Now, on to the merely irritating rather than the really upsetting. As is implicit in the various posts on telco subjects that I have posted (but which I have not mentioned explicitly), I am presently looking for a job. With that (and the huge number of visitors I received when Steven Den Beste linked to me) in mind, I have put a link to my CV amongst the links on the left of the page. I am looking for a position in telecommunications or media analysis in equities, fund management, investment banking (if investment banking still exists) or consulting, or something in the strategic planning department of a telco, telecommunications equipment or media company. I am extremely knowledgeable about wireless technology of all kinds, and the differences between all the various technical standards coming into play. (I am not half bad on wireline technology either, but my focus has been more on wireless). My record on calling which technology is likely to prevail is good: and I can provide anyone who is interested with past research that I have written demonstrating this. (I cannot post it, however, because the copyright belongs to my former employer). I also have extensive financial modelling skills that I gained working with Credit Suisse First Boston. I am a good (mostly C) programmer and have a very quantitative bent, having a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cambridge University. (I also came first in my year in Applied Mathematics at Sydney University in Australia). My most recent interest has been the technology of digital television, and I have spent the last nine months writing a book on the subject. (I will put some extracts from the book on this site when I am back from Germany on Friday). I am extremely good at writing clearly on complicated technical subjects in plain English (as I hope this blog demonstrates), and explaining how they all fit together. I am also an excellent teacher: there are few things that make me happier than standing in front of an interested audience and explaining interesting things to them.

Anyway, if anyone who reads this site might be interested in employing me, or knows someone who might be, please let me know, or feel free to forward my CV to them. I can be reached at mjj12@mjj12.freeserve.co.uk or on +44 7986995952. I am presently based in London, but would be happy to relocate to the US, Hong Kong, Tokyo, back to Australia, or various other destinations if the job is interesting.

The photo I linked to below is as shocking to me as it is, because I understand the likely circumstances behind it so well. Most of them have happened to me at some point. We have a 19 year old girl, who is probably in her first or second year of university. She hasn't much money, and her parents decide to take her on an overseas holiday as something of a treat. They buy a package trip to Bali for the three of them. They all have a good time, and the daughter meets a few other people her own age and goes off and parties with them. The parents are tired on the Saturday night, so they go back to their hotel, while the daughter decides to party for a couple of hours later than them. She's had a few drinks. She's having a good time, and then blam, she is blown to pieces. And then I imagine the parents being shown into a rudimentary morgue, full of burned and mangled bodies, confirming that yes, that is the bloody, burned and mangled remains of their 19 year old daughter, and walking slowly out. I don't have to imagine the expression on their faces because I can see it in the photograph.

I keep seeing this image in my mind. I know the area. I look at a map of Kuta, and I see the exact place the bomb exploded. I stayed in a guest house perhaps 50 metres away. I walked down the street past where the bombs exploded probably ten times. I didn't go to the nightclub, but I ate in a restaurant nearby. The restaurants are all similar. Most of them are connected to guest houses or hotels. Most have a relatively light roof, held up by pillars, without much in the way of front and side walls. As you walk past, you can see the people inside eating and drinking. You sit down, and they sell a mixture of Indonesian food and interpretations of western food aimed largely at Australians. I ate Indonesian food (which is delicious) when I visited the rest of the island, but in the peculiar semi-westernised place that is Kuta, I ate the westernised food. I particular remember that lots of places sold an interesting interpretation on the idea of a hamburger. A hamburger patty would be cooked, a piece of cheese would be placed on it, it would be put between two slices of bread, and the whole thing would then be cooked in a waffle iron, so you would get a hamburger with the meat and cheese sealed entirely inside the bread. (You could get them with bacon as well). It's not quite what we would eat in Australia, but it is the sort of thing that meat loving Australians find delicious. I can see myself sitting in one of the restaurants, eating one of these things, a bottle of the local beer also in front of me. The taste, the smell, the feeling of the heat are all clear in my mind. And now, I can see an explosion. I can feel the whole thing turning into a war zone.The images I see merge in to the photographs I saw of the explosion, and of the ruins the next day. There's a mixture of the familiar and the horrible.

These thoughts of familiarity are no doubt common to me and millions of other Australians. A huge number of us have been there. Australia is so isolated from the rest of the world, and there are few foreign holiday destinations that are both close and cheap. Of 20 million Australians, at least several million have been there at some point. Certain things about terrorism make more sense to me now. I understand the reson for attacking restaurants and nightclubs. It isn't just that there are large numbers of people in close proximity, although of course it is that. It is the attempt to attack things that are familiar to everyone. It is the urge to terrorise millions of people with the thought of "There, but the grace of God go I". I think I understood that intellectually before now. I even felt it a little. (I had been to the top of the World Trade Center, for instance, although that was in 1991, so the memory wasn't a recent one). My principal feelings towards the WTC were feeling about its contribution to the New York Skyline. I had felt a terrible sense of loss for the building and the skyline more than the sensation of terror ripping through a familiar environment. I was and am shocked, upset and outraged about that act and the corresponding loss of life. To me though, this is closer. I can see, feel, smell and taste it.

I can also imagine visiting Kuta in six months, and seeing everything deserted and run down: very few tourists anywhere, shops boarded up, hotels closed. A big hole in the middle of town, because there is no point in rebuilding where the bomb exploded and tourists are not coming. I can also imagine Kuta in five years: just the remains of the hotels and restaurants: the bones of the former tourist development being most of what is left. Maybe, and hopefully, I will be wrong and tourism will recover. But right now, my emotion is that I rather doubt it.

Slashdot points me to an article about the possibility of microbial life on Venus . The opinion of biologists on the likelihood life in hostile environments has changed in recent years. Life has been discovered in more and more hostile environments on earth (such as in the vents of volcanoes five kilometres below the surface of the ocean, far from conventional sources of sunlight and oxygen). Given that there are other environments in the solar system that are less hostile, the question as to whether there is life elsewhere in the solar system has come back into play. The question of course is whether life can actually evolve in these sort of environments from scratch, or only evolve from other life forms that have come into existence in less hostile environment. Many molecular biologists seem to think that the chemical processes necessary from evolution from scratch probably can occur in some of these hostile environements, and this has led to much speculation as to life in the rest of the solar system. (20 years ago, most people seemed to have ruled it out). It isn't likely to be very exciting life, but it is life. So we have people looking and speculating about life in the oceans of Europa, on Mars, on Titan, even on Pluto, and now Venus. I will believe it when I see conclusive evidence, because I think some of the people looking perhaps want to find it a bit too much, but this is interesting.

Of course, I think these are interesting questions, because today I think that emigrating to Mars might be the best hope for some of us, and we need to know the answer before we go.

Look at this , and try to keep your eyes dry. In fact, just let the tears come.

I can see two possibilities as to the motivation for this atrocity. The first is that it was an attack on Western civilians by Al-Qaeda associated individuals, simply because they were Western. Kuta in Bali is an extremely soft target in this case: nowhere else in Indonesia would you find so many westerners in so small an area. (Also, the Balinese are Hindu, so you avoid killing Muslims at the same time). Still, given the virulent anti-Americanism of these organisations, the choice of a target where Americans are almost completely absent is perhaps a little curious. (The apparent smaller third bomb outside the US consulate might favour this theory, however, as would the fact that the American ambassador has been warning about possible attacks).

The other possibility is that it was an Indonesian nationalist attack rather than a Islamic attack. Australia has (in the last couple of years, at least) supported independence in East Timor, has supplied the bulk of the peace keeping force, plus there have apparently been Australian SAS troops in the mountains keeping an eye on things. This could be an attack aimed directly at Australians out of revenge for the loss of this territory. Early October is a peak time for Australians to visit Bali, as it is just after the end of the football season in Australia. Bali was a favourite destination for footballers wanting an end of season trip to let their hair down. I don't know if the terrorists realised this and took it into account, but they may have.

Of course, it isn't necessary as clear cut as this. There have been rumours of Al Qaeda trained individuals being involved in East Timor, and of course Australia is a good friend of America, so maybe its a mixture. Either way, it is vile beyond belief. Australians are not used to this. (Not that I imagine that it gets any easier to deal with if you are used to it).

Talk about a soft target

I flew out of Denpassar Airport in Bali last December 23, barely three months after the attacks on the World Trade Center. My hand luggage was not ever X-Rayed before I got on the plane. Talk about a place with a lack of precautions for terrorism.

Thank You

Might I express my pleasure and gratitude that Captain L.J. of the United States Air Force is on our side.

What can be said, really?

The terrorist attack in Bali is horrible beyond words. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting "more than 180" deaths, and it seems that two thirds of the dead are westerners. Having been there, I suspect that a large portion of these are Australians. Jemaah Islamiah , an Indonesian branch of Al Qaeda is suspected to be responsible, although the evidence for this appears merely circumstantial at the moment.


