his Ziggy Stardust phase) or Motörhead or Scouting for Girls at maximum volume before a night out. The purpose of art is to induce emotional and intellectual states in its receptors. The question of modalities arises. Most people in Aristotle's time would have experienced poetry being recited, which is quite a different thing from either reading poetry or prose silently. It might be possible to obtain from words something of the violent, visceral, energised excitement we get from hearing music (or watching cinema or television or sport) when they are read to us rather than when we read them. But generally speaking we read books. A different cognitive apparatus is invoked and the emotional state induced is, generally speaking, of quite a different, but no less profound, character.  

These days one can listen to music pretty much all the time. 15 hours a day, average album length of 45 minutes, that's 20 album listens a day, 140 a week, 7000 a year. Applying a 80-20 Pareto distribution, that's 2800 albums a year. If you're listening to that many albums you are necessarily going to be exploring some pretty remote byways. Those Moravian paleoprogressive purplemoss bands that you discovered last week really are the Greatest Thing Ever. And you can listen to the albums Over and Over Again just to make sure you were right. You can't do that with books. You can't read a book (or a writer) Over and Over Again. Some people claim they do, but they are skimming or eliding, and if they are or want to be writers themselves, just what the hell are they doing anyway?

There is more to it than that. There is the communal aspect of music. Live music always sounds better than recorded music and has a much greater emotional impact even before adding the resonance of hearing a particular band at a particular place at a particular time with particular people. Reading is slow (and tiring), even for the fastest reader, and reading a novel, particularly a long one, is a private experience spread out through time and space - very different then from hearing "The Song Remains the Same" with your best friend at Knebworth

 in 1979. And then there is the tribal aspect of music. Now, of course, sf is a tribe or rather a collection of tribes, and poetry has something of the tribal to it, but these are somewhat the exception among the divisions of the Republic of Letters. But whether you are looking for a way of life or just a goddamn hobby, music offers an vast and constantly evolving array of prepackaged possibilities from which to choose - the attitudes, the clothes, the hair, the language, and, yes, even the books.

Scribbling angst-ridden prose poems behind your bedroom door does not make you Arthur Rimbaud, but playing bass in your garage door does make you Pete Doherty. Most people can't play an instrument so simply being able to play one at all, no matter how badly, gives one immediate rock'n'roll cache. But the thing about rock'n'roll is that it is distributive. You don't have to be in the band to have the fun, you just have to be with the band. And even being at the gig lets a little of the glamour attach itself to you. Of course, you can get something of that my hanging around near Neil Gaiman at an sf con, but generally speaking, the penumbra of writers falls fairly close to them. One might get a frisson from attending a poetry class with Craig Raine in his "airy front parlor in New College Lane, Oxford, seated immediately beneath a strikingly realistic painting of Craig Raine seated in his airy front parlour in New College Lane, Oxford", but it's not quite rock'n'roll. Martin Amis, on the other hand, at the MA at Manchester. Well, perhaps if it were 1979 and we in the Bursa Kebab House on a Friday afternoon. But it's  2009. I think I'll stick with hysterical realism, maximalism, recherché postmodernism and, when I'm doing something in the kitchen, the occasional listen to Scouting for Girls.

"David Gower at Belitha Villas..."

"...was glad to see me." Robin Farquharson that is. Not sure how I how came across Dr F, probably via a reference in an article about Iain Sinclair. The Weasel ordered up Farquharson's Drop out! It is some ways an extraordinary document ("Traveller in a transcendental world, or psychotic homosexual in a manic phase," according to the blurb), exactly the kind of book for which secondhand bookshops were invented, the kind of thing that one would probably in the old days have never known existed until encountered on Charing Cross Road. Of course, we live in a very different world these days, and the kind of confessional material that Farquharson produces is the stuff of a thousand newspaper columns and a million blogs fifty years. Nevertheless, he certainly doesn't outstay his welcome (the book is barely more than 100 pages long and set in something like 12 point on 14 point; at one point Farquharson himself says "Anthony said 25,000 words, my first estimate was too short and putting in London every time does pad it out a little. I'm joking, of course.") and the publisher's note and Farquharson's preface make it clear that this is the record of a manic phase presented (more or less - the reproductions of the posters and graffiti reminded of Len Deighton's cookstrips and 1960s copies of Which?) as it was written, which gives the account of a particular  (and peculiar) persons encounters with a a particular cross-section of metropolitan life at a particular instant in time, both power and interest (historical and sociological).

