compulsive communicators

more unpalatable truths

2012-01-28T02:04:00.000-08:00

I blogged before about the notion of deserving and undeserving poor (http://ulsuni.blogspot.com/2011/11/inconvenient-truths.html) and here's some more. Underlying this is the fact that the distribution of wealth is random and bears no relation to worth or worthiness. Once you accept that then saying someone is deserving or not is meaningless. If you don't accept that (and I can hear protests about how you play the hand you are dealt - which doesn't make any difference if the game itself is rigged and crooked) then you need to think very carefully about the following question: What is it about you and the way that you behave which makes you more deserving of your wealth than the billions of people who have less than you?

This is not another polemic about benefits, actually it's the direct opposite. This is about the rich and whether they can be undeserving. There is a furore in the media about huge bonuses for CEO's in particular those of banks which are mainly public owned due to government bail-outs. Now, here is the unpalatable bit: you can no more make the distinction about whether a boss is worth his (or rarely her) inflated salary than you can about whether a benefit claimant is fleecing the system. There is a completely meaningless argument about whether the head of RBS (I can't be bothered to remember his name or proper title) is worth his £1 million bonus. Well, in one sense he isn't as there are almost certainly millions of people who could do his job if it was thrown open to them and many would do it for far less than him. But then that's true of just about all of us isn't it?

This is irrelevant anyway as you attach a salary to a job and then try and get someone to do it, you don't usually decide how much someone is worth based on how they are doing the job. I have absolutely no idea how bonuses are calculated and have even less interest in it but I have to say that I basically agree with David Cameron (not a sentence you'll hear very often) that it is a personal matter for whatsisface whether he takes the bonus or not. It is dumb luck that the money will go to him and not someone else. Anyone who disagrees: how do you justify people who win this much on the Lottery? How can they deserve it?

Render to Caesar what is Caeser's. If it bothers you what money other people are getting then that is your issue about your own worth and nothing else.

Tax evasion

2011-12-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

Many people try to turn tax rates for the richest sector of the population into a political argument but it isn't, it is about straight forward inequality, ego and greed.

The same arguments for under-taxing the rich crop up again and again:

1. They help to promote our country abroad which brings in income. I heard Michael Caine using this argument. To raise taxes for people like him, he said, was a mistake as they had already generated huge amounts of income and prestige for the country with their work.

I admire Michael Caine immensely and on the face of it this sounds reasonable: somebody raises the profile of the UK all over the world, surely it is wrong to demand extra tax from them as well?

OK, but someone is going to have to decide which individuals or jobs promote our country enough to offset the extra tax. Maybe a league of top celebrities who, just by being famous enough, inevitably bring benefit to the UK. Or everyone could declare on their tax return how much they considered they were worth in increasing the global reputation of the UK. It could work: if a pop or film star was watched by X million people this year that could give them a tax rebate of X percent. The other side of the coin would be those who damaged the reputation of the UK abroad...

This leads to the situation where the celebrity is being taxed less but all the people who make or sell the records, DVD's, t-shirts, run the cinemas, tours etc. continue to pay the same tax as before.

2. They provide jobs and boost the economy.

Fine, but so does every self employed person (they provide a job for at least one - themselves).

3. If you raise their taxes they just move abroad.

The law does have to be pragmatic: there is no use having laws which are unenforceable as they just cost money paying for people to chase shadows. But it doesn't sit easy with many people that because somebody is in a privileged enough position to do something they should get away with what less privileged people cannot. We know it happens in all kinds of things - top criminals get away while those who work for them end up in jail etc. but it shouldn't really form the basis of policy.

If Michael Caine is right, then all those tax exiles are still contributing to UK Inc. through their status anyway.

He says that raising extra tax on the rich and successful is a half-think: it doesn't consider the value of the person to the country already. Actually, he is guilty of half-think: he is not considering the hospitals and schools that cannot be funded because he is holding on to the extra money. He is making choices about what to do with that money (maybe better ones than the government - who knows?) but he is unaccountable for those choices. If he thinks the government should spend his tax money differently he is much better placed to get his point of view across than most of us so why not pay the tax and be vocal in his opinion on where it goes?

4. Having higher tax rates for higher earners disincentivises their working at all.

It seems very unlikely that Michael Caine continues to work in order to earn money. At some point that he may not have been aware of he stopped earning a living and started doing what he does simply because he loves doing it. Some people may be driven purely by the love of accumulating wealth but they are in a very small minority if you believe what rich people say. Money itself is a proxy for power and, as I said above, they have power through their own status.

Some people argue for flat tax rates and this would be fine if wealth and income were normally distributed - that is the graph of people's wealth looked like the graph of people's heights for example. If you taxed everyone one inch out of every six inches of their height you would get a workable (if arbitrary) system. However, because the graph of wealth is shaped like the infamous hockey stick of global warming, a flat tax rate has the direct effect of squeezing the majority on the near horizontal part down while the near vertical stick (the top few percent most rich people) is pushed higher and higher with nothing to hold it back. It is regressive with a capital R - it promotes inequality with vigour.

Seems to me you have two choices: get rid of tax altogether and run everything on a mixture of charitable donation and free market competition, or have a proper sliding scale of tax which goes some way to reverse the trend for the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor. Anything else is unsustainable in the long run.

singularity 2011

2011-12-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/12/06/why-the-ordinary-person-does-not-yet-believe-in-a-technological-singularity/#comment-24795

To quote Ripley: I hope you’re right; I really do.

It is not that I don’t believe that we are on an increasing gradient of technological development: the two things that worry me are its fragility due to short sighted political dogmatism and the gross inequality of access.

I suspect that yes, “we” will have lots of the things in your article but who the “we” will be and who will be making that decision is the big issue for the first half of the 21st Century.

To put it another way, if one person can replace their organs when they pack up while another is dying of diseases that have been curable for decades we really haven’t hit anything I would accept as a singularity.

We don’t like the idea of technology that shapes our own attitudes and behaviour and that may be the make or break on our future as a species.

rationalism

2011-12-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

If somebody is a rationalist and doesn't believe in any kind of spirituality, do they consider that one bag of dirty water is equivalent to another even if one is a living thing and the other is not?

sophisticated consumers

2011-12-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

Although our urge to communicate is clearly core to our being, it is probably more of an enabler for civilisation rather than a driving force towards its development. A major driving force seems to be our urge to develop the things we use or consume to be ever more sophisticated.

We developed tools for many everyday tasks tens of thousands of years ago and really, apart from a few refinements, these are as good as they need to be - a hammer, an axe, a knife, even clothing - there's not a lot of ways these can be improved. The need for refinement seems to have come from us rather than the environment. The first indication of this is decoration. This is very ancient and means that our ancestors were already diverting effort away from improving function and into making an item more desirable for other reasons. We can see that status within a community and relative status of a community compared to others was linked to the sophistication of their possessions.

Communication was the way in which ever more sophisticated designs and techniques were carried forwards through the generations. Observation and mimicry and verbal instructions (show and tell) were followed much later by written and drawn instructions. If you look at the history of an object, e.g. the sword, it appears that there has been an endless search for individual uniqueness, that all possible materials, all manufacturing methods, all design templates were explored over and over. No two cultures have the exact same solution to the sword problem and yet for the most part these difference do not give a significant advantage in terms of use.

These days we tend to accept that each time we replace something it will be with something more sophisticated; it is built into our belief in progress. Yet, for most of our human history progress is very patchy, occurring for some periods in some places but for the majority one lifetime was much like the last dozen or hundred. But there was still an accepted hierarchy of sophistication in almost all communities - certain types of thing were for certain levels of society. There are exceptions of course: highly respected and revered classes of people who shunned sophisticated objects and lived as simple a life as possible. But mainly, the link between status and sophistication has been powerfully and often violently enforced; in medieval times it was against the law for peasants to wear certain fabrics and even certain colours of clothing; we have an inbuilt prejudice against people who own things 'above their station' and if you have something that has been superseded by a more sophisticated version you are labelled an outsider.

inconvenient truths

2011-11-25T03:20:00.000-08:00

1. Our economy is built on slave labour. That's how Europe became prosperous and expanded out into its colonies. The world order was established at that point and prevails.

