Salocin

When I was little, my parents used to take me skiing in the south of France. We lived in London, so we'd drive to Dover, get on a boat, cross the channel at a snail's pace, then do the 9-hour drive down through Europe to the Alps. The motorways were not continuous all the way down, the way they are today, so we'd have to drive down A and B roads, through towns and villages. It was quicker, for example, to go through the centre Lyon than it was to go around it, because Lyon's perimeter motorway was incomplete, and subject to huge delays.

As a consequence of this, we'd stop in different towns and villages every time we went down there or came back. Over 11 years, we got to know the countryside intimately, the familiar landmarks letting us know how close we were to our destination. While some trips were truly awful because of traffic or weather, many were enjoyable in and of themselves, and I suppose we obtained a knowledge of the countries and communities on the way, although we weren't aware of the value of that at the time.

Now, I can sit in the Eurostar buffet car, eating a mushy microwave-heated ham and cheese thing that goes by the name of sandwich but doesn't deserve it, and outside the window, the French countryside flies by at over 200 miles per hour. Effectively, I am in a sealed cocoon, a powered bullet, speeding from one capital to another. I see farmhouses, roads, villages and towns fly by with barely enough time to figure out how big they are and what period they're from before they're out of sight. My level of interaction with these communities has dropped to zero as a consequence of being able to bypass them completely.

Of course such technology is fantastic. It's extremely convenient to be able to go from Brussels to London in under 150 minutes, but every so often, I wonder at what cost this new efficiency has come. The benefits are quantifiable in terms of money or time: I save a certain number of hours by travelling in this way, and that has value to me. The cost is different though. It's not only that I personally no longer have much interaction with the waypoints and pitstops between Brussels and London, it's also that, were I not to have done this trip the hard way in the past, I would have no appreciation of the actual distance covered, nor would I have much understanding at all of what it's like to stop over for lunch in one of these communities, and how the people there differ from my cityfolk. Furthermore, as a society, the segregation of urban dwellers from those who live in the country becomes more pronounced. What sort of animals do they perceive as inhabiting the train that passes at 200 miles per hour on the rails that barely touch the outskits of their community? It's easy to imagine how, with different problems to face in their daily lives, they could grow contemptuous of these people who live in such comfort and ignorance of what, to them, is 'real life'.

We've come to a point where time is more valuable than ever, and anything that can provide time economies is seized immediately. I see no relaxation of this trend. We worship speed - the demise of Concord dominated the press in a way near-genocide in Somalia has failed to. Both airplane-manufacturing giants have projects for sub-orbital and supersonic passenger aircraft. Teleconferencing technology continues to advance, reducing daily the need to travel at all. In our relentless pursuit of efficiency, we specialise and narrow the focus of our lives to the point where our depth of understanding of those things that matter to us is without parallel, but our breadth of knowledge has suffered terribly. Few people these days read classics, prefering Harry Potter to any writing that might not be a "page turner", as quickly finished as a 7-hour transatlantic plane journey; the only knowledge anyone has of an artist such as Nicolas Poussin is the reference made to him in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". The most well-advertised piece of "art" in the UK in the past 10 years was a pickled cow in a vat of formaeldahyde. Very few people can tell the difference between Beethoven and Mozart, or Schubert and Brahms, but everyone can sing Britney. If it's piped to us through a clearchannel-controlled radio station, or advertised on telly, or if it embodies quick thrills, then it has popularity, without which is gains no respect. If it requires application, thought or effort, then it is the domain of the few, and they are labelled intellectual snobs.

It's always been this way, except that the minority who seek to immerse themselves in culture and philosophy is far smaller today than it was before. What's more, those that have no interest in these things belittle them today, and regard anyone who might look at the latest pop sensation and wonder what on earth is happening to the world as a backward idiot with stuck up tastes, who is unable to adapt to "modern culture". I agree with the "modern" bit, it's the definition of "culture" I'm challenging here. I lump much of today's music, art, movies and so on into a category you might call "commercial entertainment". While we can debate the definition of "culture" endlessly, I have trouble believing that the songs of today will be regarded as an achievement by anyone in 100 years, and if they epitomise the culture of the moment, that's not something to be proud of. Such things certainly have value, but they have been allowed to replace the kind of artistic achievement that inspires and overwhelms, when they really satisfy a different need - they are distractions, they aspire to popularity, not greatness, and many of their authors confuse the two.

I'm as much of a fan of rock/pop as most people, Barenaked Ladies, Ben Folds Five, The Beautiful South, to use the "B" category of my current playlist as an example, but it's not a question of whether or not people listen to pop or rock or metal or rap, it's about whether they've let these replace something else, that modern music imperfectly replicates. If you've never listened to classical music, for example, then if you stretch your boundaries in only one way this month, try listening to Pachebel's Canon, and see if you like it. If you've never really liked art, then try going to the National Gallery, pick an artist, and find out when he lived, what he painted, why it's considered great. Next time you travel somewhere, pick something to see that's on the way, and stop over for a couple of hours to find out what your ancestors built, for example, you could do worse than visit the second world war cemeteries in Normandy, both the American and the German one - they are both incredible achievements in the noble depiction of the loss and sorrow of war.

I was one of the privileged few who knew someone who had invitations to the Bridget Jones Diaries II premiere in Brussels. I can't say that my expectations were very high, seeing as this was a Hugh Grant moulded enterprise that would undoubtedly be indistinguishable from Notting Hill, 4 Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones the First and 2 Weeks Notice (or was it 4?), to name but a few. I thought it would be utterly predictable and therefore somewhat lacking in creativity and imagination.

On the one hand, my low expectations were not surpassed. But on the other, it is clear that the room as a whole enjoyed the movie; it didn't get rounds of rapturous applause, but everyone laughed when they were meant to, and despite predictable criticisms regarding the depth of the story or script on the way out, you could tell everyone had been smiling and laughing.