The Weasel's edition is the 1971 Penguin with a plain, rather dull, very vaguely op art cover. The spine is faded, but unbroken, the front and back covers fairly bright: I would guess the copy has on a shelf for nearly forty years and possibly not read until now. R0.50 in South Africa, although it is hard to imagine that Penguin SA had many (if any) copies shipped over. The original Anthony Blond hardback cover had a characteristic Alan Aldridge ("the graphic entertainer "of the 1960s and 1970s) cartoon of Farquharson in a psychedelic setting. I wonder why it was not reused, although then as now, it was not usual to reuse cover art from the hardback for the paperback; Aldridge was no stranger to Penguin, indeed he was their art editor at one point, so it seems as though the missed a trick. Drop out! cries out to a new edition with an elaborate apparatus of annotations, along the lines of John Lahr 's edition of The Orton Diaries. (It is hard to imagine that Farquharson did not encounter Orton on his peregrination.) Such an Atomic Razor Press version would have to have the Aldridge cover, although I might have to reconstruct the interior illustrations using something like PSTricks and METAFONT. It would explain who David Gower was (presumably not the future England captain, who was only ten at the time, but perhaps a close or distant relative), where Belitha Villas is (Barnsbury; Sir Ian Holm lived in the street), provide detailed historical information on the British, South African and international telephone systems (Farquharson was a self-confessed telephone head - it's pretty clear that he was born about forty years too early and that he would have loved modern communications technology - an obsession that was inherited: his father had nearly crashed the Pretoria telephone exchange when it was automated in 1937 by "dialling madly before they gave the word" - and what exactly was a Post Ofiice telephone credit card? Farquharson had the Telephone Users' Association raise a question in the House about the failure of the GPO to provide him with a credit card) and include a brief digression about Subud (it is unclear to me if the "Subud Hall" that Farquharson mentions as being "quite near" the Joyboy on the north side of Westbourne Grove is the Amadeus Centre, where V worked; I hasten to add that she herself was not a member of Subud and was involved in the administration of the centre as a venue for (mainly classical music) rehearsals ).

Farquharson's bizarre (for instance, supposedly he was denied a Fellowship at All Souls after calling the Warden to the telephone on the grounds that he had a message for him from God; R.D. Laing of all people described him as "a strange guy, very intelligent and totally out of his fucking mind" and kicked him out of his "household" for psychotics at Kingsley Hall for making a 40 minute telephone call to Canada at five in the morning in the days when international calls were... expensive) and ultimately tragic (he died of the effects of third degree burns suffered in a house fire started deliberately) life was, as the old saw goes, stranger than fiction. There are surely hundred novels waiting here to be exposed by the intrepid sojourner (Robbe-Grillet gets a name-check and there is much intercourse with Jim Haynes's Arts Laboratory on Drury Lane - surely J.G. Ballard was not far away). I suspect that if one started on this excavation, there would be no end (it will surely serve though as a piquant seasoning).

Form's Sake

To the bowels of Waterloo station last night to recover the bag that I had left on a train at Kew Bridge at the end of January. It was lucky I did go yesterday. SWT commit to keep lost item for three months. It seems however that they interpret this to mean part of three months and that all the unclaimed January items are disposed of the beginning of April. So it was to get my ibuprofen and copies of Smoke: a London Peculiar back. Of course, I am often at Waterloo, but the lost property is open 07:30-19:00. It would seem sensible to me for SWT to shift that by half an hour and also offer some weekend opening.