2. All parts of our welfare system use the Victorian notion of deserving and undeserving poor apart from healthcare which is still, as near as dammit, undiscriminating and truly universal.

3. The longer lived we become the more risk averse we become.

4. The size of the global economy is meaningless as money has no intrinsic value. We only trade with ourselves therefore it's a closed system which you could call 1. If you quantitively eased the global economy by adding $100 or $1000000 for every $1 you could still call it 1.

5. Given the above, national debts have meaning only relative to each other. Again you could multiply them all by a factor and still be in the same position. As there is no 'cash-in' day there is no limit to how much debt can continue to be rolled forward by a nation.

A person on the other hand has a lifetime - so there is a built in cash-in day. In prosperous countries roughly half of that lifetime is spent as a planned cost to society (20 years childhood and 20 to 30 years retirement) while the remaining half is supposed to pay for all that as well as the costs of living during that period and the other running costs of society. Oh, and you also have to pay for the last bit of education.

ev

2011-03-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

I suspect that electric cars will become a bit like Apple computers over the next few years with a small but significant niche market in the affluent liberal classes, particularly those associated with media and the arts. They will appear disproportionately in films and TV dramas - just as the desktop of choice in these has been a Macintosh followed by MacBooks and more recently iPads and iPhones - lending an air of futurism and coolness which the viewer will find alluring while making hard-headed arguments against actually going out and buying one. It is actually more because of the cost of Apple computers than any well reasoned argument about the merits of different operating systems or available software that prevents most people from owning them as proven by the much greater popularity of iPods which are cheap enough for the masses. Mea Culpa on this.

The same will be true for EV's and the intensity and passion of both support and attack will (like Apple) create a cult attraction depending on which celebrities are for and against and how we perceive their image. Governments would do well to avoid appearing to push anybody into owning EV's other than just helping to build the infrastructure in which they can operate. Feeling bullied into behaving in a certain way, whether it is for our health (mums at school fences handing out chips) or the environment (microchips in wheelie bins) will galvanise resistance. This is important because, unlike the choice of computer, the time period for the switch over to non-oil burning vehicles is going to affect everybody. Just as the lengthy time to reduce smoking allowed many more deaths and more suffering so a long swansong for the internal combustion engine will do untold damage.

dream

2010-12-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

We had a parcel with Xmas presents in that we were expecting. It was late because the sender had sent it from Ireland with only the correct postage for inland UK and so it had been forwarded by the Post Office in Ireland after a delay. It had various smaller packages inside which were presents for the kids and us. It was from Gordon Brown, which was not a surprise but I was quite proud that he had sent us presents even if he hadn't put the correct stamps on them.

more 'dis'ing science

2010-12-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

Another thing Scientists tend to imply is that it has improves us as a species. It does this in a number of subtle ways - by implying that because science has forged much of the foundations of our civilization that it is a civilizing force. I'm not so sure - religion could make the same claim and I don't think there is enough evidence to uphold either of these claims.

I believe we are getting slowly more civilized and it is partly a result of the extra time to think that has been bought by scientific advances (longer healthier lives not spent just merely trying to survive). But science is at best neutral because on the other side of the equation it has given us exponential increase in the facility to kill each other which we continue to do with no sign of any downward trend. As previously posted, I also attribute most of our improvement in behaviour to a natural evolution of child rearing.

I would say that currently, while organized religion may be involved in many conflicts, science has provided both the cause and the means for all of them. While scientists are quick to point at their role in solving problems such as famine & sickness, they fail to take into account that they were also partly responsible for the problems in the first place. Without science we couldn't feed billions of people, but without science there wouldn't be billions of people. Science is both the cause of pollution and hence climate change and our best hope of solving it.

Scientists claim that there is a need and then science provides a solution. What science actually does is creates a need for something that we hadn't even thought of and then gives us the means to provide it. No engines no need for oil. No gadgets no need for electricity. I recently heard that the Amish don't actually reject all modern technology outright but rather they pick and choose - in particular they reject anything (e.g. cars) which could fracture their communities which depend on everyone being in close proximity but are quite happy to have modern labour saving devices if they enhance their family lives. This may be a misunderstanding but the point is we tend to blindly embrace whatever technological marvels are thrust our way or if there is an element of doubt (e.g. GM food or stem cell research) these are treated in isolation while we happily accept the status quo (as if we haven't been eating genetically modified food since the invention of agriculture or as if keeping premature babies alive in bubbles is more natural than growing human tissues).

for gods sake shut up

2010-12-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

OK it's starting to get on my nerves now: this constant sniping of scientists at non-scientific belief systems. I can entirely understand their outrage at the disproportionate amount of media coverage that creationism seems to be getting; I can even sympathise to a lesser extent with their attacks on alternative medicine, homeopathy, crystals, colours etc. as it is pretty hypocritical to shun modern medicine in favour of ancient folklore until you need major surgery to save your life and then happily accept it. But now Hawking has had a go at philosophy and I listened to a Radio 4 programme in which Brian Cox echoed Hawking's mantra that physics will eventually tell you everything about the universe and there really isn't any need for anything else.

Now, however clever they are, Hawking, Dawkins, Cox et al are human beings - they have the same physiology as me and everyone else - two eyes which see a certain spectrum and a brain that is essentially the same. So if they come to a conclusion about the nature of the universe, it is based on information received through the same sensory apparatus and using reasoning based on the same neural platform as everybody else. Also in a wider sense the information available to them is the same as everybody else - it's not like they are party to some dark secret that is being kept from the public at large; scientific results are public property so if I had the time and the will power I could read every journal they have. So why do I strongly disagree with the idea that scientific reasoning is explaining the universe and that on its current course will one day explain everything?

Because at every stage in its evolution science has uncovered more questions than it has answered. Yes, it's been a very successful tool for allowing us humans to do the things that us humans have always done: eat, fight and fornicate (sorry nicked that one) in ever greater numbers and at ever greater speed, but it has not got us even one step closer to understanding the point of it all or even if there is a point of it all. Science can't even predict one tiny event like whether an atom will decay or if a drop of water will roll off one side of a leaf or another - not because it has incomplete data, processing power or equations that haven't been written yet, but because the universe is chaotic - things are inherently unpredictable. It can't tell you what is real and what isn't: if there are multiple versions of the universe - what is the scientific law which decrees that I see this one?

It can't prove or disprove whether there is a god, even though there are those who are doing their damnedest to try and show that it can. It can't explain consciousness. It is completely subjective even though it talks as if it objectively 'looking in' it actually 'peering out'. Saying that science can explain everything is like taking a photo and then saying that 'OK you can only see a few things in it but if you could enlarge it enough you would see everything' , ignoring the fact that something would only have to be one foot to the side and it will never appear in the photo, that there are smells and gases and heat etc. that aren't in the photo, however finely detailed it is.

Science is one tiny narrow viewpoint created by a self serving species at one blink in time on a crumb flying through space. Not only doesn't it answer any of the important questions, it doesn't even know what they are.

If I can work that out with my average human brain then so can Hawking, Dawkins, Cox and co. and I'm quite sure they have - why else would they feel so threatened by a few noisy creationists who most of us are quite happy to ignore.