The recipe is predictable. Take someone with a few convenient eccentricities (in this case, an inability to get anything right in any social situation), and exaggerate these flaws to extremes. Set them up in a sequence of events that will cause embarassing (and therefore, one hopes, funny) moments by bringing this flaw to the fore time and again. Set up expectations, in some cases through not-very-subtle dialogue, and then dash them in the most humiliating and embarassing way possible. The most predictable moment of all: Culminate in a moment of truth whereby the main character makes a declaration of love in front of an inappropriate and authoritative audience at an inappropriate and unusual venue. Make it look like an achievement.

Unfortunately, BJDv2 fails to break this mould in any significant way, and so if you're looking for a new and funny take on the recipe first established by 4 Weddings and a Funeral, then look elsewhere. If you're looking for the same take, with similar situational comedy, slightly inferior execution, and a smaller (and less interesting) cast of characters, then look no further. If you want to see what Renee Zellweger looks like when she's piled on the pounds, then this is the film for you, because if you thought she gained weight for the first BJD, this time it will blow you away - I hope she didn't have too much trouble dropping the pounds after the filming was over.

So is this the kind of movie I appreciate? Absolutely not. It's funny at times, and there are a couple of original moments, including a fun sequence in Thailand and an interesting resolution to the competing girlfriend issue, but certainly not enough for me to respect this as anything more than movie studios cashing in on a franchise with an uninspired script created out of necessity rather than and inspired desire to tell a story. But for all that I have to concede that such films have strong redeeming features. Primarily, I cannot deny that almost everyone in that movie theatre had a good time - had they paid for their tickets, they would not have felt the money had been wasted. There's something in that - not every movie can be fantastic and original, and although I feel they could and should have done better, there's a place - and an audience - for such movies.

While we will always appreciate great movies omre than those that merely manage to be entertaining, there is another measure of the success of a movie. When full theatres disgorge hordes of happy movie viewers, a need has been met, and people have enjoyed themselves. Like most candies, this is neither original nor creative, but it's still sweet, and that's all this movies' audience wants.

I'm moderately right-of-centre when it comes to industrial action. My more socially-minded friends have frequently impressed upon me the need for unions as a counterweight to exploitative business practices, but unions are - often by their very nature - a horrible distortion to market forces that apply the brakes to adaptive progress and hold back the development and adjustment of nations in ways that everyone has to pay for.

While there have been examples of terrible exployer abuse in the past, my belief is that abuse of employer power is no longer the raison d'etre of most unions. Moreover, unions themselves, while claiming to champion the poor downtrodden worker, are structurally anti-employment. They are also often short-sighted when it comes to negotiating solutions to problems.

By increasing the cost of employment, reducing the ability of companies to renegotiate contracts, and removing the flexibility required to shrink (and lay people off) when times are hard, unions make it impossible for companies to weather storms. As a consequence, a strong union results in an economic argument to not hire more people, because you won't be able to get rid of them if the work they do is no longer required. So you don't hire people in the first place, you don't grow unless you're absolutely certain that that growth will be permanent, you never take growth-oriented risks, you hire fewer people than you otherwise would, and employment as a whole is damaged. I have seen this first hand. The irony is that unions often claim to want "a greater share of the business upside", but when times are hard, they expect the business to shield them completely from the storm outside, and they have no real understanding (or they don't care) of the cost this imposes upon a business. I have seen businesses fold as a consequence of this - the first example that springs to mind is Sabena.

Take the French Truckers, for example. 700 of them are currently driving to Paris to complain about increased oil prices impacting their fuel costs. While that is undoubtedly true, and it is also true that in France, four fifths of the fuel price is tax, the last thing they want is for a complete economic impact analysis of the subsidies and taxes received by the trucking industry.

The truckers get to use the road infrastructure without paying for it. In any country, this infrastructure was one of the most expensive to build and remains expensive to maintain. Trucks do more damage to roads than any other vehicle. The trucking industry basically free-rides, using state assets without paying for maintenance, construction or upkeep. That comes from the overall pot of taxes into which all companies and individuals pay - a proportion of your daily pay packet is a structural subsidy to the trucking industry. This is true in almost every country.

Trucks pollute more than any other vehicle. They consume lots of petrol, they splurge smelly toxic gases all over the place, they cause congestion for everyone else, they are often involved in terrible crashes because the hours spent at the wheel cause drivers to fall asleep, and they are the loudest, most obnoxious vehicles in built-up areas. They don't have to pay for any of those costs to society either. We stomach their externalities, we breathe their fumes, we schedule an extra hour for a trip, and if we ever figure out a way to extract toxic fumes from the atmosphere, it isn't going to be financed by the trucking industry, it's going to be paid for, once again, by everyone.

To claim that they pay these costs through fuel taxes is also misleading because I pay fuel taxes too, at the same rate they do, and I'm no truck driver. What's more, the fuel tax revenues are currently essential to governments in Europe because they plug holes in budgets elsewhere, which will only get worse as economies struggle to keep growing as the US dollar falls and falls, thus causing Europe to pay for recent US excesses through a net transfer of wealth and loss of competitive advantage as US exports come to dominate through exchange rate effects. The US administration keeps making noises about a strong dollar, but do nothing to strengthen it, because it's actually really convenient to have this transfer of wealth occur, and by the time it all comes back to bite them in the ass, the current administration will have moved out of the White House.

The crux of the subsidy/protection problem is the sliding scale between allowing a painful realignment, and protecting everyone in failing industries at the cost of our greater national competitive position. As competitive advantage shifts, entire industries die off, others sprout up, frictional unemployment rises for some time, and a lot of people complain bitterly as historically profitable enterprises become unsustainable, causing them pain in the process. This is because, for example, as fuel prices rise, it becomes more economical to use the train, and if lots of freight goes by train instead of trucks, then the trucking industry shrinks - that's painful if you're a marginally profitable trucker.