The aspect of the matter that will be of greatest interest, I am sure, to the Weasel is that the form that one has to fill in in order to claim back one's property is headed "British Railways - Southern Region", which presumably makes it pre-1965 at least (I assume it was a photocopy). Thinking about it I was rather disappointed that it did not say "Southern Railway". So what are the oldest photocopied and non-photocopied forms still in use in the UK?

Famously Relaxed and Liberal

Radio 4's Book of the Week this week is Dr John Rae's The Old Boy's Network, extracts from the diaries of his time as headmaster of Westminster School. The continuity announcer described Westminster as being renowned for its "famously relaxed and liberal" atmosphere. Well, it was definitely "something" and liberal, and it seems likely that the phrase was one cribbed from the Wikipedia article, which, in turn, is quoting The Good Schools Guide. I was not exactly sure what that is supposed to mean, although the notion that sprang immediately to my mind was that it is some kind of euphemistic reference to an attitude, unusually relaxed even for one of our great public schools, towards pederasty. Westminster apparently has a reputation for tolerating "eccentricity", which would seem to confirm my original notion, although perhaps it is an allusion to Dr Rae's support for girls at Westminster, not restricting scholarships solely to British Christians, STOPP and the SDP.

Tim Pigot-Smith unctuous tone - apparently Dr Rae did have something of a plummy voice in real life - did little to stop my class hackles from being raised. Surely after the revolution one of the first tasks of the Council of the People's Commissars will be the abolition of the public schools.

Rae was rather catty about Keble, but smugly obsequious about Christ Church, the traditional sister of Westminster in Oxford. We weren't treated to this particular passage, but perhaps tomorrow:

Saturday, December 15

The dean of Christ Church telephones to say that X has not done well enough in his history papers to be offered a place but the college like him and are anxious to do well by him, especially in a year when we have sent them such a good crop of candidates. Would X be willing to read geography instead? On X's behalf I say yes, and the dean promises to consult his geographers. Just as well Roy Hattersley does not overhear this conversation.

(After reading the Daily Telegraph extracts of which the above is just one entry, the Weasel was moved to exclaim of Rae: "What an odious sh*t he is".)  We were however this morning treated to a discussion of the various issues surrounding open and closed entrance scholarships, held at Christ Church for Oxford in Westminster's case. But this was the early 1970s, a very different world from today, and thus, one would have thought of, a matter merely of historical interest (the early 1970s probably represented the zenith in terms of both the academic standard and the Byzantine opacity of the procedures to be negotiated required for Oxbridge entrance). And yet immediately after the programme had ended, the continuity announcer stated that the Oxford entry procedures described in it had ended in the mid-1980s. This is absolutely extraordinary and quite without precedent in my long experience of Radio 4. Why was it felt necessary to issue such an editorial clarification? At whose behest was it inserted? Fair enough if it had been the editor of the diaries placing the entry in its historical context within the programme itself. I can only assume that some producer or editor heard the programme and decided that it was likely to have the tendency to bring  Dr John Rae, Westminster School in particular and the public school system in general or Oxbridge entrance into disrepute and decided to head off any potential criticism at the pass with a preemptive strike. But it attempting to do, it seems to me that the BBC have merely succeeded in summoning ancient grievances from the grave. They will not quickly be laid to rest again.

Exciting New Career Challenge

Luckily my current employer isn't giving me the opportunity to seek exciting new career challenges, but nevertheless  I have, despite the Credit Crunch, managed to obtain one, so in a few weeks I will be exchanging my daily commute to South Oxfordshire for one to South Kensington. Which will at least give me an opportunity to do more reading, although I will certainly miss the post-prandial strolls around the estate with the Weasel. But the new job should be very interesting (and indded challenging) and will, I hope, give me the chance to do slightly more in helping to bringing about a safe Singularity.