Did you hear about the homeopathic riot? There was only one rioter but he did the damage of thousands. (nicked that as well)

Life Jim

2010-12-03T00:26:00.000-08:00

Filled in the numbers on the Drake Equation (for calculating how much intelligent life is out there) with my estimates and got 39. SETI reckon 20 to 30 thousand, but then they have to justify their funding. Seems to me that if technological sophistication increases exponentially (as ours appears to have) then the window for a civilization being within our range of experience (i.e. smart enough to be contactable but not too smart for us to not have anything worth talking about) is going to be short. We flatter ourselves that a higher intelligent species would either invade us or guide us, whereas in fact they might simply study us like "a scientist who studies the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water" because having a conversation with us would bore them silly. We have come to realize that interfering with the lives of other living things on Earth, even with the best intentions, is not often a good idea and the consensus view seems to be to let nature take its course - so they could take the same view of our planet.

39 then, is my number of civilizations at roughly our level of sophistication. Which is essentially zero, given the scale of our galaxy. Given the timelag on any communications across these kind of distances, it's not going to be a very interesting conversation anyway - a bit like telegrams in a foreign language that take years to arrive and concern events that you don't understand in a place where you'll never visit.

critical mass media

2010-11-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

So somebody posted a tweet making a joke threat to blow up Robin Hood Airport, the legal cogs turned and spat out a punishment for broadcasting a menacing statement, the result a huge outpouring of outrage. It is a situation which couldn't have happened even a couple of decades ago and probably shows that the legal system is ill equipped to deal with 21st Century communications technology.

But that is not the main point that struck me about this; what struck me is that not just the legal system is out of date but the whole way we, as people living together in society, filter our communication is outdated and unreliable now. Consider the same statement made in different circumstances.

"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!"

The context would completely change the amount of menace we construed: if it was a friend or a taxi driver who said it or if it was a comedian as part of a show or if it was an intercepted radio transmission etc, etc. In just about every case there is a natural dampening process which takes even the most potent sounding threat and downgrades it: because it doesn't reach many people, because we expect fiction or (in the last case) because there would be a validation process on the interception before anybody in a position of authority would allow it to reach the public domain.

Our media has been fairly strictly delineated so that we know when we are being told news about real things going on or when we are getting entertainment. Through experience of the way people around us talk and act, we judge when they are really threatening and when they are just sounding off. Sometimes this breaks down clearly - no system this complicated is fool-proof - like the panic induced by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast or the conman who we believe to be genuine. But the dampeners stopped most of these things before they reach a critical level and we put an enormous amount of faith in the calm voice of authority which reassures us that "everything is under control and there is no need to panic".

But now there are no recognisable boundaries between real news, social chatter and entertainment and there is no obvious authority to stop rumour, fear or anger from spiralling out of control. When something goes viral online it's so fast that the normal dampeners are way to slow to contain it. The old style news media is relegated to reporting the online reaction and effects. The danger is that real people are at the sharp end of these fireballs: somebody who said something which they might say every day in normal circumstances but didn't allow for the effect of putting it into the incendiary environment online. The speed of tranceiving pieces of information and the number of people doing it means there is an unstable critical mass at any time waiting for a catalyst to start the chain reaction.

So what is disquieting about the airport threat joke is not that somehow free speech has been denied by the law but more how easy it is to assume that when we are using these new forms of communication that the old rules apply.

absolute belief

2010-11-12T14:04:00.000-08:00

As there are a huge number of beliefs held by intelligent people to be unshakably true despite the complete absence of any empirical evidence to support them and as they are mutually contradictory and exclusive; it follows that the only logical stance is to have an unshakable belief that it makes no difference at all what you believe in the absence of evidence and to pursue that faith unfalteringly.

thousand

2010-11-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

When I was about six our class at school didn't have a proper classroom for a while (I don't know why - maybe it was being rebuilt or something) so our tables and chairs were moved into a corridor and we had all our lessons there. Just to add to the strangeness of the situation the corridor actually sloped downhill from the cloakroom at one end to whatever was at the bottom end - I can't remember. One afternoon when the teacher had presumably run out of steam coming up with 'proper' lessons that you could do in such an odd shaped space (or maybe inspired by the linearity of our temporary classroom) she handed out strips of paper a metre long each divided into a hundred centimetre sections. We were to occupy ourselves by writing in the numbers from 1 to 100 in the spaces. When we completed this task we should take the completed rule to the teacher who would check it and give us another strip for 101 to 200. Some of the girls who always were best at everything got to four or five hundred, but I kept going. When I got onto my sixth or seventh strip most of the teacher's supply had run out and most of the class had stopped (we were probably told to read quietly or something but I wasn't a keen reader at that age). Luckily a friend of mine had a strip he hadn't started and was only too glad to give it to me. Now the goal of my reaching a thousand caught the collective imagination of the class and people started hunting out new strips for me to complete. It got to tidying up time but the teacher, sensing maybe, a sense of purpose and focus in a child prone to hiding rather than joining in, let me continue - my classmates supported the quest by doing my part of whatever chore we were supposed to do - pencils in jars, books on shelves or whatever. Finally to my own astonishment I wrote in the final four digits and, clutching my achievement, proudly went out to meet my mum. I later sellotaped the ten strips together into one ten metre long ribbon and it remained, wound in a roll about two inches across with an elastic band round it in the desk drawer in our room for the rest of my childhood.

cometh the hour

2010-04-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

So Britain has its own Obama figure: Nick Clegg since Thursday evening, in that he represents a will to throw out the established system and usher in something shiny and new (and difficult to pin down exactly).

Now, this could go two ways: either this is like one of those great shots a tennis player hits when they are match point down with nothing to lose; two minutes later they are shaking hands and moving into the obscurity of losers. If this is the case then if you are reading this post some time into the future you may not even know who Nick Clegg is.

The alternative is that this is a pivotal moment, much beloved of the media, particularly in the middle of a dour battle between well prepared opponents. There can be no doubt that most of us voters were hardly fired up by Grumpy Brown and Sir Cam-alot slogging it out over a couple of dozen swing seats. I've voted for quarter of a century without making any difference to any result and it will be no different this time. This is the result of an outdated archaic system which renders the vast majority of votes as irrelevant. Any chance that this might be about to be changed can only be good news.

I have no real idea of the policies of the Lib Dems nor do I need to know really - they won't win even if more people vote for them than either of the other parties (proof of how biased the system is) but at least we can vent our frustration at the cosy gentlemen's club of two party politics that defined most of the last Century.

Maybe I just like supporting the underdog, but for the first time I'm a teeny bit excited by this election. It remains to be seen whether this is a bang or a whimper.

outsiders

2010-04-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

At some point in the distant past some missing link proto-human stood on its hind legs so that it could pick things up and carry them with its fore paws. When it started to fall forward it stuck a leg out and took a wobbly step forward. This process of almost falling then taking a step at the last moment carried on as these creatures progressed from their primitive origins to the complex civilizations of modern times. At many different points along the way some thoughtful individuals have looked at the latest lurch and predicted that this time we will fall flat on our faces -and yet here we still are, taking another precarious step just in time.

The latest trend in the early 21st Century is to predict a global catastrophe based on pollution produced by humanity. It's not a new idea but carries the weight of a huge mountain of scientific evidence collected more thoroughly than ever before. There is a lot to be said for sounding the alarm about our over zealous plundering of natural resources in a planet with a finite size but the scientific community is just as guilty of being egocentric as previous generations who thought that we were superior to other species.

I caught the end of a programme on James Lovelock's Gaia theory last night in which he described the reaction of three different groups: scientists, mainstream religion and new age religion. The religious groups embraced Gaia as supporting their faith in a higher level of being (hence they believe that humans are not the highest form of life); the scientists on the other hand were unable or unwilling to accept that there was some organism at a higher level than us. This seems a strangely myopic view (I was particularly disappointed in Richard Dawkins) - why they can happily accept that an ants' nest can clearly control its own environment without the ants individually knowing how they contribute to the process but can't accept this on a global scale is beyond me.