But does it mean we should prop it up with tax rebates and wealth transfers? Only if we think this change is temporary. If the oil price is going to come crashing back down, then this new state of affairs is temporary. If, however, the oil price is expected to stay higher than the historical average forever, then we have to respect the structural shift for what it is, and let the change occur. That means - for example - letting the new economics of the situation shrink the trucking industry. I don't want my tax dollars sustaining people in jobs that have a net negative financial impact on the economy, and that's what "propping up" means in this context.

Yes, it's heartless, but having a heart will still not make 1+1 equal three. When you allow these changes to happen, you strengthen the economy as a whole, you increase efficiency and competitiveness, redeploy labour towards net-value-added tasks, and grow as a nation, providing more internal wealth in the medium and long term for such things as health provision, which are unambiguously necessary (if sometimes also terribly inefficient).

In particular, at the moment, when we are getting hammered by the US because of the exchange rate, we should encourage this redeployment of resources. It will cause us to become competitive far faster than we would were we merely to weather the storm through subsidies, and find outselves as uncompetitive when exchange rates realign as we were before. This is an opportunity to - by weathering some pain - develop faster than we usually do, by providing incentives to entrepreneurs, and by helping large businesses realign themselves. Runners that train at high altitude, discover upon returning to sea level that their systems have learned to cope with less oxygen, and that this puts them at an advantage; Industry that can learn to cope in tough times, will outperform when exchange rates return to normal.

This is not to say that we shouldn't help industries through the transition. Redundancy pay, retraining and increased investment in jobcentres and employment programs are all ways to spend government money to encourage increased competitiveness while alleviating the societal pain that the change causes. This isn't a heartless strategy, it's a way of evolving so as to not become a dinosaur. Evolution is not painless, and since "change is the only constant", we need to endure that pain continuously. The reward is that we end up not being extinct.

Electric car the Eliica has 8 wheels, makes no sound, accelerates harder than a Porsche 911 and has top speeds of around 230mph (370 kph).

I'd like to introduce you to someone. He's called "That Guy". Actually, you already know him. When you're at school, in class, and the same person in the front row keeps asking questions, each less insightful and more embarassing than the last, that's "That Guy". When you're at a dinner party, and an unbelievably embarassing comment is spoken far too loud at precisely that moment when the conversation around the table paused, that's "That Guy".

I ran into That Guy this evening, in a context in which I've seen him before. In fact, wearing different faces, this is the 4th time I've had a near miss in a car because of his behaviour. He was talking on his cellphone, and almost caused an accident, before sneering at everyone else on the road and driving away as though it was everyone else's fault.

When I was doing my MBA in Philadelphia, I used to cycle into school almost every day. I was knocked off my bike 3 times in 2 years.

The first time had nothing to do with a mobile telephone. I was going downhill fast, and a taxi overtook me on the left. He then stopped ahead of me, but left me enough room to pass between his cab and the parked cars. I was going very fast because there's a big uphill after this downhill, and so most cyclists build up some speed to help them on the way. When I was about 5 metres away, the passenger kicked the door open. I did the only thing I could think of, and jumped straight up off my bike. I went flying over the car door, my bike slammed into it, and I landed on the road. A student got out of the car, accused me of riding dangerously, swore in lots of colourful language, and ran away. The taxi got out of there as fast as possible...

The second accident happened almost in the same place. At the bottom of the dip, just where the downhill becomes an uphill, there's a right turn. I wasn't going that fast this time, and I was beginning to cross the junction when someone drove past me on my left, then turned right, right into me. He was distracted because he was talking on his cellphone, and was driving with one hand and half his attention. I flew across the bonnet, my bike somehow survived and once again, I was fine. What really marked this event was the reaction of the driver. He stormed out of his car and practically yelled at me, "Why aren't you wearing a helmet?". This time I had my wits about me and asked, "Because you wouldn't have hit me if I'd been wearing a helmet?" Besides which, it was my legs he almost squashed, not my head. Regardless, he was still on the phone, and carried on his conversation afterwards.

The third time this happened was on a parallel street going in the opposite direction, and a big car drove past me on the left with a woman at the wheel. As she passed, she drifted into the bicycle lane, and her wing mirror clipped my hand, or my handlebars, I don't remember. Either way, I went flying over the handlebars and did a nice forward somersault while seated on the bike. The last thing I saw before I hit the ground was the driver's head, with her right hand holding a cellphone to her ear. She hadn't even noticed that she had hit me, even though the mirror was now folded against the side of the car.

Today, while driving back from central Brussels, a driver pulled into a roundabout as I came around it. I slammed on the brakes, squealed to a stop a couple of inches from his car. He gave me an utterly gormless look. It took me a moment to figure it out, but he hadn't even noticed he was doing something wrong. When he saw the look on my face (pissed off, eyes rolled skywards), he gave me a truly loathesome look, then scowled at the other drivers who had noticed the near-accident, and cut everyone off by driving in a straight line across the roundabout.

I've had this conversation with a couple of people, and they always claim that they can talk on the phone and drive at the same time with no risk. Every scientific study that has looked at the question concluded that it's a significant danger because reaction times drop, awareness of surroundings drops and co-ordination drops when talking on the phone. They also conclude that it's worse if you hold the phone in your hand as you talk, but it's almost as bad with a hands free kit - it's what's happening in the driver's head that causes the risk, not the act of holding a box in one hand. But how do you get people to recognise that it's risky when everyone has this cognitive malfunction where they believe that it (a) couldn't possibly happen to them and (b) they could cope with it if it did, because they have faster reaction times / are better drivers / aren't like those other people.

It's a simple change to make. I've stopped talking on the telephone in the car. Have you? It took getting hit by cars for me to realise it's not reasonable to think I'm immune. Let's hope other people are quicker to change their behaviour than I am.