Two Come Along at Once

Good sitcoms that is. And one of them is ITV1(!). I am talking, of course, of ITV1's Moving Wallpaper and Channel 4's Free Agents, which ended last Friday after six episodes, although it felt like only five, perhaps the series was so good that I didn't want it to end. Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan did what they had to, but it was Matthew Holness as the wonderfully deadpan agent and Tony Head as the boss who is rarely more than a sentence of rude, lewd, inventive invective from a harassment suit who stole the show for me. Consider that

When the series was first broadcast, the Sunday Express attacked the show because of bad language, claiming that the word "Cunt" was used three times and "Fuck" 22 times. John Beyer from Mediawatch said: "The obscene language in this programme is appalling by any standard. It shows a disregard of public concern that is completely unacceptable from a public service broadcaster."

and most of those came out of Tony Head's mouth, this is definitely one for Dave to download in Seattle. Note also that there was nothing in Free Agents that couldn't be heard every night on the West End stage, so I don't really know why television is quite so squeamish in 2009. In fact, Free Agents felt like a play. There was a story arc, as there is Moving Wallpaper as well as Plus One, the show that preceded Free Agents in the ten o'clock Friday evening slot and which was also a product of the 2007 Channel 4 Comedy Showcase. Plus One did only run five episodes, although it seemed more like six. It certainly had its moments, but it was much more in the mode of farce than Free Agents. It also had a great deal of swearing, which in this case I did rather tiresome, partly because it wasn't delivered with the brio, panache and vim with which Tony Head delivered his filth-sodden expostulations and partly because it made me think of my own work and particularly 11SSAL, in which the characters do swear less and somewhat to their advantage in my opinion, but perhaps this is a generational thing and it was easier for me to relate to the thirty- and fifty-somethings in Free Agents than the twenty-somethings of Plus One. Whichever way, it would be easy to imagine a version of Free Agents on the stage or as film, perhaps under the working title of Bitter and Twisted, which would at least distance us from The 10%ers, especially as at times  it verges on dramedy (I don't think black comedy or dark comedy is quite the right description), which lends itself to the stage (see the works of Alan Ayckbourn). The fact that there must be have been a pilot is interesting as it might well be an extra on the recently released  DVD of Free Agents.

With Moving Wallpaper, we are firmly back in the mode of farce, but at least it is, for the most part, funny farce (not that Plus One wasn't funny at times), although there were sailing not exactly close to the edge, but somewhere way, way over it in last Friday's episode. This is 2009. Have the production (and, for God's sake, the actors!) never heard of transphobia? Or is that the respectable prejudice? I am surprised that there wasn't some comment on this on LJ. Whereas theatrical agencies might well be not that much unlike the one in Free Agents (but would the agents have their own offices?), I don't imagine that TV production companies are much like the one in Moving Wallpaper or that senior ITV executives are much like Raquel Cassidy('s character) - interestingly both she and Ben Miller started PhDs in science subjects at Cambridge).

Consider the Veolia vanity TV advert. Is the actress Lucy Liemann, Moving Wallpaper's Samantha Phillips, script editor? It sure as heck looks like her. Now, the ubiquitous Veolia (formerly Vivendi, formerly Compagnie Générale des Eaux - Stop! Stop! I can't get started on fascinating, but hardly relevant peregrinations into the history of companies right now) is a French company. Now, in the globalised world in which we live, it is common for companies to have global marketing campaigns (and anyway British adverts are often filmed abroad, although I do recall French adverts from the TV in Grenoble in 1995 that were clearly made by UK companies) and this is strongly suggested by their tagline: "The environment is an industrial challenge", which probably sounds a lot better in French ("L'environnement est un défi industriel" - indeed!) as well as the Euro-English voiceover. Well, we don't have to speculate. Or, if you prefer. Of course, this doesn't tell us whether it is Ms L or which city the ad was filmed in. Somewhere "Latin", I'd say. Madrid? Lisbon? Montevideo? Buenos Aires? One of you must recognise the parliament-type building shown. Often models turn out to be Czech or Brazilian, so if it is Ms L , it is good to see a British actress getting a global gig.