This is terribly close to home. I was in Kuta myself last December, and my parents were there just two months ago.I had an exceptionally nice time. The island was beautiful, the people were very friendly and welcoming, the food was good. I can just imagine the scene. I know the streets, I know the restaurants, I know the way that Australian football players on end of season holidays were drinking too much beer, making too much noise, and having a very good time in that a little bit over the top way that Australians do. And probably more than 100 of my countrymen have just been brutally murdered for it. (Plus of course many other people, including many totally innocent Balinese who were just trying to earn a living. And the economy of Bali has just been totally wrecked, which is such a rotten thing to do to its people). It sickens the soul.

May I express my contempt and hatred for the barbarians who did this. May you all burn in hell.

What is a European?

There is a good piece by A.S. Byatt in today's New York Times Magazine (via Arts and Le^H^H^H^H^H^H Philosophy and Literature ) on the question of what is a European and just why Europeans feel about things the way they do.

Personally, I am unable to take the reflexively anti-EU positions that many American bloggers seem to take, or that British Euro-sceptics seem to take. Yes, the EU is undemocratic, inclined to over-regulate things, at times idiotically bureacratic, and the Common Agricultural Policy is the most insane piece of government policy on the face of the earth, with the possible exception of the American war on drugs. Reform is obviously needed.

However, the European single market is an immense achievement. It is possible to fly extraordinarily cheaply within the European Union, due the deregulation of the internal aviation market that exists as part of the single market. Could the individual EU countries have managed this individually? No way. I can buy cheap groceries from a discount supermarket in London that have been imported from other European countries rather from expensive British suppliers. Would this be the case without the single market? Again, no way. Movement of people between European countries is much easier because of the EU's requirement of freedom of movement for EU nationals. Professional qualifications are transferrable between European countries. Individual governments love to use these sorts of laws for under the table protectionism, and the presence of the EU makes this a lot harder. If the EU was not there, these things would have happened to an extent, but not to the same extent. You can criticise the EU all you like, but credit where credit is due. People sometimes tell me that "that would have happened anyway" but I am not sure you can say this. (I also find British anti-EUism somewhat suspect, because it often comes from the most appalling landed gentry Tory types, who I can't stand).

From the article

Younger Europeans take Europe for granted in a matter-of-fact way. They travel constantly across it on cheap interrail tickets, and they study as exchange students at other European universities. My own daughter in Newcastle -- a far northern English city that sees both England and Scotland as ''foreign'' -- shared a student house with a Frenchwoman, a West German, an East German and two Belgian hitchhikers, who were picked up in Spain -- by another friend -- and slept on the couch for six months. Young Europeans intermarry and produce bilingual children. Some of them go to McDonald's and some of them join antiglobalization protests and travel in buses to support Jose Bove, the French proponent of local produce, against American imports of beef with hormones. Our local French supermarket is in fact European. The voices you hear speak Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, French and English. The French peaches in the market are labeled with tiny circles to show their color -- ''yellow,'' ''gelb,'' ''giallo.'' In France and in Germany this summer the euro seemed to be an uncomplicated matter of fact -- the currency. By the end of the summer most Europeans were grumbling bitterly that its introduction had been a cloak for price increases. It unifies at a practical level, more than symbolically.

This I think is very true. Younger people are much more "European" without thinking about it than are older people. Trans-European laws and systems are there, and younger people, who are much more mobile than their older compatriats, take advantage of them. The biggest soccer matches are in the "European Champions League". This was once a brief competition in which the champions of each European country played each other to find a winner. It is now a league in which the best European clubs (including multiple teams from the bigger countries and often none from the smaller onces) play each other endlessly from year to year. This seems perfectly natural. I think there is a common culture of media, and experience, becoming more and more the place with younger Europeans, who are more mobile than the older generation. It may be almost that they are sucking in an anglophone rather than a European culture. London is certainly full of people like this, and a couple of years there seems almost a rite of passage for well educated, upwardly mobile Europeans.

There was only one thing all the Europeans I talked to had in common. They would all say, ''When I am in America, I know I am European.'' In Europe they notice local differences, but seen from the distance of the States, it is suddenly the whole state of being European that grips them. One person said to me, ''I thought I knew from books and television what the American way of life was, but when you are in it you realize you don't understand it at all.'' This feeling isn't necessarily, or even mostly, antagonistic. America has the fascination of the Other. I don't think European perceptions of America are helped by the ubiquitous presence of dubbed American soaps and B movies on European television. American mouths moving in American shapes and producing French sounds in French voices are cultural zombies, and misleading.

My experience is a different one. I am an Australian. I first came to England in 1991 to study at Cambridge. On the way, I had a couple of weeks in the US. This was my first time in the US, and my first time in Europe. Australia was part of the British Empire and at school I was taught a fairly Britain-centric and Eurocentric view of the world. I expected London to be familiar and comfortable. I did not really expect America to be familiar and comfortable. Oddly I found things the other way round. America is in many ways like Australia. Homes on large suburban tracts of land. Large cars. Strip malls. A McDonald's on every corner. Modern architecture and an absence of older buildings. Large indoor shopping malls and derelict high streets. Skyscrapers. Britain on the other hand was different. It was far less familiar than I was used to. (I was surprised when I got to London and found an absence of skyscrapers, because I simply could not conceive of a large city that did not have them at the centre). Europe has gained some of these things in the years since. There is now a McDonald's on every corner here as well. London has a few skyscrapers, firstly built a way out of the city at Canary Wharf, and now some being built closer in. These things were symptoms of underlying structure, however. And despite a few changes on the surface, the underlying structure hasn't changed much. And the nature of the shopping experience is completely different. I have since learned to love London in particular, but the fact that Europe is "different" never really goes away.

I spoke to Enzensberger in Munich and asked him if he felt European or German. He replied that there were no such people as Europeans -- Europeans were far too idiosyncratic, entrenched in their ways and their languages and their histories; it was impossible to generalize. He then thought for a moment and said, ''On the other hand . . . if you took me up blindfolded in a balloon and put me down in any European city, I would know it was Europe, and I would know how to find a bar, and the railway station, and a food shop. . . . ''

By these rules, Britain is European. A European has no trouble finding the railway station, a bar, and a food store in Britain. An Australian and an American sometimes do, although they have no difficulty finding the equivalents (which generally do not include railway stations) in each other's countries. These rules do apply in Britain, which is why I never can agree when someone tells me Britain is not part of Europe. To me, Britain feels European. To my heart of hearts, Europe remains "other", and Britain remains "other", in a way that America in a lot of ways does not.

During the gulf war, I happened to be in a German monastery with a group of English and German writers and scholars. We divided, not by nationality, but by age. The young were passionately antiwar, as they have been brought up to be. Those who remembered 1945 and its aftermath saw the analogy between Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Hitler, and spoke unhappily of the imperative to avoid appeasement. Just after 9/11, I was in Frankfurt. I found myself defending the coming strike against the Taliban to an angry and idealistic Austrian TV cameraman who had just spent eight weeks with Afghan refugees and believed nothing justified the loss of innocent lives. I do not know a European -- and that includes the British I talk to -- who is in favor of a strike on Iraq. They do not accept the rhetoric of the ''axis of evil,'' or the connection of such a strike to the fight against world terrorism. The old know what war does to people and cities. The young believe that aggression is simply bad. The 85 percent is dwindling, at least at this time.

I am unusually pro-American, even as Australians go, but I have found a big disconnect on this one. I am generally in favour of the strike against Iraq. I was unequivocally in favour of action against Afghanistan, and if it ever comes time to remove the house of Saud, I shall be overwhelmingly in favour of this. I remain utterly outraged by the attacks of September last year, and I am not sure how much of my pro-war position comes simply from wanting revenge for this. My British and other European friends mostly are reflexively anti-war. A lot of the time I simply stay silent, as my friends are on the whole good people, and it isn't worth the argument. The disconnect between Europe and America is large on this. I saw September 11 as an attack on my civilization, and an affront to me personally. A lot of Europeans didn't. Ultimately, from this comes the difference. I think they are naive not to see the attack this way themselves, but the difference is a big one. I don't think being reflexively anti-war is viable at this point. It has led in some instances to the appeasement of monsters and to the demonisation of friends.

Finally, living up to my promise

I am going to talk about cricket. My beloved Australian cricket team today managed an extraordinary win over Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates. (They are playing in the United Arab Emirates because the Australians presently consider Pakistan too dangerous to visit. There is a world class cricket stadium in the UAE because one of the local Emirs developed a liking for the game while at Oxford). Pakistan have been playing international cricket for more than 50 years, and have played a total of 287 test matches in that time.