Now there is a much more ready acceptance of the Gaia hypothesis but even Lovelock himself is guilty of the assumption that humanity falls outside it. If the biosphere has been robust enough to withstand ice-ages, meteorite strikes, continents colliding and any number of natural disasters, why should the efforts of human civilization for a couple of hundred years be so likely to overwhelm it? Just because we are making sentient decisions as opposed to blindly acting on instinct doesn't mean that our decisions aren't part of the Gaia process.

In another programme Brian Cox described our civilization as the pinnacle of life or something. Stephen Hawking once said we are close to understanding the Universe. I'm quite sure there were those in Ancient Greece or Persia or China or any one of a thousand other progressive periods who thought exactly the same thing. And I'll bet there were also those who predicted it would all end in tears as well.

Certainly the explosive population growth of the last Century and a half is causing our species to stagger dangerously but I see no reason why we won't turn this into another step on our winding journey. One of the reasons for this is connectedness. An anthill or termite mound functions as an uber-organism because of the close links in the communication between individuals. Now we have global problems and the ability to create global sollutions. We are monitoring so much of the world so closely that things are less likely to creep up on us than before, which is not the same as being able to predict things but at least our reaction time is much faster than ever before. We are also getting more and more concerned for the health and safety of every individual person on the planet and for a lot of other organisms as well.

I don't see us as outsiders looking at Gaia, shaking our heads and saying "That'll never support 10 Billion of us." I see us as fully integrated into Gaia, with as much right to be here as every seal, crab and elm, making decisions which will inevitably lead to Gaia self-regulating because we can't help it.

saved by the future

2009-10-23T05:14:00.000-07:00

Having read the theory that the Large Hadron Collider is sabotaging itself from the future to protect the universe made me realise that the same is probably true for each of us individually.

Effectively we all have possible pasts and possible futures but we are only aware of one now. Our possible pasts are mainly very similar so that our memories seem consistent most of the time. As an aside, there have been occasions where my memory is definitely at odds with the past as reported to me: there was a person whose appearance totally altered between the first time I saw him and all subsequent times without any explanation, some facts that I knew became false at some later date etc. The point is that we are alive in the present: therefore however dangerous our pasts seem, they weren't fatal. But of course they were, as well, it's just that the ones that killed us have created other nows where we aren't around to regret it. So if there is a possibility of surviving something then as far as we are aware, we will survive.

Of course this only works from within our own consciousness: other people can and do die all the time. They also have miraculous escapes as well - in some alternative past the ones that died didn't and the ones that survived died. So if I get a gun and play Russian Roulette I can guarantee that I will survive - from my point of view. Sadly, for you, I may easily die so you will never know if my theory is correct or not.

Of course I'm not entirely sure and so am not going to put this to the test.

becoming more civilized

2009-09-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

I was puzzled for a while over the evolutionary mechanism which is driving mankind's progress towards civilization. In many ways history is cyclical with ideologies swinging to and fro, wars happening, societies forming, growing and fracturing - so why, I wondered, is there an underlying trend which is away from the view that like is right and different is either inferior or bad and towards the principle of universal equality? Even in my own lifetime views on gender, sexuality, race and other species has changed dramatically. We now feel a collective guilt for the prejudices of the past: Japan has apologised to its prisoners of war, the British government has apologised to Alan Turing for dealing with him under laws which were legitimate at the time but now seem discriminatory.

Then I had an idea: a theory which would explain this trend. It is an article of faith but it could be proved empirically. I think that it is to do with bringing up children. That simple.

The point about evolution is that it only takes a tiny advantage to drive really big changes over time. We tend to think of the giraffe's neck in terms of all the short necked giraffes dying one hot summer when there weren't enough leaves to go round. In fact, more likely in a drought year about 50% of the giraffes who died were long necked and 50% short necked, but a tiny difference in chance would mean that there would be a few more longer necked giraffes in the next breeding season so a slightly larger chance of two of these breeding and having offspring with even longer necks. Slowly the average neck shifts towards being longer over thousands of generations and thousands of years.

So, my theory is that for any given generation the people who pass their genes on to the next generation are more likely to be civilized and social than those who don't have any children. It only needs to be a tiny difference. If you are out all the time plundering and fighting you are not bringing up children and vice versa. When a society is involved in wars, the people who go out and fight are less likely to pass on their genes than those who don't. The experience of war counts for nothing in terms of genetics which is why the horror of war in one generation does little to prevent the next from repeating it. But the genetic makeup of the next generation is fundamentally altered by the selection of cannon fodder.

Support for there being a trend linked to childcare comes from the way that children are given ever more time and energy to bring up to adulthood as societies become more civilised. A hundred years ago early teenagers were considered ready for adult life, now we are adding years to schooling (14 to 16 to 17, 18...) and a larger proportion of people are going to higher education which provides a buffer before full adult responsibilities. The more resources that our societies put into bringing up the next generation, the less they have for fighting each other.

Lasting effect

2009-08-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

It seems clear that living things outlast just about any other structures in the world. Therefore the only things we are likely to create are what we grow organically. Everything we have built over the last few millennia is unlikely to be around for much more than a few thousand years from now (if that). If we want to make things which will last longer than that we need to learn how to save our signature in the genes of living things. It seems likely that the current production of inorganic machines, buildings etc. will be replaced over the next few centuries by processes of growing what we need from seed. A future city would then be like a forest - able to adapt and survive the ravages of time. If we want to preserve our knowledge then any inorganic storage is going wear out - we need to encode it into a DNA like self-replicating structure to be extracted by future generations or future species.

Woolly reactionaries

2009-07-23T13:16:00.000-07:00

It is true (from personal experience) that things irritate you more as you get older. Hence the more you grumble and as older people are a vital market for TV, books and newspapers these grumbles are well represented in these media (media: plural not singular, that would irritate). But what gets my goat more than anything is grumbles about the wrong things.

People grumble about speed cameras when they should be grumbling about idiot drivers cutting in and out of traffic to gain a few yards in the queue at the next roadworks; they grumble about paying their licence fee for the BBC to put out politically correct woolly liberal programmes when they should be complaining about paying Rupert Murdoch for channels which put out twenty minutes of adverts and trailers every hour while sporting events which are part of our national heritage cost more money and are re-scheduled round maximising viewing figures. People grumble about immigrant workers when they should protest over obscene pay packets for directors. Then worse of all they grumble about people like me who try to point out the ignorant prejudice which they are displaying, calling us woolly liberals.

You want something that isn't woolly: OK, you're wrong. You haven't thought through what you're saying but are just repeating parrot fashion what you've read and heard. You are perpetuating old myths. But here's the rub: however hard you try you can't stop the continuous progress away from the past which you hold up as so golden towards a future which scares you shitless. Stick that in your reactionary columns.

It's my ball

2009-06-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

So Formual 1 is having an existential crisis. Every sport does this at some point which is not surprising really given that they serve no real function in the world outside their own self-serving set of rules and regulations. Basically they are all Frankenstein's monsters constructed from boys' playground games (the gender is relevant due to the competitive alpha hetero-male gene (which exists even if it hasn't been officially discovered yet) which means that it is necessary for hetero-males to rank everything and everyone on every measurable criteria; this can clearly be seen from the inequality between interest in male and female versions of the same sport and the lack of gay male participants) Wherever a group of boys gather together with time on their hands two things will happen: sides will form and rules will appear and evolve. This statement does not do justice to the process of negotiation involving every form of argument, coercion, appeasement, escalation, posturing, attack, defence, bribery, threat etc. which are more important than the process of actually playing the game. I can remember entire breaktimes spent stood around arguing over who was on which side and how big the goals should be, one person stood with their foot on the ball to ensure everybody concentrated on the issues in hand and didn't get distracted by doing keepy uppies.