Liquid Architecture

If architecture is frozen music is poetry liquid architecture?

To Marlow on Monday evening for a writing workshop. I hadn't realised until the day itself that it was in fact a poetry workshop (my bad for not bothering to look at the preparatory materials until pretty much the last minute). Not that there was a problem with that. I've long felt that no matter what kind of writer one wants to be it, one should study poetry - and at least try to write it. Poetry is language at its most concentrated, condensed, distilled, reduced. It is about the sound, rhythm, meaning and feel of words. And these are things we should - must -care about as writers. Reading poet and writing it stretches literary muscles that don't otherwise get stretched and stretching those muscles will make us better writers regardless of whether we are writing litfic, paranormal erotica or monkpunk.

The tutor was Kate Foley. She hadn't been expecting a chap among her tutees, but this didn't seem to affect the flow and we were soon to business. I managed two poems or, rather, attempts at poems. For me, it is difficult to get over the feeling that there is a particular language, subject matter and tone that is proper to poetry - the elegiac (in fact, I could go further and say that it is elegiac nature poetry that is real poetry), but I did manage in one of my pieces to at least address this issue. I think it will take a while to get over it completely, but it is a start.

It would be a good to go a course at the City Lit or Arvon or somewhere, but not going on one is no excuse for not starting to do something more on the poetry side now. I have the Penguin English Verse audiobook on tape. At some point I will have to convert to a form that is more maintainable over the long term (I also have the cassette of James Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). And, of course, I have innumerable volumes of poetry at home. I could read some of them.

Poetry reminds me of science fiction in that most poetry, like most science fiction, is about itself, but also in that the poetry world reminds of the science fiction world. Although science fiction does not have an equivalent of The Poetry Place (and such a place would be unbearable if it did, I fear), if one goes there and browses through the various little magazines one finds lying around the cafe tables one is reminded of nothing so much as fanzines as well as the hermetically sealed world of science fiction: poetry, like science fiction, talks (largely) to itself (it just has easier access to the book pages of the broadsheets, school and university literature syllabuses and Arts Council grants). The Wikipedia page on the British Poetry Revival reads like an account of the history of the fandom - only the names have been changed. Of course, there is a poetic sensibility that some people possess just as there is a science fictional one, so one might only be able to go far, but surely there is potential for interesting things to happen at the interface.

For me, wanting to study poetry is complementary to wanting to learn another language. Being able to read another language fluently gives you the literature of that language - including the poetry of that language. And poetry in another language, the densest, deepest form of that language, helps you get at language itself from the inside out, which is to be at the very core of what it is that makes us human. And that something towards which all writers, whether we are writing in Cornish, English, French, Japanese, Volapük or Warlpiri should aspire. Everything is Connected.

Going Underground

Dublin Metro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Good Lord! Dublin to get a tube - or at least part of a tube a 7 km double tunnel deep bore through the city centre with some cut and cover further out and then another 1.5 km of deep bore under the airport (total line length of Metro North is 17 km; there is also a Metro West, but that is entirely above ground). I wonder if the credit crunch will kibosh this (or whether it is in actually really much more than fauxprosal as it is currently described). I am strangely reminded of childhood days of fantasising about a Preston Monopoly board - and a Preston TV station. I realised quickly enough that such things were indeed fantasy. Of course, it is probably harder to get a traditional Monopoly board now than some special edition (we've had Wigan, Ipswich, Bournemouth and Poole as well as Lancashire, but not Preston itself yet). Local local TV though remains a dream. Local newspapers, such as the Lancashire Evening Post, have their issues (so to speak) and probably more so now than in the 1970s, but they don't suggest that the notion of good local local TV is a contradiction in terms (Look North (West)/Northwest Tonight was a formative influence on me and showed that it was possible to produce worthwhile regional programming, in the 1970s anyway, although it probably helped that the North West is a reasonably coherent and cogent geographical region, at least compared to some TV regions, although, of course, the news was heavily biased towards Manchester, which, given that I didn't go there until November 1983 when I was 15 (with my brother to visit Games Workshop in the Arndale Centre - I bought a copy of the James Bond 007 RPG and SORAG, a Paranoia Press Traveller booklet on a Zhodani intelligence service - I still regret that I did not buy the Tarsus:World Beyond the Frontier boxed module - just looking at this stuff now is making me weak with desire (and nostalgia); I think I am going to faint), meant that much of it had a slightly unreal quality to it - the world was a big place to me in those days.