In test cricket, each team plays two innings, so each of the eleven men on each side bats twice. Yesterday, on the first day of this present match, Pakistan scored their lowest ever score in those 287 matches: their eleven players scored 59 runs between them. Today, in their second innings of the same match, they broke the same record again, scoring only 53. Normally, five days are scheduled for a test match, but a match can take fewer if a side is beaten in a shorter period. Australia beat Pakistan in two days: only the second time this has happened in well over 1000 matches played since 1946, and only the 17th time it has happened since international cricket started in 1877. This was truly a monstrous thrashing.

People I like to read

I have added some links to the bar on the left. These are just places I like to look at most days. Many of them are blogs, some are not. I've also added my amazon wish list, not because I expect anyone to buy me anything, but because it gives a good picture of my tastes and interests.

Thomas Telford's great maybe


This is London Bridge . And for a bridge that has nursery rhymes about it, it is dazzlingly unimpressive. The area on the South Bank of the Thames around London Bridge is a fun place to walk however: it is full or narrow lanes, the remnants of docks, and markets that these days contain stalls that sell posh claret to rich people who live and walk nearby, nowadays, but it still has atmosphere. (These market stalls are under big signs saying "Turnips" and the like, however, so I imagine this was originally an agricultural market for produce that had just been unloaded from ships at nearby docks. I can imagine attempting to buy cucumbers there for ready money a century ago).

Of course, the nursery rhymes are about the original Medieval bridge (c 1600) of 19 piers, which did a substantial job of blocking the flow of the river. It was solid, but in danger of falling down in high waters. However, this bridge was the limit of navigability of the river, which is why it is the furthest upstream that you find the remnants of docks. When the medieval bridge was replaced with New London Bridge in 1831, the river could flow freely further upstream. This was both good and bad. Bad in the sense that bridges upstream were not designed for the tides, and many had to be replaced over the next few years. New London Bridge was not especially well designed, and was replaced with the present ugly structure in 1973.

The great "what if" in all this was that engineer Thomas Telford proposed a replacement for the original bridge in 1801, which would have been a single 200 metre cast iron span across the Thames. This would have been structurally sound and utterly beautiful, and would still easily do the job today. It was not built due to what seems to have been a mixture of conservatism and reluctance to spend money and effort on building the approaches. It's one of the great unbuilt projects of engineering history. (Sadly, I cannot find a picture).

Nobel science prizes and credibility

As someone who is at least trained as a scientist, I have always tended to see the Nobel Prizes from the physical scientist's point of view: the prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Medicine and Physiology are a big deal: Peace, Literature and Economics are a little suspect. The principal reason that the three science prizes are held in such high regard by scientists is that the selection committees over the years have done a terrific job. Nobel prizes have been consistently given to the right people. (The physics prize is the only one I am really qualified to comment on, and this year's is certainly once again an excellent choice. People who use enormous underground reservoirs of detergent to do groundbreaking research into the fundamental interactions of the universe deserve to be rewarded for it). There is perhaps a problem with categories: the most groundbreaking of research these days is done in things like biology and computing science, and this was not the case when Nobel created the prizes, but the prizes have generally managed to cope with this. The medicine and physiology prize has been essentially treated as the "Nobel Prize for Biology" for 50 years now, and in recent years (including this year) the chemistry prize has been used to reward biological discoveries as well. There have been one or two instances of the physics prize being awarded to computing related subjects (Brian Josephson for instance) although it has not happened in a major way. (Josephson is Cambridge's equivalent of John Nash: an utterly brilliant man who isn't all that stable, sadly). If there was a Nobel Prize for Mathematics, Computing could perhaps fit into this. However, there isn't, and founding a computing Nobel the way an Economics Nobel was founded would be a fine thing. I can't imagine it would be too hard to find organisations that would put up the money, even in these post tech bubble days.

How does one get on the Nobel Peace Prize committee, anyway?

The almighty Professor Reynolds comments on the Nobel Peace Prize award. Given just how utterly depressing the events of the last year and a bit have been, my preference would have been simply to not award it this year. There is plenty of precedent for this. However, they have given it to Jimmy Carter, which is a deliberate statement of disapproval of the actions of the present American administration. I don't really mind Jimmy Carter, and I am not a huge fan of President Bush. Seriously, however, there is a large hole in lower Manhattan, and 3000 people were murdered by fanatics who want to take us back to the ninth century. Do the Nobel committee really expect the Americans to do nothing and say "I feel your pain" in return. Personally I am rather glad that the Americans are really determined to wipe these fanatics out.

But that wasn't what I was intending to write about. The good professor had the following to say

Personally, I think it's just another shameful year in which Arthur C. Clarke's contribution was overlooked.

Although Dr Clarke is a personal hero of mine, I had never thought of him in the context of a Nobel Peace Prize. But when I think about it, Prof Reynolds is right. With his vision of an interconnected world, Clarke was one of the ealiest prophets of communications technology and globalisation as a way of reducing the marginalisation of much of the poor world. He has done a lot to encourage it to happen. And it has happened. Plus there is a spiritual humanism that comes through in all his work that preaches the utter opposite of the tribal and religious hatreds that we sadly see too much off. Here is someone who looks at the best of what humanity can achieve and asks us to rise to the occasion. Someone who is a professional optimist about humanity, and who is always capable of finding good reasons for being an optimist. This is something we need more than ever. Of course, I doubt the Nobel committee would deign to give such an award to a mere science fiction writer, but that is their loss. (The British government waited a scandalously long time before giving Clarke his much deserved knighthood, too. Here is the same snobbery again).

Maybe I have given a few too many platitudes without enough concrete examples. It is hard to put in words just why I think Clarke is such a great man, and such a significant man. Perhaps I will try again later.

Ridley Scott needs to set a film in this place

There is an interesting piece in The Economist talking about the growth in the Pearl River Estuary region in China into perhaps the world's most important industrial region. We have the great city of Hong Kong, the wild west around Shenzhen, the industrial heartland in the Shenzhen Economic Zone, the gambling den of Macau, all linked together. One thing that is striking about this region is the ferocious development of new infrastructure: railways, bridges, roads, airports, containers ports, everything you care to name. Most western cities built their key infrastructure 100 years ago and have since been tweaking essentially complete systems. In Hong Kong, there are still gaping holes, and devlopment is ferocious. In the rest of the region, even less is there and the pressure to build is even greater.

The article talks about a proposal to built a 39km bridge across the estuary, connecting Hong Kong with Macau and the Special Economic Zone of Zhuhai. This would apparently be something similar to the Sunshine Skyway in Florida. It would be two lengthy causeways, with an island in the middle, and presumably a number of lengthy spans allowing for shipping to go through. This is apparently possible because the estuary isn't deep. Still, we are talking something quite impressive.

One key obstacle, however, is the extraordinary number of political jurisdictions that come into play. Although it is all part of China, we have the Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions, the Shenzhen and Zhuhai Special Economic Zones, and the Guangdong province proper. To go from any one to any other one of the five you need a passport, so getting all these jurisdictions (plus the central Chinese government) to agree on building such a project is a nightmare. There is a history of all of them building ports, airports and goodness knows what in competition with each other already.

This article suggests setting up something akin to the Port Authority of New Jersey and New York to manage key infrastructure in the region. The original Port Authority was set up for a very similar reason - to have jurisdiction over infrastructure that was important to both states and to prevent constant arguing between them. The Port Authority does this quite successfully, although there are certain other things that this kind of large public sector bureacracy does less well: for instance managing the customer service side of New York's airports.

More fun with pictures

The people at The Onion are presumably laughing themselves silly one more time.


This one is "Frank Gehry No Longer Allowed To Make Sandwiches For Grandkids". Okay.

I love bridges

One of the nice things about Brunel's state of the art in 1840 suspension bridge in Bristol is that there are a couple of quite spectacular more modern
bridges quite close nearby. You only have to drive a few kilometers out of town to come to the Severn Estuary, and the two crossings from England into Wales. The recently constructed Second Severn Crossing is rather boring: two long causeways at each end and a single cable stayed span of around 456m in the centre.

Perfectly nice engineering, but cookie cutter stuff. There are lots of other spans just like it. (And the whole system including the approaches is very similar to the older Sunshine Skyway bridge in Florida. The whole trend towards cable stayed bridges, hugely influential as it is, is more an achievement of materials science than civil engineering. (I am enormously interested in materials science, but I am trying to write about bridges).

The older (1966) First Severn Crossing, is much more interesting, however. It is a particularly beautiful bridge, without question, but it is also historically quite memorable. There is a nice picture of it here.

Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, suspension bridge design advanced, and as it did so, engineers became more and more confident of their abilities to build bridges with steadily more flexible and thinner decks. If you look at bridges built over the years, the decks suddenly get thinner.