I spent 40 minutes writing an article on security, encryption, privacy and the like, and then hit the wrong button, closed the browser window and lost the lot. There's no way I'm writing it again, so this is all you get for today.

Damn I hate it when that happens - all that effort gone to waste. I want a "recall contents of last unsubmitted form" function in Firefox.

Normal service resumes on another day.

Alternative punctuation for passive aggressive communication, from ze

Taiwanese man tries to convert lions to Christianity, says "Jesus will save you. Bite me."

I’m sitting in the Eurostar terminal in Brussels, and it’s some ungodly hour of the morning, and my painfully early awakening coupled with the prospect of an entire day of travel for 2 hours of job interviews out west of London have obviously put me in a pissant mood. It’s one of those mornings where every silver lining comes with a thundercloud, and every observation I make seems to fall short of expectations somehow. Allow me to demonstrate…

The WiFi Access in the Eurostar terminal is shitty, without clear instructions on how to subscribe, and probably costs a fortune. The coffee is bitter, machine-made, and has an anonymous hair in it. The train to Bruxelles-Midi (where I catch the Eurostar) was smelly, old and overcrowded, my Thinkpad battery is so dead I get about 30 minutes power out of it and my shirt collar is half a size too small.

In other words, I’m quite capable of seeing the world in shades that vary between black, pitch black, dark black and gloomy, particularly when I’m asked to get up at 6am two days in a row, and spend a fortune on transportation for an interview that will probably not get refunded by my prospective employer.

But I’m in an introspective frame of mind these days, probably brought on by the sense of perspective gained from seeing a ski-lift cabin crash to the ground a few metres away from me, and so I find that the gloom is only skin-deep. Going through the observation exercise again…

I love my top-of-the-line laptop computer (I’m a big fan of IBM), even though it is now 30 months old and therefore probably quite out-of-date. Despite being over 2 years old, the battery still has some life left in it. The Thinkpad has built-in wireless access, and 5 years ago I wouldn’t even have conceived the possibility that I could connect to the internet with my own computer in a train station, let alone without a cable, so it’s quite impressive that there should be a wireless network in the Eurostar terminal at all, and it’s unsurprising that the provider should want to make some money from it’s installation. I got to the station in time to buy myself a coffee, which was provided thanks to the fact that someone got up even earlier than me so as to open the coffee shop in the first place. There’s a direct service from Waterloo (where I live) to Bruxelles-Midi, and my mother was kind enough to get up and drive me to the station before dawn, even though I could have walked and she could have slept. I’m now on a super-fast French-designed train that’s going to go from Belgium to England via France in 2 hours and 15 minutes, will deliver me direct to London Waterloo, and goes through a tunnel that has to rank as one of the most insane acts of engineering ever witnessed.

Incidentally, I will have been to 5 countries in 3 days, which is quite something all by itself.

As for my collar being half a size too small, I choose to believe that my shirt shrank in the wash.

With a second look, it seems like there's a lot to be grateful for. And with that, as though by magic (and with a bit of cognitive dissonance), everything’s right with the world.

Now let’s hope I get the job.

UPDATE : Looks like the positive attitude paid off. Apparently I will have a job offer through the mail soon.

I just came back from a weekend in Soelden (or Sölden), a ski resort in Austria. While I was there, an empty gondola crashed to the ground after becoming detached from the cable carrying it up the mountain. I was standing with a couple of friends on the ski slope to one side of the gondola, about 50 meters away, when it wobbled, smacked against the supporting pylon, and then fell off the cable and crashed to the ground below. The AP article referenced above has demonstrated to me how totally misleading the news can be when it's received 3rd hand in this way, it gets most of the facts wrong!

That's a picture of the skilift in question. It's a two-stage lift with cabins that hold a maximum of 8 people in each. The high wind caused some technical problem and the skilift was closed for a very long time, with technicians running around the middle station (the one half-way up the lift where the gondolas slow down and pass through a station to let people get on and off).

We overheard lots of different stories about what caused the problems, and the one story that seemed to make some sense was that the wind had caused some cables to get tangled in the upper half of the lift. This caused the entire thing to be halted as they tried to fix it, and it was standing still (in sub-zero temperatures and howling winds) for about 45 minutes, with lots of people in it (I've heard numbers ranging from 70 to 134). We were walking up a ski slope carrying our skis to get to another skilift and around this broken one when we heard a grinding sound.

One of the gondolas on the far side of the lift (the ones coming down from the top, and therefore empty) was rocking really violently. It was stopped over one of the pylons that hold up the cables, and it looked like someone was throwing it from side to side. Then it came partially unstuck from the cable and turned sideways, I think it smacked into the pylon itself, and then simply toppled from the cable, rotating as it fell. We couldn't see where it hit the ground because it was in a dip, but we certainly heard the crunch of metal hitting ice. At the same time as it fell, we heard a loud noise and saw a cable come whipping out from the middle station, broken. It flew up past the lower cabins, I think it must run through some support in the cabins, and is probably a safety cable or something of the kind. Of course we thought it was the cable holding the cabins up and were almost expecting to see the whole lot come crashing down. We were holding our breath at the time, but although it caused lots of the cabins to rock quite violently, they didn't look like they were going anywhere. The broken cable hanging down between the pylons did make it really clear that they certainly weren't going to be moving any time soon, but the cable that supports all the cabins was still intact, and the fallen gondola had somehow become unattached from that cable.

This was the end of the dramatics from our point of view, although I can't even begin to imagine how absolutely terrified the passengers stuck up there in the cabins must have been, having seen a cabin nearby fall 20 meters to the ground below. We had to get off the mountain because it was so cold and windy we couldn't feel our faces or fingers anymore.

From the bottom, we saw a helicopter try to dangle a person near one of the cabins, but the winds made it impossible, and they gave up on that after a while. I think it was incredibly risky to have tried it in the first place. I didn't even know helicopters could fly in gales like that, and the poor rescuer dangling from a line below it was being thrown about like a cocktail shaker.