"The programme previously covered the Isle of Man, but that is now covered by BBC Wales Today." I remember the Isle of Man being covered on Look North. Presumably the coverage being hived off to BBC Wales is part of some internal land grab: "The Isle of Man is part of the Celtosphere and in these days of devolution news coverage of it should be provided by fellow Celts out of Cardiff." I presume that coverage is actually provided out of a North Wales studio, but whichever way this makes as much sense as Cornish news being provided by BBC Wales.

There was also Granada Reports and Granada had the reputation as the most intellectual of the ITV franchises, but it was still ITV and I ddn't see it as much. I note that they had studios in Blackburn and Chester until 2005 and still have one in Lancaster. One would have thought that with the price of televisual equipment these days, it wouldn't cost much to run a small news studio, but I suppose the costs are in things like the rent on the building space.

Of course, unlike the Australians and New Zealanders (and there is surely a novel or at the very least a short story there), the Irish have long had their own Monopoly board for Dublin. I recall from The Monopoly Book that  one of the railway stations was actually the bus station (there were also two airports, but consider the Atlantic City board). Brady's book was good for the time (written early-mid-1970s), especially for a ten year old - I recall it was bought from Mears' in Garstang - but it hoved to the Official Story of the Origins of Monopoly: the true history is much more interesting and unexpected. The fact that the Dublin board only had one station made me aware of just how small Dublin was compared to London. When I went there in 1998, it reminded me of Liverpool. This was just at the beginning of the Celtic Tiger era and I imagine it has changed a great deal now. At that time, pretty much only the area around had Temple Bar had been redeveloped. But then I imagine Liverpool has changed. Of course, Liverpool does have a metro (of sorts) and recall extensive coverage of the opening of its underground stations such as Moorfields and the deep platforms at Liverpool Central on Look North in 1977. I don't know if at the time I ever dreamt of a Preston Underground. I know that in the 1990s, when tram scheme were popular, there were proposals for what I think was branded the Lancashire Metro, which would have involved building a large number of new stations on the existing lines between Preston and Lancaster, and Preston and Blackpool. My google-fu is weak today, but I think there might be a map in the Preston Bus book I have at home. The tram schemes constantly return, but it will take a new technoeconomic paradigm before anything more ambitious happens in either Preston or London. We should at least get Crossrail 1, but it would be grand to one day see something more exciting in Brentford.

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You Learn Something New Everyday

In my case, that Radio 4 continuity announcers hadn't heard of "polyamorism" until today.Perhaps I just spend too much time hanging out on LJ.  Apparently  Woody Allen's latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, has a polyamory theme and there was a discussion about it (polyamory) inspired by the film on Woman's Hour this morning. Curiously, I didn't even release VCB was a Woody Allen film until recently as the posters (quite prominent) in London don't mention this, presumably because Woody's last few films haven't done very well (both critically and commercially). VCB has won an Oscar and netted $88M already against a budget of £20M, so it has turned out to be one of his more profitable films. I used to be - I suppose I still am - a big Woody Allen film. I ought to look out the film on DVD. Surprisingly though there has been less discussion of it on LJ, but then LJ is somewhat hit and miss about what is and what is discussed (on my flist anyway).