Eventually these games become sports and grow to the point where they have supporters and independent judges, but the internal dynamics stay much the same. The current crisis in F1 is just a global multi-billion pound version of some snotty kid saying "It's my ball so we're going to play by my rules or not at all." There are a lot of ways that it can go: the kid with the ball can get their way, another kid with a lot of clout can get his way by force or everyone gets bored and goes and does something else.

The deciding factor in the case of modern sports is the audience (primarily the TV audience). It's us on our armchairs. We are to blame for hyper-inflationary transfer fees and player salaries in football because when offered a choice of two matches we don't choose the most exciting or the one with most goals, we choose the one with the celebrities in it. This solved English football's existential crisis in the 80's when it changed from Hacker Harrison or Slogger Jones in the 70's to Diego Primadonna or Christiano Dramaqueen in the 90's. The number of star teams or star players in any sport who reach the level of celebrity is very small and excusive and once a fan is fixated nothing will shake them off (even a preening conceited popinjay who's cheating got a national hero sent off wouldn't stop fans from wearing the colours of their chosen team).

In the case of F1 this staunch loyalty would mean that there are Ferrari fans the world over who would stay glued to a series staged by a breakaway of one (let alone eight) and the TV companies know that and that is why what we will be watching next year will involve those top teams whatever the sport is called. The hopelessness of the task of the self-appointed rule-makers face was clearly shown at the British Grand Prix where, as the commentator pointed out: the changes imposed on aerodynamics have allowed the cars to get closer to each other but they still can't overtake. They are on a hiding to nothing: if people wanted to watch cars overtaking each other there are lots of different types of racing where this happens; we watch F1 because of the glamour of Monaco and Ferrari, because of the history of places like Silverstone and because of the celebrity status of Alonso and Hamilton (who like top football players, have tantrums and pop-star girlfriends).

So next year we will be watching Ferrari and McLaren, Hamilton and Alonso at Monaco and Silverstone in cars that cost more than most people earn in a lifetime, are completely impractical for anything apart from going very fast round a dozen racetracks and still don't overtake each other very often. And that's the way it will always be.

start again

2009-01-26T07:27:00.001-08:00

It's funny isn't it that when normal people muck something up it makes them look foolish, but when you have god like status it just makes you seem more endearing - like it bridges the chasm between our futile little existences and their higher plane. Elvis and Bob Dylan both became somehow more human by giggling during songs; Diana's wedding vow name order mix-up set her on a course which would end in her becoming Queen of Hearts; nobody believed that somebody could really walk on the moon until Neil proved it wasn't all scripted (or not); in politics it works in direct proportion to the importance of the position, hence US presidents are excellent candidates in every sense. With a Reagan or a W it just served to confirm their folksy bumbliness and allay some of the terror of the most efficient killing system ever devised by man. For Obama it was an enormous relief, as he seemed a bit like a snooker player on a 147, with everybody holding their breath for him to make his first mistake. Now he's fluffed the break, you feel he could go on to win the match.

Good on the BBC for not supporting the Gaza appeal - let the bloody Israelis pay for it.

the check is cashed and freedom rings

2008-11-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

It's all been said really. A defining moment certainly. An individual can still become a symbol of something huge and important deep down in the human psyche.

Just leave it alone

2008-09-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

I know I've posted on this before, but I'm just exasperated following the Belgian F1 Grand Prix and the decision to change the result after the race after the presentation, after the press conference. I don't care who benefited or who lost out or why they think they needed to do it - I just cry in the name of all armchair sports fans (that's billions of us by the way): LEAVE THE RESULTS ALONE AFTER THE EVENT HAS FINISHED. It's like sportus interruptus - how can we enjoy the moment of triumph, the celebration the release of tension at the end of an epic battle if a faceless beaurocrat can simply cross it out with red biro at any time they feel like? It's the equivalent of airbrushing history - you can't have seen this happen because we say it didn't count. Who are these people serving? What is the purpose of sport if it is not to provide the build up, the combat and the aftermath, be it triumph or defeat? If they are going to take that away from us then we, the billions wan't our money back. We are not going to take it. We won't get fooled again. I think we should stand up for our right to have the events that we have witnissed upheld unaltered. Don't return your medals, don't accept new ones - you know you won or lost, came second or third, you know who was ahead and behind at the tape and at the checkered flag. It's recorded for all time from every angle by every camera and every timing device. Don't give in to Big Brother when he tells you to erase what happened and replace it with a meaningless flavourless substitute.

renewable energy

2008-06-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

There isn't any. All the energy in the world comes from the sun. That's not some poetic way of expressing it - it's hard every day science. So it really doesn't make any difference whether we dig up solar energy which is stored in millions of years old fossil fuels or stick a piece of glass and metal out in the desert and collect the suns rays direct. There is still a zero gain in energy over what would have happened anyway.

Now, there are undoubtably different costs involved with different sources of energy (atmospheric pollution being the one we are currently most exercised by) but in the end they are all inefficient (as all systems are) and chuck out low grade unusable energy (heat) as a biproduct. If you look at the development of civilisation you can see how we never think very far ahead as to the consequences of technological progress. Once there were a lot of trees and wood was considered inexhaustable but they did run out in many of the more developed countries or at least run low to the point of irrevocably changing the environment. Then coal was discovered which seemed pretty inexhaustable. But although, air pollution was a very real local problem during the industrial revolution, nobody really thought about polluting the whole atmosphere - it was so big people just thought of it as infinite. Now we worry about the proportion of CO2 in the air but the alternatives that are being trotted out are just falling into the same trap of a century ago of thinking of systems so big they might as well be infinite.

Take an innoculous solar panel. What harm can it possibly be doing? It just sits there and turns suns rays into useful energy. Fine. In the same way that a coal powered steam engine is fine. Both work well in isolation. But let's be realistic about our current and future power requirements. Take a look at the per capita energy use of different countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Energy_consumption_versus_GDP.png) and you see a pattern: the more developed the country the more power per head. Now look where China and India are: down near the bottom and the world average is well down there as well. So forget your energy saving lightbulbs, we are going to need more energy, a lot more energy. Per person. With a world population increasing exponentially. And energy requirements in the most developed countries still increasing. So we don't need a few solar panels. We could cover the Sahara with solar panels and it wouldn't be enough in ten or fifty years. And when you get to that scale you will get environmental effects (some that you just didn't think about: like what happens to the climate when you concentrate all that heat in one place) And don't forget the cost on resources of building them, transporting them, maintaining and replacing them.

Ultimately any effort to use the solar energy which is falling on the Earth anyway is doomed because this energy is already providing the fuel for the natural systems in place: the biosphere, water cycle etc. So we can't cut back (nobody is going to accept that we go back to a more primitive phase of our development) and we can't get enough energy from any Earthbound sources. All we are doing is cannibalising the planet and everything is degrading in the process. We need to forget about being careful and concentrate our dwindling resources on long term fixes which actually add to the energy on the planet (solar panels in orbit would be a good place to start). It's going to be expensive and use precious resources but ultimately it will save far more. I read a website which stated 'straight faced' that it would "only need an area the size of France" covered with solar panels to meet our energy needs. Fine, but put it in space not on precious land down here. That way we continue to get all the solar energy incoming that we would have anyway and our power needs from a separate source.

Take the War as a comparison. Resources were very tight. So the choice is whether to spend money on munitions to fight on the front or to protect shipping convoys in the Atlantic bringing new resources. We can fight against using up our existing resources too fast or we can invest them in bringing in new resources.