Eventually, we heard on the radio in Germany that it took many hours to bring the people down, and that they did it by rapelling from the cabins to the ground (wearing harnesses and lowered along ropes). How the rescuers got into the cabins to set up the equipment and put everyone in harnesses is anybody's guess, maybe they had to shimmy down the cables to the cabins after climbing the pylons. Thank goodness there are people prepared to do things like that.

The final result is - one downed cabin, nobody killed, a few people with hypothermia from being in the cabins for so long, some very very scared individuals and pretty bad PR for Soelden ski resort. Last I checked, the skilift was still out of action, although I expect it will take several days, if not weeks, to repair. They may also want an enquiry into how something so awful could have happened: people sometimes go down in gondolas when they don't like the weather at the top or when they don't want to ski down for other reasons. There could have been someone in that gondola when it went crashing to the ground.

I would also like to thank my procrastinating Italian friend, who made us wait as he copied photos from one computer to another. Had he not delayed us, we would have been trapped in those gondolas too.

Another observation : When I saw the gondola fall down, I had 2 reactions. The first was denial: I use these things all the time and it's necessary for me to feel safe in them, I also never anticipated that they could actually fall off the cable. The second was ... nothing. It took me about 2 hours to actually get an emotional reaction to what had happened. I felt like I was watching a movie. I think that by seeing extreme stuff on television all the time, by constantly getting bombarded by the worst news in the world, and hearing all the time about disasters, when we see one for real, we're not impressed. It's wrong, we should be impressed. I should have been utterly appalled by what I was seeing from the very moment it happened. Apart from checking with a few people to make sure that they too believed the gondola to be empty (otherwise we would have had to go and check), I just stood there for 5 minutes, and then got moving when I realised I couldn't feel my fingers.

I expect that this comes from having seen too many disaster movies and documentaries about "what went wrong", and also from the fact that there really wasn't anything we could do to help - they were 20-40 metres up, dangling from a cable, and we were in sub-zero gale force winds on the ground. Nevertheless - it's disturbing. I'm still happy my reaction was one of being a bit stunned. Some of the people around us got out their cameras and started taking pictures almost immediately, which seemed kind of sick to me.

I recently added this site to yoursite.nu, and a few people have reviewed it. Although some of the reviews are very useful, it seems some reviewers got as far as realizing that there are 3 columns and a lot of text to it, and then posted something (positive or negative) that isn't all that much use. Certainly the reviews of zen boards are often from people that didn't read the faq and didn't really pick up on what it's for.

One comment drew my attention though ... first because it was complimentary and I'm sucker for a nice word, but also because the poster suggested I put up something about me. I've often considered putting up an "about me" section, and always rejected the idea, because this blog isn't... really... about me. In fact, I'm not sure what this blog is about, since I just write on whichever subject appears to be most inspiring at the time.

All the text makes my eyes not want to read. Maybe not. Woah, you have alot of archives. Your blogs are very intelligent (I don't mean it as you don't come off as intelligent; but some people have ways of sounding intelligent here, then making posts with internet lingo every other word.) Eventhough the design is simple, overall, I like your site. But, maybe, you should add a bit about yourself?
- aira

The "about" link is often the first link I click on a site when I first visit it. It gives context to what's written, because you can understand certain points of view better given that context. The first two characteristics I always look for are age and sex. I am usually disappointed by the rest of the personal profile. I think it's an awareness that most people might be similarly disappointed upon reading my profile that makes me reluctant to write one. We often look for people with similar backgrounds, of either sex, when we browse other people's blogs, and I don't think I'm going to get many people reading my blog because they empathise with my background. It's not special, I'd be surprised if many people thought it sounded similar to theirs, or that they're going to particularly empathise with me because of it. Since it costs you a little privacy to write a background statement, you want something in return, and I don't think making such things public is going to be worth the cost in my case. I'll let you know if I change my mind.

When I come across a gung-ho Republican website, I have to admit that I'm usually quickly turned off by the bias, singlemindedness and the venom I find there. The same goes for websites that have as their founding principle the pursuit pursuit of any "marginal" or "minority" or "interest group" agenda: pro-life, pro-choice, feminist, republican, democrat, gay or lesbian, it all feels too much like looking at life through a lens that removes all perspective and objectivity. And they're almost always angry and defensive. I don't have to agree with someone to think their weblog is great - it's hard to beat lenin's tomb for fantastic provocative content.

What else do we have? Well of course there's the "babyblog" or the "pregnancyblog", and while I understand a parent's hormonally-fed desire to share with the world their little bundle of joy, I have no interest. There's also the average-average blog, in which someone who has no real content to feed outside appetites feels the need to share information such as "I just installed firefox" or "going to watch a baseball game tonight", in order to fill empty spaces on their blogs. These seem to be in the majority, and a few of them will undoubtedly mature to become quite good, but they have to go through some sort of blog adolescence in which they squeeze their spots in public before they find their style and stride. Finally, there's linkblogs, which just link to every story the author finds of passing interest, more often than not driving traffic to the major news sites, and as a group all linking to the same damn things.

There are actually very few great personal weblogs out there - my favourite of the moment was mentioned in a recent post. It takes good writing skills, and an ability to recount events that - for me at least - are far too personal to share. I leave that to those braver and more qualified than I.

A recent visitor called Sam posted the following:

If you want my attention for a while, write a really good post for us all on why exactly people are so desperate for traffic! I am being serious, not making fun of you or anyone else, I am guilty of it too. I find it perplexing though the desperation that some people exhibit for readers

It's an interesting question, because although we all know why (we all feel it), it's not the easiest thing to put into words. My thoughts would be...