Learning from Circuit City’s Mistakes - CE Pro Article from CE Pro

Learning from Circuit City’s Mistakes - CE Pro Article from CE Pro

This is a mistake that companies make over and over again.  People see how much their best sales people are being paid, often more than senior managers, and get annoyed and immediately demand that something is done about it.

So, when they don't do something as plain daft as Circuit City did, they will still muck with Comp Plans, put caps on commission payments and engage in other activities which throttle back on payments to the sales team.

The rest, as they say, is usually history.

As a person who has worked in commission paid roles for several years now (ok, more than 15), this pattern of behviour is both extremely familiar and also incredibly depressing.  I hope that when I come to run my own business again, I'll remember that a well paid, well incentivised salesforce is the key to success in any business.

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Holding Dollars

Item on Today this morning about rumours that one of the rating agencies is going to downgrade UK government debt. Given the amount that the UK is currently borrowing to prop up the banking system, this is not a good thing. Apparently, unlike the Germans and the Japanese, but like the Americans, the British don't save, but unlike with the Americans, no-one wants to hold debt in a dodgy minor currency - they prefer to hold euros or dollars. There are also rumours that the UK government might default on its debt. I think this unlikely, but the mere existence of the rumours will do us no good.

Clearly at the moment it would be better for the UK to be in the eurozone. Whether it would be better for the eurozone is another matter. There is the argument that the euro is a dodgy major currency, but that argument is generally made by the usual suspects. The problem for Gordon Brown is that even if he wanted to join the euro and even if the Germans would have us, it would probably be practically impossible to join by next May, certainly in terms of having notes circulating. It would also be a political controversial decision. We can though expect the debate to dominate the political discourse over the next year and a quarter. Brown isn't going to want to say that he will take Britain into the euro, but he has to keep the option open. Cameron and Osbourne's problem is that if Britain is the first country transitioning to a post-post-industrial society (we need a catchier term for the processing of turning from a first world to a, well, not quite a third world country, but certainly something profoundly different from what we have been over the last decades and, arguably, centuries) then sterling is worthless and the only alternative to the euro is US dollarisation. And that worked so well for Argentina. But it might be an easier sell to the readers of The Sun.

The UK government owns 70% of RBS, St Vincent Cable is openly calling for the nationalisation of the entire banking sector (unclear to me how he intends to pay to do that - perhaps he thinks the government should just sequester the assets of the banks) and the Bank of England's prime interest rate is, for what it's worth (in economic terms probably not very much as the economy today bears precious little resemblance to the economy thirty years, much less three hundred - and people say nothing ever changes), at its lowest level ever in 315 years.

And today, the United States gets a new president - young, vigorous and intelligent - at the time that the world's faces its gravest economic crisis since the early 1930s. We live in interesting times.

Getting what you voted for, good and hard | Samizdata.net

Getting what you voted for, good and hard | Samizdata.net

This is an interesting piece from Perry de Havilland, one of the UKs leading libertarians, seriously it's interesting, read it. 

Of course, the reasons I find it interesting, and many readers will is somewhat different to the reasons Perry thinks it is interesting.

He makes an interesting thesis, that markets work because the actors in the market are flawed and acting only from Self Interest.  His point, and I've heard this argued somewhat by David Friedman, is that the real problem is that politicians are flawed and therefore Statist solutions don't work either.  Only the market will magically punish the irrational.

One of the vast problems I have with this line of logic is that the only rational course of action is to punish the stupid or gullible, no matter what the cost to society is.  I may, perhaps, be too empathic for my own good.