Eventually, a suspension bridge was built over the Tacoma Narrows, just ouside Seattle in Washington State. It had a very thin deck. Many structures have so called resonant frequencies . If a structure is vibrated at one of these frequencies, the structure starts vibrating in such a way that the oscillation rapidly grows. Once the oscillation starts, the wind continues to amplify the oscillation. It so happened that one of the resonant frequencies of the deck of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was similar to the frequencies of certain gusts of wind that occurred in the area. Wind blowed onto the bridge, and the bridge shook itself to pieces. (There is some quite famous film footage of this event. If you have ever studied physics or engineering, this has almost certainly been shown to you at some point). Although the bridge could easily withstand the forces exerted on it by traffic running over it, it could not withstand the wind.

The response of engineers to this disaster was to go back to building bridges with reinforced trussed decks. The first few big bridges built after this event have very thick decks, and as years go on, you can see them get thinner as engineers get more confident again.

However, the Severn Crossing was the first bridge built after the Tacoma Narrows disaster with a very thin deck. The engineers who designed it had satisfied themselves that they fully understood what wind could do to the bridge, and they designed an aerodynamic deck that would prevent the wind from causing this to oscillate. The bridge is still there, so one assumes that they did fully understand the problem. Most large bridges built since have similar aerodynamic decks. The big exceptions are bridges built in Japan, which still have large trusses. The Japanese claim that they are being doubly safe, although some people simply suspect that the Japanese construction industry are just looking for ways to build things that cost as much money as possible.

Overbuilding construction projects in Japan. Who would ever think such a thing.

The other sort of oscillation that can cause a bridge to oscillate at its resonant frequencies is human steps. Vehicular traffic is generally no problem, but steps are regular. If a lot of people are crossing a bridge with similar periods between steps, this can cause the bridge to shake alarmingly. (This is why soldiers normally break step when marching across bridges).

As has been happening in most cities on a river, the waterfront in London has in recent years been redeveloped, and various new facilities have in particular been built on the (formerly industrial) south bank of the river Thames. Two of the nicer new developments are the Tate Modern art gallery and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which are just opposite the river from St Paul's Cathedral in the City of London. (The Tate Modern gallery is a converted power station, and a remarkable work or architecture, although the art itself is not very interesting. The Tate Britain gallery further upstream and on the other side of the river at Millbank has a much greater collection. If nothing else, however, the creation of Tate Modern did free up more space at Millbank for the Tate's magnificent collection of British art. And I have written about the Globe elsewhere).

The authorities decided that a new pedestrian bridge connecting these facilities to the City was desirable, and a thin, elegant footbridge, known as the Millenium Bridge, was constructed. (Remarkably, this was the first new bridge crossing of the Thames in London for something like 100 years. Existing bridges had been replaced by new bridges, and a number of tunnels had been built, however). The bridge was opened in 2000, and a huge number of people walked over the bridge on its first day. However, the bridge shook alarmingly, and engineers were so worried that the bridge was immediately closed again. It seems that the engineers had not taken resonance into account properly. (They should have, however, as similar problems had occurred with the Auckland Harbour Road Bridge in New Zealand in 1975. It seems though that they did not properly read the literature). The engineers spent two years designing bracing structures that were then attached to the bridge to prevent this problem in the future. The bridge was re-opened, and a lot of people have walked over it since.

How do I make money from this?

Just a brief further comment on my CDMA2000 v UMTS/GSM observations. A key point I was making, which I also made in a Slashdot comment , was that IS-95 CDMA networks are already in place in lots of Asia. The operators that have such networks have generally done badly competing with GSM and are somewhat unfashionable because of this. (Those companies with both IS-95 CDMA networks and GSM networks have generally sold the GSM network hard and neglected the CDMA network). However, these networks can easily be upgraded to CDMA2000. If CDMA2000 applications become a big deal, which appears to be happening in both Japan and Korea, these networks can upgrade extremely quickly and their perceived position could change extremely quickly.

The thing I perhaps didn't emphasise enough is that This is exactly what has happened in Japan over the last six months. NTT DoCoMo has been the long term market leader, with its 2.5G i-mode mobile internet service. KDDI's WAP version 1 service was far less successful and the company was perceived as second best. However, KDDI has updated to CDMA2000, and has added several million users from scratch since March. DoCoMo on the other hand has just got itself burned repeatedly over W-CDMA. The technology shift was quick, because it was IS-95 to CDMA2000. The perception shift was equally quick. I expect to see this shift happen elsewhere as well.

If I was still a stock analyst, I would say that the implications of this change in perception are generally as follows. I think we are on the bring of one of those changes in perception that leads to a major rerating of certain companies. Buy KDDI. Buy Telstra. Buy Telecom NZ. Buy Sprint PCS. Buy China Unicom. Buy anything Korean you can get your hands on that is close to being a pure cellular play. (Both in terms of equipment and networks). And of course buy Qualcomm. Accumulate Lucent and Motorola. Hold Ericsson. Sell AT&T Wireless. Sell NTT DoCoMo. Sell SingTel. Sell Hutchison Whampoa. Sell Nokia. (As for Vodafone, which is the world's largest GSM operator and is a major GSM proponent, but which owns a large stake in the largest IS-95 operator in the US, that one requires a lot of analysis. As does Hutchison Telecom Australia, which is being pulled along by its parent company, but which has a IS-95 network in Australia. If Hutchison was to spin that network off into a separate company, I would be bullish about it. The same is true of Hutchison's IS-95 network in Hong Kong).
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The revolution will be television

Asparagirl is reminiscing about watching the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission over her high school's T1 link.

I am around ten years older than she is. When I was at high school, the most exciting space mission would have to have been Voyager 2, which got to Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. To see the photographs that Voyager had take, I could either watch perhaps 30 seconds of footage on evening network news bulletins, compiled by people who really didn't care (Australia had no cable or satellite television in those days, so there was no chance of hoping the Discovery Channel or similar would show something) or look at a blurred black and white photograph in a newspaper. To see a good selection of colour photographs, I had to wait a couple of months for a copy of New Scientist of Scientific American with a photo spread on the subject to arrive in Australia (by sea mail!) from Britain or America.

I was at university in 1989, and I had access to the outside world via Usenet and UUCP based e-mail by that time. (Full internet access between Australia and the outside world was a few months when Voyager got to Neptune). It still didn't really help, as sending pictures over computer networks was not something people did at the time.

(Part of this was that Australia was and to some extent still is a fairly provincial place. However, Australians can not downoad anything they want over the internet from NASA, just like anybody else, not to mention watch the Discovery Channel. (No, Nasa TV, though).

Despite this, this time of post telco-boom post-tech boom depression, it is sometimes easy to forget the extent of the revolution that has occurred in the last decade. It is phenomenal beyond words. In the 1980s, particularly if you were a teenager without much money, information about anything was generally difficult to obtain. Your local (or school) library might contain a book about a subject, but it would often be simplified and/or a decade out of data and/or written by somebody who didn't understand the subject properly. If you wanted to know something about the law, that was what you had to rely on. Today, you can look at the statute directly, and look every judicial case that has ever been concerned with the subject. If you want to know almost any statistic about almost anything, you can get to the source, and get the most accurate and up to date information imaginable. If you don't understand something and are generally interested in the subject, you can get an expert's view on a lot of subjects very quickly. (Just send the expert an e-mail, or ask a question on Usenet, or hang out on the right message boards). I was at my most curious and my most hungry for knowledge when I was about 15, and, quite frankly, I was starved of knowledge about the things I wanted to learn. Today, I wouldn't be. I think I would give almost anything to have had the access to knowledge and information at 15 that is available to anyone who wants it (at least in the rich world) today.

To be truthful, it's available in a reasonable amount of the poor world, too. Go into an internet cafe in a small town in Indonesia or rural Turkey - to name two places I have been in the last year and where I have actually seen it - and almost inevitably it is run by some bright kid, who is the only person in the town capable of setting up such a thing. The bright kid might come from a well off or well educated family, but maybe not. (Even in these kinds of places, or perhaps especially in these kinds of places (I don't really know) being a geek is not that fashionable I suspect). The extent to which some bright kid can nag his or her way into getting access to such a system can really be really quite impressive.

Of course, even in situations like that, access is a long way from being universal: it only goes to a very particular sort of bright kid, who may ultimately discover that he is stuck in the small down in Indonesia even despite knowing a lot. But it is something that very definitely is there, and which wasn't there even a few years ago.

A Tenth Planet

This discovery is unbelievably cool. I have heard a little bit recently about the likelihood of there being objects of Pluto's scale in the Kuiper Belt. Although this is a little smaller than Pluto, you really have to say that if Pluto is a planet, so is this. And if this isn't, neither is Pluto. (Some people in recent years have been trying to argue that Pluto is not really a planet, but I doubt you will ever get the majority of people to let go of the idea that it is). Either way, the picture of the solar system we have had since 1930 - nine planets - now has to go. Psychologically, for me at least, this is a big deal. It's actually much less important than the discovery of the many planets orbiting other stars which we have seen over the last couple of decades, but this is so much closer to home.

Good Walkies, Grommit?

Andrea See is talking about the pleasant experience of watching Chicken Run outdoors under the stars.