3/6/09
I heard a really good comment on Radio 4 that the amount of CO2 we can 'safely' add to the atmosphere before the effect is really horrendous is one trillion tonnes. The question, he said, is not "How much can we cut back?" but "How quickly will we reach the 1Tn mark?" and then "What are we going to do with the next 1Tn tonnes?" It has taken us a couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution to hit the half Tn and will take a few decades for the next half Tn.

tomorrows chip wrappers

2008-05-04T02:00:00.000-07:00

Society never attempts to solve a problem by simply going back to the state of affairs before the problem occurred. Change is a kind of spiral - sometimes moving quickly away from a previous situation and sometimes back towards it only to veer off sideways to something new.

We are a disposable society (I'll skip over who 'we' are so that I can get to the point). This is our current self-view: we buy new stuff, we use it a bit and then we dump it and buy something else. Assuming there was a time when we didn't do this: what did we do then? It seems that we got stuff mended and tried to keep it going as long as possible. A mend and make do society then.

So what is the answer we come up with to our disposable lifestyle? Not mend and make do certainly. These are seen as signs of not being able to afford new and latest and have negative connotations. A look around stately homes preserved by the National Trust will tell you that this attitude certainly didn't pervade the very well off in previous eras. There is a furious pride in keeping things, not just collecting and preserving, but things for every day use. There were whole towns of people whose lives were spent in specialist vocations of building, mending, tending to, adjusting and personalising everything from furniture to vehicles, from jewellery to ironmongery. My guess is that there was much less thrown away simply because a use would be found for just about everything.

The current answer to our guilt is to recycle. This seems good on the face of it: no point dumping something that doesn't rot in a landfill site - might as well collect it, sort it and make more of the same from it. But hang on. There's a huge difference between re-using a jar for this year's pickle that you used last year for jam and taking that jar, transporting it off somewhere, grinding it up, melting it down, remoulding it, repackaging it, transporting it somewhere else and then putting something else in it. That's a massive amount of effort and impact on the environment. What we are doing is deceiving ourselves into thinking we are not throwing stuff away because we put it in a different coloured bin or take it to a recycling site. It makes us feel better about buying new stuff and this is reinforced by marketing with a green tint: not only do we recycle but we buy stuff from companies that do a bit for the environment as well.

We should always be suspicious of what governments say - they are only around for very short amounts of time and have no long term vision except where it happens to tie in with short term gain. We should always be suspicious of commercial organisations - they will do or say anything to push up profits. We should be wary of pressure groups - their existence is justified by there being a problem that can be solved by getting us to act and they play on our fears. We should be wary of the media - it is either taking a standpoint and justifying it or, if it is trying to be neutral, it is very easily distracted by the sensational and picturesque.

Olympic ideal

2008-04-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

If I see or hear another person saying that if the Olympics hadn't been awarded to China there wouldn't be this chance to highlight the oppression of Tibet and put pressure on the regime to change its policies, I'll be tempted to scream.

It's like putting a rapist in charge of a beauty pageant as long as they promise to behave themselves. Is this the new international diplomacy? Forget the UN and Amnesty International: let's give Zimbabwe the World Cup so that we can put pressure on Robert Mugabe to release the election results; or maybe a joint bid by Israel and Palestine.

Every parent knows what happens if you give out the goodies first on the promise of good behaviour later. It is beyond naive not to think that once the sugar rush of the Olympics has died down that China will revert grumpily to its normal bad behaviour.

I have complete sympathy with the competitors for whom this is the pinnacle of their sport and possibly their best chance to reach these heights of achievement and recognition. But let's not muddle the great sporting event of the Olympic Games with the purely symbolic (or shambolic) spectacle of the torch relay. This seems to me an entirely appropriate forum for protest and the more it is disrputed and shown for the hypocritical farce that it is the better. Remember, this is not a race of the best athletes from each country, this is a procession of those who have already achieved greatness being patted on the back by their country (again - as most of them have already had their achievements recognised). I don't think the careers of SIR Steve Redgrave or DAME Kelly Holmes are going to be ruined by being made to look a bit silly. That they consider it an honour to carry something which is supposed to stand for the spirit of fair play on behalf of a state which tends to stamp on opposition before it can get its running shoes on says much about the shallowness of their thinking. Sport and politics shouldn't be mixed they say having spent the last two years extolling the virtues for our country of the Games coming to London - like raising our profile on the world stage, giving British companies the chance to promote themselves (or to use the current rhettoric: to allow the rest of the world to put pressure on Britain to do... what? Leave Iraq? Join the Euro? Drive on the right?) 'What's sauce for the goose...' as they say. And doesn't that completely contradict the justification of putting pressure on the hosts?

Extinguishing the torch was a good start - symbolising the lives snuffed out in Tibet. I like the idea of the alternative torch procession in Argentina. This could be taken a stage further: let's have hundreds of replica torches so that the real one is lost in the crowd. To increase the visual effect, let's all dress up in blue tracksuits like the Chinese minders. It's that or ignore it altogether, but that, as Amnesty International will testify, is why oppression goes unnoticed and unpunished. Thank goodness China got the Olympics or we never would have noticed.

aw ref

2008-03-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

Clearly in order to make democratic government answerable for its actions you need reference back to the people on important decisions. The current system seems to favour referendums (even though they hardly ever actually carry them out). This is a rubbish way of making a decision: it means that you get a large audience who are basically ignorant of the issues involved (informed by those two great oracles: the media and the man in the pub/street) and vote on gut feelings and ill-founded prejudices. In effect it gives the decision to the most widely read newspapers.

Surely a jury is a much better idea. i.e. a small well informed audience informed by a range of experts on all angles in depth and detail. As this would be much less costly than getting everybody to vote it would allow a far greater range of policies to be decided. After all the jury trial of those accused of a crime is seen as one of the pillars of democracy so there really can't be much of a ligitimate argument against the same process to trial acts of parliament.

Imagine a jury selected from all walks of life, representative of the makeup of the country (the polling organisations seem to have effective selection techniques) who are then seconded for a period of maybe two weeks to consider the pros and cons of say a proposal to build a nuclear poerstation. The government of the day would act as prosecution calling expert witnesses to support their case while any other organisation could put forward their alternative views (not necessarily directly against but giving different point of view). There would have to be a selection process to limit the number of witnesses. Then the jury would retire to consider their verdict which would act like the House of Lords in passing the act or throwing it back to parliament to be rewritten.

the cutting edge of the blade

2008-03-16T03:19:00.000-07:00

Consider Oscar Pistorius (check spelling): banning him from competing against so-called 'able bodied' runners is discrimination. Pure and simple.

First strip aside all the faff about return of energy through his blades being more efficient than a normal ankle; strip aside the scientific mumbo jumbo of testing him against some other athletes and plotting their effort:speed ratio; this is giving you answers but you are asking the wrong question.

What are you measuring when you judge a running race? It's who can run the distance fastest given (and here is where the AAA is getting its knickers in a twist) that everybody has the same conditions and doesn't get an advantage by breaking the rules. Rules which are the same for everybody. Now these blades are not mechanical - they are not bionic legs. They are sprung metal and should fall into the same category as running shoes. Presumably there are rules as to what a running shoe may be made of and so forth. If you measured a runner's efficiency in running shoes against those in bare feet this would show an advantage (if it didn't they wouldn't wear shoes) All sports have non-mechanical equipment which aids the competitor - consider swimmers' suits which reduce drag, muscle fatigue etc. When you are looking at very fine differences even the material that shirts and shorts are made of makes a difference.

So if you ban something just because it increases efficiency then you're really back to ancient greece and naked athletes, which is fine but, well there's no room for the sponsors' logos is there? Even then there are advantages to be gained from living at altutude etc. The AAA really needs to avoid looking at this as one arsy south African and as the next era in competitive sport. All that is needed is regulation on the makeup of the blades just like there would be on a new shoe. That then is equality in as much as anything is ever equal which it clearly isn't. Does it diminish the spectacle or the result having a runner with blades instead of legs? No it doesn't. All the effort and speed is down to the runner it doesn't come from any aid. If he had been born seven feet tall it wouldn't disqualify him so neither should not having legs.