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How the Mighty are Fallen

Technology Review: Long-struggling Nortel files for bankruptcy

I'm surprised I hadn't seen mention of this elsewhere. One might well ask what took them so long - I recall Nortel in the early 2000s posting the largest ever (quarterly?) loss by a company, something like $17 billion. That was, of course, writedowns of goodwill, but Nortel shares were fully convertible for hard cash when it was valued at $297 billion. Now it is now worth $155 million, which means that 99.95% of the company has been destroyed. That does take some doing. Those famous vanity adverts weren't, in hindsight, perhaps such a good idea. Unless you cashed out in 1999. I wonder if Amanda Holt did? Given that The Reg claims she had a £90,000 a year job in 1999 (was there a Nortel ofice in Manchester?), she would presumably have had plenty of stock and stock options (Teli at Siemens certainly did) - The Reg says that her £15,000 of share options were withdrawn by Nortel after she was sacked, but she may already have had owned shares in her own right.

In 2003, I had to cacel mu Arvon course at Moniack Mhor with Gordon Legge and Bernadine Evaristo at in order to work on the Vodafone UTRAN second vendor bid. I even read two Gordon Legge books - not bad. We eventually lost to Nortel - the CTO of Vodafone was ex-Nortel - I recall his gurning fizzog from an advert that appeared in The Economist shortly before he left Vodafone, but it should I have been a no-brainer. Although we needed to do was show a slide of Siemens's credit rating v. Nortel's credit rating. I am pretty sure that Mike did indeed show such a slide. It's always more complicated than that, although, in this case, it shouldn't have been. Of course, Siemens Mobile Networks no longer exists either, so worrying about the relative share prices and credit ratings today of Siemens and Nortel is moot. I wonder what Nokia Siemens Networks  credit rating is though. And who will end up with the various parts of Nortel (Alcatel Lucent might be the best cultural fit).

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The CES Roundup...

Despite getting to bed at what passes around here for a reasonable hour, and that I didn't drink after about 11, I'll admit that I feel rough.  That would probably be the 3 nights of post 3am finishes and the early calls for meetings.

One of the problems is they pump extra Oxygen into the casinos and bars - this does two things; it keeps you feeling awake and alert and it stops you feeling so drunk.

Of course, the moment you go elsewhere, for example, to bed.  Things go down hill fast.

Never mind.  Tis but once a year... except I have Mobile World Congress in 4 weeks and that's pretty much a rerun.

Back to the show.

Well back to the show.

I did actually get to see it this year, which is more than last year. 

Nice stuff - a lot of very impressive 3D stuff on TVs.  The 3D prototype monitors without glasses were interesting but the images unclear.  I finally tried out a Myvu (www.myvu.com) which was interesting but not good enough to fork over $300 for.  Give them a little longer and I expect that a pair will be appearing in my standard travel kit.  But they need to get lighter and up a notch from VGA.

I liked the PS3 stuff I saw, and I am tempted sorely.  The Sony Vaio TT was also pretty spectacular.

Just plain weird: building a complete house of the future inside the event but putting it at the far end of the least accessable hall.

Work related: all good meetings.  The Nvidia demo of their new chipset for mobile devices looked good, but I'm naturally skeptical about canned demo's.

It was a hard show.  Lots of excellent networking, some extremely good customer contacts. 

Next stop Barcelona - rinse, repeat...

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The New New Thing

What is the New New Thing in 2009? Or the New New Person or the New New Book? I mean in the way that Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was the New New Thing in the late 1940s or feminism and the works of Buckminster Fuller in the late 1960s or Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind in the early 1970s or post-structuralism and deconstruction in the early 1980s or K. Eric Drexler's The Engines of Creation in the mid-1980s or complexity theory or artificial life were in the late 1980s or the web in the mid-1990s. I am getting jade and am ready for something new. Everything can't have been invented. Can it? I suppose with the crisis in late capitalism, the New New Thing ought to be something in the sociopoliticial sphere, but it is not clear that there is any underlying philosophy behind Obama that can revolutionise the world - or at least the way in which we see some of it.

Suggestions on a postcard please.