My favourite line out of that movie is I think "Good Heavens No. I'm a chicken".

I went to Bristol, home of Aardman Animation, a month or so back. It's a really nice city. (Sea ports or former sea ports often have a very nice, cosmopolitan feel about them. The town is also helped by having an extremely good university).

Between Bristol and the Severn Estuary, the River Avon goes through an immense gorge, and over this gorge goes the extremely famous Clifton Suspension Bridge , built Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great Victorian engineer. At the Bristol end of the bridge is the suburb of Clifton, full of nice houses, shops and stuff. The people of Bristol, unlike the English in general, seem to take great pride in the great works of engineering in the town). I sat in a pub named "The Brunel" and had a very pleasant meal and a couple of pints of ale. But I digress.

Clifton does, as I said, contain nice houses, and I got the impression this is one of the posher parts of Bristol to live in. Near the end of the bridge, I walked into a perfectly ordinary English newsagency: the sort of place that is in a small shop, and that sells newspapers, a few magazines, a few groceries, which has an immense array of chocolate bars to choose from, and contains a fridge containing drinks, and a few things to eat, the featured item of which is almost always sweet corn and tuna sandwhiches.

Such newsagents seldom have a great selection of magazines. The local one near where I live in Croydon doesn't even stock the Economist. In any event, this newsagent stocked both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. From this, I deduced that some rich film-making types lived nearby. Who could tell? Perhaps the guy in front of me buying the Guardian was in fact one of the directors of Chicken Run.

More dot com fallout

Imagine my horror this morning when I typed www.aldaily.com into my browser this morning and discovered that Arts and Letters Daily was gone, as a consequence of the bankruptcy of Lingua Franca. As someone who still misses Feed, I spent sixty seconds contemplating the horror, before following one of the links to http://www.philosophyandliterature.com which appears to be Arts and Letters Daily under another name. It seems that the actual site www.aldaily.com has to be auctioned with Lingua Franca's other assets and that therefore Denis Dutton cannot use it any more, so he has moved. On the new site, he says

Welcome to our new site, which we will be operating for the benefit of readers at least until the final disposition of Arts & Letters Daily.

Possiby this means he will try to get the Arts and Letters Daily name, URL, and most importantly the archive back in the auction. One of the worst things of the bankruptcy of online pulications can be the loss of years of interesting material. For now we seem to have lost the A&L Daily archive. This is bad. I'll be hopeful, as I wouldn't think the site is worth anything without Mr Dutton.

An odd thought

I went to a fifteen year reunion a couple of years ago at the high school I attended in Australia. I had spent most of the preceding ten years outside Australia, and I was consequently a little hard to contact. However, I heard about the event from a friend and showed up unannounced on the evening. One of the organisers told me that they were pleased I had come, and named one other person who they had also been unable to contact.

What is interesting is that the other "difficult to contact" person and I are the only two members of the class who appear first in a Google search for our names. So much for being difficult to contact. (Also, we were both widely assumed to be gay by our classmates, simply because we weren't the greatest conformists in the school. Neither of us actually are).

So what is CDMA2000, anyway?

Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless has a piece on developments in the various 3G mobile phone standards - in particular how the American standard CDMA2000 seems to be winning over the European W-CDMA/UMTS. This is a follow up to this Economist article, and is an interest of mine as well. I wrote Steven a ludicrously long e-mail reply, which I think I might as well post here as well.

Steven,

It was interesting to read your piece on CDMA2000. In my former job as a telecommunications analyst at CSFB in Australia, I also listened to a lot self-righteous patronising crap from GSM proponents, and I am feeling a little schadenfreude myself. I wrote a whole lot of reports a couple of years ago stating that I didn't believe that W-CDMA would work any time soon, and that IS-95 networks could be easily upgraded, and that therefore these networks were potentially very valuable assets, but it nobody much paid any attention at the time.(Of course, I lost my job in a massive downsizing, so in a way it barely matters, but I do now feel somewhat better....).

In Australia, we have a mixture of GSM and CDMA (IS-95) networks. At this point the GSM networks have most of the customers, largely I think due to Nokia's marketing skills. At the height of the boom, even the companies that owned the CDMA networks announced the intention of buiding W-CDMA networks and purchased 2.1GHz spectrum (admittedly fairly cheaply) in order to do so. The success of GSM in Europe, Asia, and Africa was such that everyone paid attention to its proponents, and paid little attention to anyone else. (Everyone particularly paid attention to Nokia). The lesson they took seemed to be that because GSM was so successful the people behind it were omniscient. IS-95 might have been the better technology, but networks that had adopted it in the past had lost out to those that had adopted GSM because everyone else had adopted GSM, and that UMTS/W-CDMA was the 'upgrade path' from GSM. Clearly everyone was going to adopt W-CDMA, so therefore we should do this too, and you couldn't even get people to talk about CDMA2000. a colleague of mine spoke to the CEO of a company (Telstra) that owned a IS-95 netowork, and he knew little about CDMA2000 whereas he had swallowed all of the hype about UMTS. His company is now becoming quite enthusiastic about CDMA2000.

Now the perception has collapsed, and people are looking at the actual technology again. This is great, as it means the of the telco/tech boom has now gone.

The whole story of what happened in Australia is quite interesting, so here goes. I have also posted this on my blog. (http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com)

(Bear in mind that I am not an engineer, although I do have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. I am something of an engineer wannabe, however.)

In the analogue days in Australia there was a single AMPS network on 800MHz that belonged to then government owned then monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). In the early 1990s the government decided to upgrade to a digital technology. Three licences were sold for 900MHz GSM spectrum. Telstra was compelled by law to upgrade to GSM, and to phase out and switch off its AMPS network by 2000. This seems to have been because the government thought that it wouldn't get a good price for the second and third GSM licences if the new players had to take on an entrenched monopoly, and forcing Telstra to shut down its AMPS network weakened that monopoly. Telstra was not permitted to upgrade its network to IS-136, as it would have liked to have done. (This happened in New Zealand, where Telecom NZ upgraded from AMPS to IS-136 and eventually built an IS-95 network alongside its IS-136 network). Three companies: Telstra; Optus (then owned by C&W, now owned by Singapore Telecom); and Vodafone set up GSM networks. The government announced that the reason for the switch off was to make the 800MHz spectrum available for newer technology, and it would be auctioned when available.

When the GSM networks went into operation, it became clear that GSM is a lousy technology for places like Australia, because Australia is enormous, and very sparsely populated. GSM works fine in densely populated Europe where base stations are close together, but it works very badly in situations where large cells are called for. (My understanding is that it fails when the time it takes for a signal to go from the base-station to the handset becomes comparable with the length of a timeslot, so it's a TDMA thing in general I guess). The fact that the AMPS network, which worked well with large cells in rural areas, was being switched off and replaced with GSM (which didn't work) enraged voters in rural areas, who had become used to having mobile phones.

Like rural voters everywhere, rural voters in Australia are upset about a lot of things. (which largely come back to the fact that agriculture is not a way to get rich in the modern world, whereas it was a century ago, and the importance of rural Australia to the country has been in decline for at least that long, but I digress). Rural voters are a political problem for the conservative government that has been in power since 1996 in particular, because rural voters have recently been flirting with parties of the far right instead of the traditional rural conservative party. In any event, in this case rural people really did have a point. The government therefore felt it needed to do something quickly.

The auction of the 800MHz spectrum took place, Telstra gained a licence and was encouraged (and subsidised) to build a national IS-95 network as quickly as it could. (Hutchison Telecom also purchased 800MHz spectrum, and built a second IS-95 network in the large cities, and signed a roaming agreement for its customers to use Telstra's network out of the cities). This solved the rural voter problem quite effectively, as IS-95 works fine with large cells. (Has this issue come up in the US? Surely it must have). Therefore, what we ended up with in Australia was a situation where Australia had two solely GSM operators, one solely IS-95 operator, and one operator (Telstra) that owned networks of both kinds.

What then happened was that the three GSM operators gained something more than 90% market share between them. Although Telstra caters to customers in rural areas if it has to, its profitability lies in customers in the large cities, as this is where the majority of the population lives, and the urban population is much richer. City people might like to pretend that they leave the city to experience the great Australian outback regularly but in actual fact they don't. Therefore, it doesn't matter to most of them that GSM phones do not work outside the cities. For the best customers, international roaming is probably more important, and this does work extremely well for GSM, and it is an issue on which the CDMA world has never seemed to have got its act together. For whatever reason, CDMA lost out badly in Australia.