It's why you started. Most people who write websites are not interested in writing for the sake of getting their words into storage, otherwise they're be typing into a word processor. We write, and we post, because we're looking for validation, or to test our opinions against that of the public, or to put our lives on show in the hopes that others will sympathise or somehow be attracted to our daily grind. The more arrogant among us probably like to think they're educating their visitors. When we start, we figure the worse that can happen is that people don't agree with us. After a month or so, we figure out that it's much worse than that: people aren't even caring enough to read. After that initial period of denial, we realise that we're going to have to fight for traffic, and that's what BlogExplosion and all the other things we all join work off - this need to advertise our free (often worthless) journalistic endeavours.

Comparative value. It's happened to everyone - you come across a weblog, and it's the most completely vacuous load of drivel you've ever read. In my case, this usually means that it's in pink and there are more smilies than there is punctuation. Then we see that each gut-churningly bad post on this weblog has about 150 comments, and that the referers list proudly displayed on the bottom of the page is longer than the entire content of your own site. So you go back to your site, read through it, and wonder how on earth it's possible for someone who writes that blandly and that badly to get so much attention when the effort you put into your own site goes completely unrewarded. You start craving traffic because if that site can get it, then surely you can too. Of course what you don't realize is that the site is being read by lots of people just like the author, and that that site isn't your competition, because you probably don't want those people posting on your site anyway.

It all comes down to currency. Visits are the currency by which our weblogs are valued. If people visit and disappear within moments, it feels as though they walked out of a film, or stopped reading a book halfway through the first paragraph - it's a statement about the quality of your writing and your content that isn't pleasant. If no-one visits at all, that feels like the same statement, but made through the fact that no-one wants to link to you. It's not necessarily accurate, because if people can't find your site in the first place, they can't very well be judging it's value, but the hits-as-blog-currency argument makes more sense to me than links-as-blog-currency used by so many webblog ranking systems.

I've never been well-linked, and it probably took me about 2 years to get over that. Now I have a small collection of regular readers, they drop by briefly but regularly, and seem to check the headlines of the new articles and read those that interest them. They seem to post rarely - the prefer to lurk. I'm happy for them to lurk, and I'm grateful that they think - however silently - that what I write is worth reading.

More accurate maps of the US election result, via esoterically.

Right, listen up all you 30-second-to-the-nanosecond flash-in-the-pan traffic-whores. Here's a question for all you just-visiting-because-I-need-to-build-traffic-somehow blogexplosion subscribers. (didn't get the bonus credits this time either eh?).

I've been staring at my visitor logs in real time for the last 10 minutes (I know, drives the definition of obsession to new limits) and I have concluded that there are 2 types of visitors to this site.

First and foremost, there are the blog spammers. They hit the site approximately twice per minute, don't request any page, but hit directly with an HTTP POST command, only to get told to take a hike by the glorious mt-blacklist software. Second, there's you blogexplosion people, who receive the front page. Once and only once. And are never seen again.

So here's the challenge. Please spend the next 30 seconds (or more, if you're a Good person) doing one of the following...

• Read an article (other than this one) and tell me what you think in the comments. Link back to your site, if I like it, I'll permalink it and you can permalink me right back and everyone wins and is happy and so on so forth.
• Check out zen board and spend enough time there to actually give me some feedback worthy the term. That means constructive criticism, or, if you're feeling really generous and want to salvage my downtrodden ego, tell me you think it's actually quite good. Then tell me how to improve it anyway.
• Answer this post with the words, "ooh I came from blog explosion too. Aren't we all just traffic whores." But that lacks imagination.

We are eternally grateful.

Please visit zen boards and let me know what you think.

It's a free forum system that allows anyone to create forums and then post links to them on their website, or to send out the links in email, or whatever. It's brand new and evolving as you read this, because I'm still coding it. It will probably break here and there and if you could let me know where I'd be eternally grateful.

If you want to use it, go right ahead - I have no plans for deleting any forums that are created in there. If the traffic spirals out of control, you might start seeing some googleads or pleas for donations, but hopefully that won't happen!

So here comes the new batch of trailers for the Christmas movies. Looks like some of this might even be decent stuff. First up is Ocean's Twelve, they finally replaced that rubbish teaser trailer with something that gives us a few plot points. I'm looking forward to this one. Next, of course, we have that disaster-in-the-making, Star Wars Ep III - although it looks like Lucas may have tried to return to some of the style and feeling of the first trilogy, I find it hard to get my hopes up for something so clearly capitalising on hype and past success - they're even trying to bleed some value out of the trailer by limiting its distribution, but you should be able to see or download it by using the link above if you have the right filesharing software. Then there's National Treasure and Imaginary Heroes, both of which are new to me and may be good or bad - it's kind of hard to tell. One looks deep and meaningful and the other could be lots of fun. If you like slightly arthouse movies that remain extremely well written, you could go see Primer which I reviewed after I saw it at Sundance, and which I loved. The trailer doesn't do it justice, and frankly isn't that representative of the movie itself. Alexander looks like it has high production values, but I fail to see Colin Farrell as a historical mega-figure. Maybe I'm being unfair and he'll pull it off. Either way, Angelina Jolie looks fantastic as ever. Elektra looks like poor mystical gobbledygook and Cars from Pixar looks fantastic, but we'll have to wait until November next year for that one!

Legions of Canadians have already pledged to sacrifice their singlehood to save their southern neighbours from four more years of cowboy conservatism. From the BBC.

I believe that one of the most distasteful human desires is the desire for power. I don't mean the sort of Dr. Evil megalomania, but simple power over your fellow man, the sort of thing that is lampooned by South Park whenever Cartman hollers "respect mah authority" in that annoying voice.

Our western societies require that power be bestowed upon a few trusted individuals so as to enforce the rule of law, preserve our way of life and stand fast against the inevitable forces that rub up against what we term civilized society. These are the policemen, customs officials, military, tax inspectors and so on that ensure the proper working of certain essential aspects of our economic and political system. They are crucial roles that are of paramount importance, and which need to be carried out with accuracy and tact.