Ben goldacre would have a field day with the 'scientific results' of the tests in Germany I have no doubt. The efficiency of a human ankle must fall in a range from 'hopeless' to 'very good' - there is no 'normal'. What are you going to do? Take an average? Estimate what each competitor's ankle efficency would have been if they had any? OP might have had ankles better or worse than anybody you measure him against so what are you proving anyway?

He shouldn't be allowed to compete in the Olympics this year though. Not because of his legs but because they should be being boycotted by everyone.

biofuel

2008-03-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

Just for the record: biofuel - really bad idea. And I reserve the right to say "I told you so".

World population 6 billion; a couple of billion starving and land is going to be more valuable for growing fuel crops to sell to rich countries than growing food crops. The worst of it is that these rich countries will be feeling all warm and guilt free as they drive, fly and heat their way through these new fuels because they're not from the limited fossil fuel reserves (which are tucked neatly away underground and in oceans and frozen tundra and deserts where you can't grow anything anyway) but instead are renewable and carbon neutral-ish as the plants absorb the CO2 while they grow that they release when burnt. If you ignore the energy of harvesting, processing and transporting. And the effect of the fertilisers on the environment. And the fact that food crops find their way back into the food chain much quicker to lock up more CO2 in the next generation. Read James Lovelock if you don't believe me.

supporting the second favourite

2007-11-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

As my natural inclination seems to be to support the second favourite in Everything, it makes me wonder whether this is a successful strategy in terms of return on investment.

Take betting: if you bet on the favourite you get the worst odds but you will win most often. If you bet on outsiders you get a few spectacular successes but mostly no return at all. Perhaps the second favourite gives the best cost benefit ratio. I suspect that a lot of effort by statisticians has gone into this.

My guess is it is psychological cost benefit rather than straight forward numbers. If you support the favourite you get most victories but they are expected and therefore the euphoria is minimal, more like smug satisfaction at proving the status of favourite was correct. By contrast the defeats are devastating as they undermine the position of favourite. This explains why managers and fans of the favourites are the biggest whingers about unfair conditions, refereeing, cheating by the opposition etc. They seek to explain how a favourite has not won.

Some would opt therefore to support rank outsiders, which is fine because every little victory is worth a lot. But the endless defeats must get wearing.

Now the second favourite: when you win it is still against the odds but it happens relatively often. It's still painful when you lose, but this doesn't happen much more often than with the favourite. There is a particular satisfaction at beating the favourite who has more support, money, status, i.e. has everything going for it.

I would have to confess to being a pathological second favourite supporter in all things in life (it is not a conscious decision any more than being attracted to somebody - it's inbuilt - whether nature or nurture is an interesting debatable point)

clips

2007-11-17T12:27:00.000-08:00

One of my favourite comedy scenes is in the film version of Porridge. It involves Fletcher's exploitation of the naivity of the new warden and the theft of most of his bicycle in the kitchen. It is perfectly set up with all the ingredients introduced in an understated way (helped by the lack of any background music or laughter) during the build up and executed with an almost off-hand casualness by the cast: Fletcher's muttered "Shame" when McKay enters the room, Godber's backing away before the curry powder is poured and then quietly sinking McKay's hat with the ladle. It's like comedy unplugged, the viewer is drawn into intimacy with the situation and the characters like they are really there and it becomes funny because it is 'real'. You had to be there and you were.

blade runner is such a unique and impressive film because it represents the points at which the careers of those involved took off. harrison ford took the disgruntled maverick from starwars and added a depth and soul which turned a cartoon character into something far more interesting. ridley scott took the foreboding and suspense (not to mention lack of light) from alien and applied it with more subtlety and used the sci-fi hardware as backdrop to a human story without letting it overwhelm the personalities. rutger hauer is a scene stealer merely by his appearance but pulling off the tormented psychopath searching for and destroying his creator is a heroic feat requiring supreme confidence to avoid becoming a hackneyed frankenstein monster. Even the haunting music by vangelis is exceptional. the storyline deals with huge issues of what it is to be human which are usually delivered by captain kirk with full orchestra but somehow it is still cool - has become cult - and injects humour just when it is in danger of getting too introspective.

xmas lists

2007-11-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

ipod

latest pratchett (making money)

watch

books to read - 2nd hand, used, charity shop & carboot welcome (you can never have too many)

spanish beginners tape

saucer for used t-bags

big jar for muesli

Closure

2007-10-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

It can't be said often enough how important psychology is in sport (but there are plenty of commentators and amateur psychologists who are doing their level best). The blame game for Lewis Hamilton's failure to finish the job in his last two races is raging everywhere: blame Ferrari, Max Mosley, Ron Dennis, Lewis, his dad, the paparazzi whatever. What seems to have been missed is that Ferrari played a blinder off the track to put all the pressure on McLaren and they never even stretched the rules (well not obviously).

You could put it all in terms of a corporate mission statement:

Aim: To win both driver & constructor championships (at all costs)

Objectives: 1 Identify weaknesses of our main competitors and exploit them. Note: think outside the box, not just the car, but the drivers, the team set up, reputation, other personnel etc.

Strategy:

1. Undermine credibility: this has the double advantage that it puts them on the defensive and any success they have can be disputed. The methods will present themselves based on circumstances but as a starting point it is vital to aim at the keystone of their reputation: Ron Dennis. Identify his weaknesses and use them to bring down the team.

The methods which presented themselves were ideal: a disgruntled employee, sketchy evidence of industrial espionage - nothing special in any normal season, but exploited to the full by 'sexing up' and turning them into a test case of the authority of the FIA and personally of Max Mosley. Wind them up and watch them go.

It has been said that Muhammed Ali won the fight before he stepped in the ring by undermining the confidence of his oponent using his charisma. In the same way Ferrari had won the championship before the engines started for the last two races. McLaren were all over the place, half of them fighting the other half over Alonso vs Hamilton and the management trying desperately to be seen to be fair to both sides; they had had one championship stolen from them already and they lost sight of where they were going to get the other one. At the back of their minds amidst all the jitters and recriminations was the fact that their credibility was in tatters and if they won they were more likely to be further sanctioned. Ron Dennis was in the impossible position of having to avoid acting in the best interests of the team (which is to support the driver leading the championship) lest he be tried and found guilty of bias.

While the McLaren team could hardly think for stress and conflicting pressures, the confidence of the Ferrari team must have been going through the roof. Step up Kimi Raikonen and, in an act of brilliance (overlooked by almost everybody) he, not only got ahead of Hamilton into the first corner at Brazil, but managed to brake, forcing him back into his team-mate. It was brilliant in its reading of the psychology of the situation, not the execution. Under normal circumstances you would expect Lewis to be charging for the first corner and he would simply have twitched past the Ferrari on instinct. But, Kimi assumed, rightly, that Lewis would be under strict instructions not to race against the Ferraris and concentrate on getting through cleanly even if it meant giving way. So it was that Hamilton lost all his timing into the first S bend and went from 2nd to 8th. That was down to the difference in the confidence of the Ferrari driver who was going all out for the win and the McLaren driver trying to avoid doing anything which could end his race or get him penalised.

The worrying thing now is that McLaren may implode. They have been, not only beaten, but also made to look stupid. There is a real danger that Alonso will leave taking a chunk out of the heart of the team and that Ron Dennis' authority is so badly undermined that there will start to be power games played out within the team. They badly need to decide what their aim is: is it to be seen to be a fair player or is it to win, because, in the end, the two may not be compatible.

global obesity warming

2007-10-20T01:30:00.000-07:00

"The obesity epidemic is as serious as climate change" my arse. It ain't the same ball park - to paraphrase Samuel L jackson in Pulp Fiction - it ain't the same league, it ain't even in the same sport. The obesity epidemic (if there is such a thing) is not even as significant as the smoking 'epidemic' for one very simple reason:

it doesn't affect other people.