I think the biggest reason behind this is simply that, for some reason, mobile phones turned into fashion accessories. People are very conscious of their brand and appearance, and it is very important to have a 'cool' . (I think this is even more the case in Europe and Asia than in the US). Cell phones almost became like watches. A $1000 watch probably doesn't tell the time any better than a $20 watch, but people are willing to pay the difference in order to have the right watch. The $20 watch may well have more features than the $1000 watch, but this doesn't matter, as the only features on their watch that most people ever use are the time and date. Nokia were first to understand that phones were like this too. (The Nokia 8210 is easily the most successful phone in recent years in Europe and Australia, but in terms of functionality, it is quite backwards. It can be used for phone calls and SMS messages and that is about it). The features that Nokia added were lifestyle features such as changeable ringtones, games, and the ability to change the casing of the phone to change its colour. Plus they concentrated their advertising on these lifestyle features. What they did was create a situation where if you are a high school student, it is social death to have a mobile phone that is not a Nokia. If you are a single woman, then the tiny little phone that goes in your handbag has to be a Nokia. Nokia have never struck me as having great engineering - Ericsson and Motorola seem to get new (technical) features onto the market much faster - but Nokia are great at creating demand for their phones. Despite having seemingly excellent engineering, Ericsson have produced phones that are ugly, and that has cost them. Motorola's phones are packed with features - my own phone is a Motorola for this reason - but they are less attractive and are weaker on the lifestyle front than are Nokia's. (Motorola have improved their game a lot in the last couple of years, however).

And in markets such as Australia, Nokia does not sell CDMA phones. Yes, they produce them for the American market, but in markets such as Australia and New Zealand, they do not sell them. When asked about this, they say that they prefer to concentrate their efforts on the GSM market. If you want to buy a CDMA phone, it will generally be made by a South Korean company - Samsung or LG or Hyundai. And while these companies make decent products, they are deeply unfashionable: they are brandnames associated with cheap cars and cheap televisions. People do not want this for a mobile phone. So they have lost out. GSM has the high prestige brands associated with it, and it has gained the reputation for a quality product, even though it is technically worse. (It seems foolish to me for Nokia to decide which of its products its customers want for them rather than letting them do this, but that's its strategy).

In Australia, Telstra responded to this customer preference by seeing its CDMA network as part of its universal service obligation and only really promoting it in rural areas, devoting most of its marketing effort to GSM, and Hutchison has simply tried to compete on price. (Its calls are cheaper than anyone else's).

In New Zealand, Telecom NZ have sold IS-136 and later IS-95, and have lost out in a similar way, although not as badly. Their only competitor, Vodafone, uses GSM, and Vodafone have done a far better job of marketing their service, at least partly by selling GSM as the world leading technology.

In 2000, vast sums had been paid in Europe for the 2.1GHz UMTS spectrum, and a similar auction was held in Australia. (They auctioned the 2.1GHz UMTS spectrum bands, but did not specify a technology). However, there were about the same number of licences as applicants in Australia, so the licences went cheaply. Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Hutchison and Qualcomm all purchased 3G licences. Optus (who have 'vendor financing' from Nokia) and Hutchison (who have a global parent that intends to roll out UMTS networks around Europe) announced they would build UMTS networks quickly. Telstra and Vodafone said they would build UMTS with less urgency, and Qualcomm announced that it would build a network using 2.1GHz CDMA2000 and resell the capacity. The extraordinary thing is how amazingly detached the rhetoric was from reality at the time: Nobody had any idea what 3G was or was supposed to do, but they had already decided that UMTS was going to be the winner. Plus they had no idea of the value of the assets that they already owned. At the time, Telstra was fully talking the UMTS line, but in the two years since, their tone has changed a lot. They seem to have woken up to the fact that their IS-95 network is an asset, and it seems to be clear they will launch a 1x service before long. (Telecom NZ has already done so).

(There were lots of theories as to what Qualcomm was doing - my theory was that they wanted to adapt and demonstate their CDMA2000 equipment for the 2.1GHz bands that were being auctioned throughout the world by regulatory authorities who thought that UMTS would prevail put didn't feel the regulatory need to specify a technology, probably with China in particular in mind. Qualcomm have been quiet on this lately, which may suggest that capital is too expensive these days for demonstrations like this. If they were thinking about China, it may be unnecessary anyway, as China Unicom has a (quite new, probably 1X capable out of the box) IS-95 network in pace already).

I suppose the lesson to be learned from this is the same one that you are making, which is that it's a bad idea to try to pick winners. Australia, NZ, and a lot of Asia has IS-95 networks in place, even if these networks do not have huge market shares at the moment. If camera phone type applications become a big deal, as they appear to have done in Japan and Korea, then it will be very easy for these networks to be upgraded to CDMA2000/3G, and you will see an amazingly quick shift in the fortunes of the two technologies, as the infrastructure is already sitting there in most of Asia to allow this to happen. (There was an IS-95 network in Singapore that was switched off because it didn't have many customers. I wonder if they can switch it on again. Actually I doubt it as it was operating on 1900MHz and I think the spectrum was reallocated to allow overlapping 1800MHz GSM). If some companies get a big advantage from this, there will be pressure for competitors to upgrade too. This may lead to widespread 2.1GHz CDMA2000, as this is where the free spectrum is.

Actually, I think the shift in perception as to which is the successful technology has just happened. I think CDMA2000 has just won, and this will be common wisdom within six months. This leaves Sprint and Verizon in the box seat in the US. Asia is in a good position to adopt the technology because there is enough IS-95 in place to allow a fairly easy transition, but Europe is completely screwed, as it has committed itself to a technology that doesn't work, and it cannot fix this until very slow moving bureacrats change the rules. Plus there is so much bad money already invested that they will no doubt continue throwing good money after it for a while.

Just as a matter of interest, there is one interesting regulatory loophole in Europe for people who want to build CDMA2000 networks. The EC/EU only got involved in the spectrum allocation business for GSM, and prior to that allocation of spectrum for analogue services was a matter for national jurisdiction. (The resulting mass of incompatible analogue systems was one reason other than protectionism that we got a single European standard and a single European set of spectrum allocations for GSM) A lot of European governments allocated 450MHz spectrum for analogue services, and in a lot of cases this is still allocated and still subject to national rather than European jurisdiction. (This spectrum is also available in Russia and one or two places in Asia). In most cases it is at least theoretically legal for the owners of such spectrum to build CDMA2000 networks in this allocation. I know that Qualcomm have been working on developing hardware to work at this frequency, and there is also a variant of GSM designed for it. I don't know if anyone has the guts to take a gamble on building such networks in Europe, or if bureacracy would get in the way. (I think it might). At least in theory, however, it is a possibility.

I have spent the last nine months writing a book on digital television, and the European proponents of the DVB digital television standard sound exactly like GSM people. (Actually they are in many instances the same people, so this is perhaps not surprising). We will see what happens with this technology, too.

Update I have added a few more comments on this, including observations on what my related stock recomendations might be. I have also written another piece discussing the reasons as to why Europe's mobile phone market is now as schlerotic as it is.

Further update I am presently looking for a job. If anyone reading this page things they might know someone who would be interested in employing me, look here .

Okay, fly the Jolly Roger

I see that pirates are now pressing CDs on ships in the Straits of Malacca.

Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe

Recently, I puchased the special edition DVD of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In the commentary Director Baz Luhrmann and Production Designer Catherine Martin talk about wanting to get away from what they describe as "the Victorian conception of Shakespeare". While their resultant movie of television, guns, rock music, and tatooed guys wearing Hawaiian shirts did indeed get away from the Victorian conception (and, while on that, most other conceptions as well), I do know what they meant. There is a certain idea that you should sit in an enclosed theatre, and feel the seats through your backside as you listen very carefully to the language being enunciated so clearly. While Of course, Shakespeare doesn't have to be like that, and in a good production often isn't, and probably wasn't even in Victorian times, but there is an earnestness that does become a bit much sometimes. I certainly have the memory of studying Hamlet at school, and going and seeing a very earnest production in which none of the audience (or really the cast) seemed to be enjoying themselves. I could appreciate the beauty of the language, certainly, although to some extent it was a matter of being in a thick fog, and occasionally a clear patch would open up and something extraordinarily beautiful would be visible through. I like Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet : the film's photography of Mexico City is dazzling, the film's use of music is sensational, and the film certainly respects the integrity of the story. While there is something to the criticism that the film doesn't properly respect the language, I think Mr Ebert is too harsh. The film works. The film has power. Sometimes its hard to describe why. Michael Almereyda attempted to do something similar with Hamlet in 2000, setting the play as a struggle for power in "Denmark Corporation" in New York, and while the film was technically competent and well acted, it fell completely flat. I do think, though, that the worst thing you can do with Shakespeare is make it dull. And I think when Catherine Martin is talking about getting away from the Victorian conception of Shakespeare, what she is actually saying is that we must avoid making it dull.