So why is it that so many of them are wankers?

The photo above is of three individuals dressed in military uniform who were securing the train station in Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when I returned from South Africa. It was very early morning, well before the rush hour, and it was quite cold. With absolutely nothing to do, the police officer soon ended up scolding a child for walking the wrong way down a deserted escalator.

The kid was doing nothing wrong, was clearly just enjoying himself, no-one else was using the escalator and his parents were nearby. It seemed to me to be the use of authority because it existed, rather than because it helped anyone in any way. The child, clearly intimidated, scooted off and superglued himself to his parents.

Far worse than this is the experience of going through US customs. I have had to do this a great many times now, and am frankly now almost always prepared for the worst. While I have had a few pleasant surprises, by and large, my experience is one of cringing anticipation and an expectation that I will walk away feeling somehow insulted, regardless of how carefully I have prepared my papers. Furthermore, you absolutely positively cannot give these people any kind of feedback at all if you are spoken to in an insulting manner, because in my experience they are simply waiting for an excuse to demonstrate just how horrible they can make your day.

Being cheerful in return just makes them suspicious, and that's assuming you are still able to look cheerful after an 8 to 12-hour flight and a 6 to 9-hour time difference.

Police officers in the US are sometimes similarly difficult to deal with, although in Philadelphia and Seattle I've had some good experiences to mitigate the bad. There's this perception they have that they deserve a measure of respect because of the uniform they wear, which makes them swagger rather than walk, accentuating the swing of the hips so that their utility belt swings back and forth and their gun, baton, pepper-spray, radio and handcuffs are observed by all.

To my mind, the importance of these roles comes from the fact that they exist to support our society and our way of life. In a very real way, these individuals, employed by the state (and therefore paid for by us all), are the servants of the people, and that is something that should make them proud, not arrogant. The measure of their success should not only be the crime they prevent, illegal immigrants they catch and tax-dodgers they trap, but also the level of comfort everyone has around them. We should not feel threatened by a customs official unless we have good reason to be - so why am I always made to feel like dirt at the border?

"Power corrupts" doesn't really explain this phenomenon - it's a self-selection problem. Many of these jobs are not very well paid - that means that people who can get better pay elsewhere tend to do so. Of the people who will accept this sort of pay level for this kind of job, those that go into positions where they are endowed with powers (police, customs, etc) often do so because they are attracted by the power, rather than by the opportunity to serve the people. Often, they also forget that serving one's country and serving the people in the street is actually one and the same thing. In the case of border guards, they don't realise that they're the first impression most of us have of America - my friends and I often reflected that we knew we were back in the US when we'd been insulted by the border guard and been made to feel like a drug smuggler by customs.

In Seattle, I once crossed the road like a Londoner. That means that I figured out where the cars were and how fast they were moving, and then just crossed the road. I was stopped for jaywalking. I had never heard of jaywalking before. After walking me to the pavement, the officer asked me if I knew I had been "jaywalking", and in my very English accent, I said, "I've been what?". A huge grin appeared on his face as he figured out what my particular malfunction was, and he thought it was great fun to see the look on my face as he explained what was, to me, a ridiculous rule. He was funny and friendly, and performed his job perfectly. It is truly the case that people are just more laid back on the west coast.

In Philadelphia, there's a traffic cop in University City that many students refer to as the "dancing policeman", because when the traffic gets heavy in the afternoon, even when it's pouring with rain or hailing like it's the end of the world, he controls the junction near the bookshop, and stands in the middle of the street directing traffic with energetic arm and leg movements, a whistle hanging around his neck and a big shit-eating grin on his face. Everyone loves him. Just seeing him puts you in a great mood, even when the weather's awful. The motorists honk to salute him as they drive by. He never gets disobeyed, and he never needs to shout, confront or threaten anyone.

These two examples show that you can be a police officer, a traffic cop, probably even a customs agent, and still be really nice to everyone. In these positions, you have a huge impact on everyone you interact with, and with that comes a social responsibility to not negatively impact their lives for no reason.

Here in Belgium, we have overly powerful civil servants in the form of rabid tax inspectors. The police are ruthless when you commit a minor infraction such as being 2% over the speed limit, but utterly useless when it comes to getting to your house when your alarm is going off and you're getting burgled. Our politicians are part of a coalition system so gridlocked that they're going to be in power forever and they know it. But nevertheless - there are a few really good people in some of these roles, many more than there were a few years ago, and hopefully that will improve further in time.

Correlation between average US state IQ and which way each state voted in the 2004 election

Download movies, get sued. This is the message being sent out by the MPAA to the thousands who swap movies over the internet, in a move mirroring the music industry's assault on file-traders.

Given the ease with which a DVD can now be ripped and made available for download, and the huge variety of movies available through file-sharing networks, not to mention the steadily escalating speed and falling cost of broadband internet access, it is not surprising that the studios should feel threatened.

One wonders what the justifications for downloading movies will be. The studios have good years and bad years depending on the appeal of the movies they've made, and many people watch lots of commercial rubbish while claiming it's no good. Are they now going to refuse to pay on the grounds that the films were no good anyway? They'll probably claim that if they like the movie, then they'll "go out and buy it anyway", which means it's "positive for the industry, and grows sales", or some such nonsense.

The BBC News is reporting on the difficulties caused by the deteriorating condition of Yasser Arafat. A specific passage caught my eye :

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said he would allow Mr Arafat to return to the West Bank if he recovers.

But he has made it clear he will not allow his old adversary to be buried in Muslim holy ground in east Jerusalem.