OK, if my child needed an operation and all the hospitals were full of morbidly fat lazy people then I would be as frustrated and angry as the next person. But if you are going to start moaning about the amount of tax spent on propping up these bloaters then you quickly go down the slippery slope of: well people who smoke, do drugs, climb mountains without the proper equipment, get drunk and into fights, drive too fast etc. There's a lot of 'epidemics' which are every bit as costly, annoying and down to personal lifestyle choice. But most of them affect other people very directly: my children are much more likely to be run over by someone in too much of a hurry to watch the road than they are to be squashed to death in a lift by a fat person. People under the influence of alcohol are also very likely to inflict injuries on my family one way or another. Then there's smoking: at least it's banned in public indoors places now (about three decades late), personally I would like to see it banned in any area inhabited by children including private homes - it's a straight forward human rights issue.

But global warming (whatever the cause human or natural or a mixture) is going to affect everybody and lots of other species as well. I don't know if anybody's done any research, but aren't obese people actually carbon sinks? They must be tying up lots of the stuff and OK they eat more so there's a whole production issue but then population increase is the real baddie there.

whingeing sportstars

2007-10-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of reasons why the FIA shouldn't be putting an inspector in the McLaren garage during the Brazilian Grand Prix; almost too many to list comprehensively. Here is one: Alonso is a whinger and, as any parent knows only too well, with a moaning child you NEVER give in. (Well that's the theory anyway - in practice you end up doing anything for a quiet life and of course live to regret it - and that's the point)

Of course there is a long and illustrious history of whingeing sportstars - if you can't beat someone in the arena then you can always complain about their behaviour off it: coded yoghurts, weapons concealed in plaster casts, taking more than their share of the blankets - anything to rubbish the result if it goes the wrong way. Only... and this is where it gets a bit bizarre... usually it's the oponents who are accused not the team mates. Now, the two drivers in an F1 team are competitors but they also play for the same team which is why it seems very strange to have an official coming in and making sure that these team mates aren't being diddled by different parts of the same team. Er...

Imagine an Olympic official being posted in the British athletics changing rooms to make sure that one sprinter wasn't getting more leg massages than another.

Now, there are two outcomes from this situation: 1. the official presides, sees nothing untoward and the race goes ahead as planned.

or 2. (and if you put an inspector in somewhere you have to at least pay lip service to what they come up with) the inspector finds a discrepancy - maybe Alonso's teddy bear is trifled with by a maverick mechanic - and then someone in the FIA has to make a decision. What do they do? It's the pivotal race of the season: are you going to put somebody back a few places on the grid? Dock a few points? How many? Enough to change the result or not? The FIA don't exactly have a track record of comprehensible decisions: when Schumacher barged Villeneuve they deleted his position but not his points (or something); McLaren got their constructor points deleted but their drivers got to keep theirs (aren't they the same points? I mean the drivers earned them for the team) I live in dread of some incomprehensible decision that totally muddies the water and leaves nobody entirely happy - the winner because it undermines their credibility and the losers because it didn't bring them justice.

Sport: tune in, get a result, switch off

2007-10-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

...or why the result shouldn't be meddled with.

I watched Ben Johnson run 100m in 9.74 seconds or whatever it was. He did that and I saw it. He was presented with a gold medal - I saw that too. Then he was found guilty of taking a banned substance, stripped of the medal and the world record. This isn't about the moral maze of drug use in sport or fairness; this is about sport as a form of entertainment. I watched the race and the presentation and became emotionally involved in a moment in history. Changing the result is changing that history and asking me to erase that emotional impact from myself.

Here's another example I only just discovered: in 2003 there was a crazy Formula 1 race in Brazil. In the end the race was stopped as there were so many crashed cars around the circuit it resembled a scrapheap. The race victory was given (if memory serves) to a McLaren, which was sad as a Jordan (or some other no-hope team) had looked to be leading. I was disappointed at the time right up until I switched off and then I forgot all about it. Turns out, I just read today, 4 years later, that the result was overturned and the Jordan was given the victory a few days later.

In sports like F1 which are technologically bewilderingly complicated, there are so many things which can be discovered that have an impact on the result that there are very rarely any races at all that don't have some adjustment made to the order of start or finish. But it is still a form of entertainment when all is said and done by the army of people employed to say and do things.

Moritorium

My role as an armchair sport spectator would be enhanced by knowing the result I see at the end of the broadcast is the one which will stand. This must be even more so for someone who paid through the nose to go along to the race, fought their way through the crowds to watch the presentation ceremony and then had it all erased while they were back at work the next week.

This should be a cross-sport agreement between whatever bodies control these things. Every effort should be made to ensure fair play right up to the point where (and each sport decides what determines this final point) the proverbial fat lady sings. They could, of course, choose to delay the actual presentation but I have a feeling that the TV companies' muscle will prevent this from happening too much.

Presumably there must be a limit even now: I assume nobody is going to strip England of their 1966 World Cup medals because the ball wasn't over the line on one of their goals. All I am saying is that it should be brought within a reasonable time for viewing the event.

There will always be cheaters in sport; some that get caught and some that get away with it. There will be dubious decisions, wrong results and complaints. But this is not like the US Presidential election; if you keep deciding results in courts rather than on the pitch/track/field etc. there won't be any winners, just losers and lots of people reaching for remote controls to turn over.

compulsive communicators

2005-05-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

A quote from David Attenborough's seminal Life on Earth series. The final programme was about the development of homo sapiens. As a description is appealed to me at the time and now it rings even more true;

The largest and most complex man-made structures (forget The Great Wall of China and getting to the moon - although without them ect ect) are communications networks of one kind or another. I mean the GWoC may be visible from space but the telecommunications network not only covers the globe but is visible from, well Vega when Sagan wrote Contact, further now presumably. The transatlantic telegraph cable from Scotland to Newfoundland was the longest continuous piece of cable when it was laid. Now you could presumably crawl (if you were small enough) along telephone/data cables to just about anywhere in the world.

When the web first took off people were amazed that experts were volutarily providing answers to problems for free without any attempt at reimbursement. Hence 'compulsive' - we just have to communicate.

The inventions pushing forward the boundaries of communication: language, drawing, writing, printing, photography, telegraphy, radio, telephony, television and the internet have at each stage underpinned all the other major developments at the time. Civilisation could not have developed without complex language so no Great Wall; no man on the moon without radio either. In fact the pace of development has been accelerated by increasing speed and reach of communication technology.

New pope

2005-04-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Many people are expressing their hope that the new pope will not be as conservative as his predecessor regarding issues of contraception and homosexuality. Many are pointing to the aids epidemic in Africa and stating that the pope has a resposibility to slow the spread through more liberal policies.

This is a tempting but ultimately fruitless position to put yourself in. The pope is not democratically elected; he is not answerable to the people, not even to catholics or even the priesthood. He is the head of a faith who is chosen in secret by a select few for reasons we (the outside world) will never be party to. He is as entitled to his opinions as anybody else and is ultimately only answerable to his own faith.

If you want to help the sick in Africa then you have to look to your own faith. The catholic priest cannot simply parrot official church dogma coming out of the Vatican he is morally bound to do what he believes to be right, regardless of any backlash against himself. Surely this is one thing any Christian can agree on: Jesus stood up against blindly following the organised religion of the day. It is no good hoping the pope will give you the thumbs up to promote condom use or whatever, if that is what you believe to be the morally correct thing to do.

The true Christian believes that they will only be judged by God - there will be no pope or church to hide behind when that judgment takes place.