Which gets me to the production of Twelfth Night I saw on Friday night. This too got away from the Victorian conception of Shakespeare, but by going entirely in the opposite direction. I went to the reconstructed Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. I had never been to the theatre before, and it so happened, largely by luck that I chose to go to the most authentic attempt at an Elizabethan production of a Shakespearean production that has been tried since the new Globe opened. It had Elizabethan costume, musicians playing Elizabethan musical instruments, an Elizabethan attitude to sets and props and, in particular, an all male cast. Certain things about Shakespeare in general suddenly make more sense when you see a play in something like the original theatre. For one thing, about half the audience at the Globe are groundlings , that is, people standing. Standing in one place for a while is tiring, and the breaks in the play, or at least in the action when there may be a scence of revelry or singing and dancing or similar, are at least partly there to allow the groundlings to move around a bit and prevent their legs from getting too stiff, and similar. There is much more interaction between the standing audience and the actors than is the case in a Victorian production, at times the audience is rowdy. But the play is designed for this.

But on to Twelfth Night in particular. This is one of Shakespeare's "cross dressing" plays, and was clearly deliberately chosen for an all male cast at least partly for this reason. The character of Viola spends much of the play impersonating a man, and quite a bit of the plot depends on the vact that she and her twin brother Sebastian are constantly mistaken for one another. In modern times, Viola is normally played by a woman and Sebastian by a man, and generally you can tell. Therefore a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary in order that you accept that all the other characters in the play cannot tell them apart. However, if they are both played by men as in this production, they can quite genuinely be close to indistinguishable. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept that Viola is a woman in the first place I suppose, but when all the female characters are played by men this is somehow easier. And in any event the audiences in 1602 were no doubt so used to the convention of female parts being played by men that they barely noticed it. The prevalence of cross-dressing in Shakespeare's plays suddenly means something different though. It works better with an all male cast. It really does.

The location, and the production, and the fact that we had permission to really get into the play and be a little rowdy rather than being required to sit back, be quiet, and absorb the earnestness of the production, did something to the audience. It gave us permission to have a really good time. A buzz was present, almost like you might find at a sporting event. Everyone was engrossed by the play, and were simply having a really good time. It was the best night out I have had in ages. They need to build one of these Globe Theatres in every city.

Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story called "The Immortal Bard". In this story, a scientist invents a time machine, and with it goes back to the early 17th century and brings Shakespeare to the present. He enrols Shakespeare in a college Shakespeare course, and the bard is overwhelmed by all the things now being said about the actual meaning of his plays, and flunks the course. Given what is now taught in many English departments, Asimov was if anything prophetic. However, imagine that it was possible to bring Shakespeare 400 years through time to modern London. Given that he lived before the great fire, there wouldn't be much he recognised.. Even St Paul's, more or less directly across the river from the Globe, was built since his time. Still, imagine that you could show Shakespeare the Globe theatre, and that and that he could see large crowds of people attending productions of his plays, more or less as they had been 400 years before, in more or less the same place beside the Thames. Most importantly, he would see audiences having a really good time. A finer tribute to him

There's a short interview with writer/director Cameron Crowe from Empire Magazine, in which he discusses puting together the DVD commentary track for Jerry Maguire. This particular commentary is with Crowe and the main actors for the film. When told in the interview that some actors (Schwarzenegger) now demand payment for commentaries, Crowe laughs.

Personally there are few things I have less desire to hear than what Arnold has to say about his movies. I have enjoyed a few of his movies, but what I am interested about is how the movie was made, not the motivation of the actors or the characters. I love commentary tracks, and I am always interested in what the film-makers think, but with a few exceptions I don't give a shit about the actors' thoughts. (One exception was another Cameron Crowe movie, Say Anything.... I would have been very upset if the commentary had not featured John Cusack in this case. Of course the distributors of this film in the PAL world released it without the commentary, but..). I think the best commentaries generally have two of the film-makers (in many instances the writer and the director) talking about the film. In some cases the director talking on his own works well, but generally interaction is good. However, not always. The Princess Bride has separate commentaries from director Rob Reiner and writer William Goldman. The reason they are separate is presumably because Reiner lives in Los Angeles and Goldman is a devoted New Yorker, but surely it could have been possible to get them together for a morning. ( Stephen Soderbergh has generally got it right with his films, as most of his films have a commentary track of him talking to the writer. He has described commentary tracks as "The best film school around" or somethink like that, and he fills them with little details. Plus they are pretty no holds barred. (In the commentary on The Limey, writer Lem Dobbs spends quite a considerable time explaining all the things Soderbergh did wrong. The comments are interesting because the criticisms are generally fair, and it's a terrific film anyway. Soderbergh also clearly doesn't like the solo commentary, because on DVD of the one major film he both wrote and directed (Sex, Lies, and Videotape) he spends the commentary track talking about the film with another director. (Neil Labute). This commentary is a trifle self-indulgent, actually. Soderbergh spends a portion of it cringing about things that he would have done differently if he was more experienced. Labute responts by complimenting Soderbergh on what a fine film he made anyway. (Labute is right. The film holds up to the passing of a few years extremely well).

And go read this profile of Lawence Lessig right now. It's good to know all about the number one knight on our side in the copyright wars (even if he did go to Trinity).

There's lots of good stuff in the November Wired . Besides a couple of pieces on the spread of 802.11 WiFi networks, which I will talk about when they are online, we have this great piece on an Australian plot to eliminate awful introduced carp that are infesting Australia's waterways. I actually am an Australian, and Australia is amazingly sensitive about its native wildlife. As you grow up, the distinction is constantly made to you about the difference between native and introduced wildlife. Native is generally good. Introduced is generally bad. This is the right attitude to have in Australia, because the continent was largely cut off from the rest of the world prior to 1788, and it is full of unique and fascinating species. Many of these are terribly susceptible to being overrun by foreign species, so great care must be taken. When you enter Australia, you are not permitted to carry any animal or plant matter that is alive, or that could conceivably be alive.

However, it was only when I came to live in England that I realised that it is the Australian position that is largely the atypical one. Europe, Asia, Africa and even the Americas have been mixing their wildlife with each other for millennia. New species will occasionally overrun old species, but that hard line between introduced and native simply doesn't exist in other parts of the world.

Anyway, back to the carp. What is striking to me is how clever this is, and how remarkably safe it seems. The point is that if you just throw a few modified fish in the water and stop doing it, the species will evolve the all male gene out fast enough. The point is that the process of extinction must move faster than the process of evolution, and you have to keep throwing the modified species in until the fish are all gone. If the all male gene jumps species to some other kind of fish, it doesn't matter because without being replenished the genes will just evolve out of the other species. This is so much better and safer than uncontrolled biological warfare in which you introduce a new animal to supposedly kill the old one, and you just have a plague of the new one. (Something that has happened a few times in Australia's history).

I see that Disney are proceeding with the film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There would be a certain irony if the project comes to the screen after Douglas Adams' death, given the amount of effort he put into getting the film made when he was alive. However, I don't want to see it. THHGTTG was so much one man's quirky invention, that I cannot really see a film being made true to the spirit of the original(s), without Adams' involvement. And sadly, we are not now going to get this.

From time to time I have been encountering the Chomskian America had it coming argument from Chomsky himself, from the British left wing newspapers, and from acquaintances in London. American foreign policy is devious and therefore S11 was America getting a taste of its own medicine blah blah blah. I have never had much sympathy for this point of view. (Actually I am outraged by it). This sort of argument usually gets back to conspiracy theories, and I think that conspiracy theories are for losers. (I have a recollection of Bruce Sterling making this observation in an article in Wired or F&SF or somewhere in about 1995, which I would link to but I cannot find the quote). American foreign policy can be really dumb at times (See War on Drugs, The) but is it especially devious and full of sinister reasons for fighting? The answer generally is no. America generally does things for the reasons it says it does. And when I think about this, what always seems to come into my mind is the American intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Here we had a nasty vicious war in Europe. The Europeans failed to do a thing about it. Eventually America came in and stopped the killing. Why did they do this? Because it was the right thing to do. There is really little more to it than that. Even then we only got sniping from a lot of quarters on the left. We got very little gratitude from countries in Europe right on the doorstep of the killing. Yes, America could have come in and stopped the killing earlier. And yes, there have been other human rights crises in other parts of the world where America could have taken action but didn't. (I rate the lack of action when genocide occurred in Rwanda to be the worst failure of the Clinton administration. This lack of action was to some extent a consequence of the reaction to the quagmire that American forces got themselves into in Somalia, so I sort of understand how it happened. However, the delay in appreciating that Rwanda was on another scale rather than just being another African war was a terrible failure. It was a case of an administration screwing up and failing to act, however. No conspiracy ). However, you must give credit where credit is due. The intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo was an example of America doing a very fine thing. America deserves a great deal of credit for this one. It can be observed, and it has been observed, that America was in this particular instance protecting Muslims against Christians. This is true, but it is not the point. America was simply stopping people from being killed. If there is a war between Muslims and Christians, then America was not taking sides in it. Europeans allowed the atrocities of Bosnia and Kosovo to take place in their own back yard. America stopped them. When I hear arguments about who is morally better than who, I cannot but see the events of this particular war as exhibit A.