Why not? For Gods sake, why ever not? Fate hands you an undreamed-of opportunity to make a symbolic gesture that will cost you absolutely nothing, and you miserably fail to take the opportunity, for reasons of domestic popularity and political dogma. The attitude and petty intransigence that underlies this decision is one of the reasons this miserable conflict drags on endlessly: When given the chance at noble gestures, both sides recoil, prefering to return to the safe bosom of their ideologically-justified loathing.

Ok, so here it is in black and white: I wanted John Kerry to win. I was not fanatical about it, but I was surprised at the strength of my disappointment when I heard that George Bush had almost certainly clinched it. I saw Kerry's concession speech as I wandered through Heathrow airport towards my gate, and sat in the plane trying to figure out why this bothered me so much. What expectations had been overturned that affected me so deeply?

It's only after the storm is over (and all the pundits have stopped the ridiculous pejorative and exaggerated verbal crossfire that clouds elections so much) that we have a little calm in which to reflect, and thinking on the election after the fact, I came to the conclusion that my disappointment really wasn't about any of the issues that had been so hotly debated for the past few months.

Had Kerry won, I would have expected four years of reconciliation between Europe and the US. It wouldn't have mattered that the policies didn't change that much, the tone of much of what has happened, and the fallout from it, is such that parties in Europe would have made the effort at reconciliation with Kerry almost regardless of his actions, provided his words were soothing. It is much harder to envisage reconciliation with Bush as a consequence of the fact that, at least from my point of view, there is an overwhelming disdain for many European countries from the point of view of the Bush administration and it's supporters. It is this sense of being looked-down-upon by the other side of the Atlantic that so piques French, German, Spanish (e.t.c.) pride - and this, on a gut level, is understandable.

Even if Bush wants to build bridges at this point, it is very hard for those bridges to be accepted on this side of the Atlantic because they are being built by the same administration that (from their point of view) marginalised them in the UN by over-ruling the desires of the majority of the votes in that house. On this side of the Atlantic, many people blame the US for the weakness of the UN, because the US is perceived to have undermined it by working around it and by so visibly disdaining it. This same administration referred to certain countries as "Old Europe", taking the historical origins that these countries are rightly proud of, and ridiculing them. It's not just Bush, it's Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice and Cheney too.

If the next four years are characterised by the same approach from the US, then the wounds caused in the transatlatic relationship may end up being so deep that the scars will be felt for ever more.

Bush has won. Both the popular vote and the electoral vote. Putting aside the division in the US that split the country deeply along partisan lines (for that is a uniquely US problem that isn't relevant to this argument), I can only wish them the wisdom, strength, honour, generosity, kindness, moderation and depth that will make their administration great. A great US administration, and the things it can achieve, can be transformational in a wonderful way for the world as a whole. But sometimes, a President who is great for the US, is not necessarily great for the world, and as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, he has he has power over us all, and a duty to us all.

As you can see from my referrers list, I've received 2 hits from Google recently by people looking to download books for free. They came to my site because I've reviewed the books and I have an article that talks about illegal downloading further down the page. Go buy it in a shop you tight-fisted bastards, you're not being asked for ridiculous amounts of money, and you can buy it second hand and/or sell it after you're done with it.

We often overestimate how good our senses are, because we don't realize the extent to which our brain fills in the blanks. When you can't quite hear every word someone is saying, you don't necessarily notice because you can extrapolate the missing words from the context of what's being said. What happens when your brain is tricked into filling in the blanks incorrectly? To answer this question, count the black dots in the image (click to expand). This image nabbed from this site.

I am a great fan of Iain M. Banks' science-fiction novels. Over the years, I have grown out of most authors who write novels based on the far-future, or science fiction as an exploration of technology, but have become a great fan of Banks' work.

The Algebraist is the latest in his collection, and will be a bit of a disappointment to his more die-hard fans insofar as it is not a "culture" novel. The Culture is a society created in some of his previous books that provides a truly fascinating crucible to use as a case-study, but the benefit of departing from that universe is that he can create a new one to examine, and also that new readers will not feel quite so alienated (it took 2 or 3 books before you really understood the culture anyhow).

Amazon.com don't seem to have it in stock yet, so I find myself forced to forego any commission and send you direct to Orbit Books for your buying pleasure. If you're in England, you can always go to Amazon.co.uk, because they have it.

Banks has the ability to create truly extreme characters and universes and make them seem quite normal. Many of the characters in this novel therefore exhibit characteristics that range from the eccentric to the deranged, but all fit nicely into their roles as though there could be nothing more normal than to have an insane psychopath as the dictator of a galaxy-spanning empire.

The Mercatoria : a semi-corrupt governmental organization that rules over most of the rest of the galaxy, are in the process of rebuilding their wormhole links to various systems since the last war, in which man was pitted against AIs, and man prevailed. Rebuilding wormholes is a tedious business that involves travelling large distances over hundreds of years. The planet Nasqueron and the system it inhabits are on the fringes of the galaxy, and therefore at the bottom of the list of planets expecting to be reconnected to the rest of the galaxy.

Something has been discovered, however, in the Nasqueron system. The seers, an order of scientists who examine and interact with the "Dwellers", eccentric gas-giant-dwelling creatures who have outlasted every other galactic species by a factor of hundreds, discovered some information that has every galactic power-broker heading to Nasqueron at the fastest speed their ships can carry them. Barely forewarned in time, Nasqueron must prepare, and Fassin Taak, the seer who inadvertently uncovered the information in the first place, must undertake a mission to find this information before every military force in the galaxy tears apart the Nasqueron system looking for it.

Through the lives and actions of a limited number of individuals caught up in the vast sequence of events, Banks describes with his usual flair how the actions of the few can affect the lives of all. Bringing in more and more species, and vividly painting a vision of the galaxy 2000 years older than today, he shares with us a fantastic world which we can inhabit for the duration of the novel. While not as internally coherent or believable as the worlds created in the Culture series of novels, you will nevertheless find it challenging to interrupt this story, so read it on holiday rather than in-between your working days!