In 2000, I was staying with a friend in New York. My friend lived in a residential tower belonging to Columbia University at the Hudson River end of 179th street. I wanted to visit a friend in Connecticut, so I rented a car and drove up to see my friend. I got back to Manhattan at about two o'clock in the morning, and could find nowhere to park anywhere near where my friend lived. Eventually, I gave up and drove over the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, NJ, parked in the car park of a strip mall, and then had to get back to Manhattan. There were no taxis to be seen, and there did not appear to be any buses back over the bridge. Therefore, I ended up walking across the George Washington Bridge at three o'clock in the morning. Interestingly, most private lighting in Manhattan had been turned off at that time, and most of the lightling visible was street lighting. This was not white, but yellow. The famous skyline was visible, but New York was therefore a yellowy-red colour rather than the white it would have been earlier in the evening. As always, the skyline was magnificent, with two clumps of buildings, at midtown dominated by the Empire State Building, and downtown dominated by the World Trade Center. Not everyone loved the WTC from an architectural point of view (I rather liked it), but it did something magnificent to the skyline. At three in the morning (as indeed at other times) the skyline was breathtaking. I haven't visited New York in the last year, but when I do, I will not be able to look at the (still magnificent) skyline without thinking about what is missing. In 50 years time, I will not be able to look at the skyline without thinking about what is missing.

This, I think is the fundamental reason why something immense and magnificent has to be built in place of the WTC. To hopefully slightly lessen the feelings of emptiness that I, and many others, will feel when looking at the skyline.

Often, when you watch competitive sport, you see young competitors winning. The best of them have an unbelievable amount of focus, they have little experience of anything but winning, and often don't seem to realise what a big deal it is. Pete Sampras was like that when he became the youngest person to win the US Open in 1990, and he was like that for most of his wins at Wimbledon. Sometimes, however, you see a great sportsman, who it appears the younger players have caught up with and, who it appears is past his best and the media has declared him 'finished', find something, somewhere inside him that reminds him that he still is a great player, and that he can win one last time. This is really nice when it happens, because competitors who do this know how hard it is and really appreciate the fact that the old man has done it one last time. I remember Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters in 1986. And of course Pete Sampras this week. The trouble is of course that in this case the 'old man' is younger than I am, and I don't feel old. From the point of view of Australian sports fans, another key instance of this is swimmer Kieran Perkins winning the 1500m freestyle at the Atlanta Olympics. I think we has about 22 at the time, so "old man" can mean some odd things in these circumstances.

I am a little ambivalent about all the media coverage of the anniversary of September 11. We all have our memories of what happened and our reactions to what happened, and to be honest a lot of us have been thinking of little else for the last year. What is not needed is lots of mawkish and puerile platitudes in the form of television specials. My compliments to the New York Times magazine's effort, however. (Free registration required, yada yada yada). Promotin a bold, interested proposal as to what should be rebuilt in lower Manhattan is a fine, positive way to mark the anniversary. (I wish the article was more detailed, however. Perhaps I am being unfair, as I haven't seen the print version).

I'm in the process of redesigning the site. Therefore, things will look different from time to time, and occasionally things will look funny when I screw up. However, I'm working on it.

The Cyberpunk movement, 15 years later

Last month, I caught to Eurostar train through the channel tunnel to Brussels and then had a couple of days in Brussels and a couple in Amsterdam. Besides drinking a fair bit of the world's best beer and seeing a large police presence outside a building called the World Trade Center, I had a wander around Brussels, a city of fine restaurants, expensive boutique hotels and unelectred bureacrats and lobbyists who really run the world (or, at least, Europe). I had an odd memory of reading William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, the quintessential cyberpunk novels, about ten years ago. In Count Zero , the second of these novels, an art dealer named Marly Krushkova is summoned from Paris to Brussels to be interviewed for a job by an ultra rich corporate mogul named Joseph Virek. He is not actually there, but has some nasty disease and is thus living in a vat full of yeast in a bleak industrial park outside Stockholm, and the interview therefore takes place in a virtual reality version of Guel Park in Barcelona.

And yes, upon visiting Brussels did strike me as the sort of place where one goes to have virtual reality interviews with creepy businessmen like this. The country of Belgium has an impressive lack of any federal oversight of anything, and it seems to be the place for people who are upstanding in the sense that they will always obey actual laws and will be mortally offended if you suggest they wouldn't, but who none the less sometimes need laws with fewer scruples than are found in the United States of America. ( Singapore is a bit like this, too, although with an entirely different feel to Belgium). If you are instead making a show of being law abiding but you don't mean it and nobody believes you mean it, you go to Vienna. If you are not even making a show of it, you go to Cyprus, possibly Northern Cyprus.

Anyway, I think Gibson got Brussels about right. And after having this thought, an odd thing occurred to me. The Gibson novels are striking in that they are so global. The characters are in Tokyo. Then they run an errand in New York. Then there is another rush of airports and they are in Istanbul. There is a certain feeling of lightheadedness, of crampedness, and of prefabricated food that you get when you travel long distances by air, as if the actual time in transit isn't real. Suddenly you are in Istanbul. (Gibson of course extends this by adding the JAL shuttle to orbit to the experience).

I first read the Gibson novels about ten years ago, and at the time I had been to very few of the places where the books were set. In the ten years since, I have been to almost all the places in question. Not just Tokyo, but Chiba itself, a somewhat bleak, industrial place on the edge Tokyo bay out in the same direction from the city as (a) Disneyland and (b) Narita Airpot. (In this I was actually influenced by the Gibson novels - I was in Tokyo with a railpass a year or two after reading Neuromancer, a train line went to Chiba, and I thought what the heck, let's go). However, I have now been to Istanbul. I have now been to the Arizona desert. I have now been to Malibu, I have now been to various parts of the Sprawl (In the Books, there is a single giant city called the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, which may or may not have become an independent state). I have been to Paris, Barcelona, and of course London (where I am now).

Since going to Brussels last month, I have reread the three novels, and yes, my sense of the blur of all these places is very well captured by the books. Plus the global technological sense of the books is right. The mass of Cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs and laptops carried by people on planes and in hotels now wasn't right in the details, but it feels right in terms of the mood. (Of course, Gibson notoriously is something of a non-techie himself. He says he wrote the books about the enthusiam for technology he saw in other people rather than the technology itself, so details not right but the feel correct is perhaps what we should expect).

I have at times thought that Gibson is in some sense a disappointment in terms of his later career. He wrote a series of dazzlingly brilliant short stories in the early 1980s. (They are still in my opinion his best work - they are collected in Burning Chrome). Then he wrote Neuromancer, which was and is a great sf novel, but which was not as original as some would claim, because it basically reapeats what is in the short stories, then he wrote the two sequels, which really are just him repeating himself again, although they are full of wonderful new images and situations.

Then he wrote the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, which while again full of wonderful images and situations, are less ambitious than the books that came before them. They are less global, about smaller scale characters, and less obviously concerned with the fate of humanity. (They actually are about the fate of humanity, but you only realise this somehow in passing at the end of the third book. I am not sure if this happening only in passing is clever or just cute).

It has been my impression that Gibson's sense of "with it" has been fading. He still writes excellent books, and I have been looking forward to his new novel Pattern Recognition eagerly. But, somehow, my feeling was that he was past it. But now I am not so sure. What I have been rereading recently still feels really vital. Neal Stephenson somehow now seems much more dated, although Cryptonomicon for instance was written much more recently. I now need to read the Bridge trilogy again and see how vital this feels.

Anyway, enough of this for now. I will talk about Neal Stepehenson and Bruce Sterling in future postings.

I so love The Onion . This photo

accompanies a story entitled US Fast-Food Chains Agree To Voluntary Cheese Limits and supposedly illustrates what burgers were like before the limits were imposed. I can just imagine them laughing themselves sick as they made the burger.

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This is a good one.

I have only been one place where electricity was not widespread: the Himalayan high country in Nepal near Mt. Everest. Here there were some villages that had electricity and some that did not. (There was lots of flowing water, so building small hydroelectric plants wasn't hard. Various foreign organisations (especially Austrians) wanted to build them, but the (Hindu dominated) government in Kathmandu put lots of bureacratic obstacles in their way). Due to a population explosion, there was a huge deforestation problem, with all the trees being chopped down for firewood. Any attempt to replant trees would just get almost immediately chopped down again. This was except for in and near towns with electricity, where the deforestation had stopped, and trees were successfully being replanted. Oddly enough, the presence of electricity was leading to major environmental benefits, not to mention the fact that the people were quite pleased that it freed them from lives of backbreaking labour of getting and carrying firewood. Pretty much anywhere there is no electricity, that is what life largely consists of: backbreaking labour.

Perhaps we could also fly in some McAfrika burgers from Norway.