This has taken me longer than I said it would to write and post. My mind has been on issues of terrorism rather than telephones. Plus I have had endless blogger/blogspot problems which means I seem to have typed most of this several times. Perhaps I should move this blog somewhere else. Anyway, apologies.

Last week, I was sitting on a wharf beside the River Elbe in the Blankanese district of Hamburg. It's a mighty river. Large container ships go past to the Port of Hamburg. A college friend of mine who lives in South Africa happens to have been born in Hamburg, so I sent him an SMS text message from my GSM cellphone. I also sent a message to my sister in Austalia. This cellphone is registered with a British network (Orange, which actually now owned by France Telecom, although is was owned by Mannesman of Germany and before that Hutchison of Hong Kong). It is on the simplest prepay tariff, which I use because I do not know how long I am going to be in the UK and I do not wish to commit myself to a fixed term contract. However, there is still enough interoperability and roaming in place that I can sit beside a river in Germany and send text messages to people in South Africa, and receive replies a few minutes later. I was impressed. It is possible to buy a wireless communications device for 50 pounds that will allow me to send messages to another one of these wireless devices over much of the world.

Roaming and interoperability is of course what GSM got right. The GSM standard, with its system of portable SIMs and phones that could be easily moved from network to network and which could be used with different numbers and network accounts was a nice, elegant piece of work. However, the creators of this system didn't just get it right technically, they go it right logistically as well. Right from day one there was a central clearing house set up to make roaming from one network to another and the associated billing as easy as possible.

The downside of this is that my little exercise in which I sent and received a few text messages while sitting next to the Elbe cost me several times as much money than it would have if I had been sitting next to the Thames. My phone was not in its home country, and I was therefore being charged "roaming rates". If I was actually using the phone for voice calls, I would again be charged very much more than would be the case at home, and (horror of horrors) I would be being charged for incoming as well as outgoing calls.

As to why charges are so high, the telcos have a number of justifications.These come down to the fact that when you are roaming, the infrastructure of two different networks is being used, this is tricky and so it should be expensive.

In actual fact, the key issue is simply that the charges for roaming are largely decided by the company that owns the network you are roaming to. They pass the charges on to your home network, which adds a markup and passes the charge on to you. As you are not a regular customer of the network you are roaming on, this operator generally feels it can rip you off beyond words without being terribly concerned about the loss of future business. Those customers who do regularly visit the same countries are normally business customers who do not pay for their calls themselves and therefore are not very price sensitive anyway.

As to whether this makes sense, we need to look at what is going on. There are two kinds of roaming call:

1. Outgoing calls. You are in a foreign country and are making a call (to anywhere). The foreign network picks up the call and then passes it on to the destination. At the end of the call, it passes billing information on to your home network, and the cost of the call appears on your next bill. Your home network is involved only in terms of billing. From the point of view of the network, there is little difference between this and handling a call from one of its loval customers and an international customer who is roaming, except that billing informaiton needs to be sent to the right place at the end of the call.

2. Incoming calls. In this case, my phone's home network is in country X, and I am roaming in country Y. When someone wants to call me, they call the phone's number in country X. The network has to figure out that the phone is roaming in Y. It then has to open a line to country Y, and the network in country Y connects the call to the phone. This is more complex than an outgoing call situation, as the call has to be routed via country X regardless of the location of the caller. (In addition, the network in country X has to keep track of the fact that the phone is in country Y in order that the connection be possible). Even if the caller is in country Y, the call has to go via country X and back, because the phone's number is native to that country. Plus of course billing information needs to be kept track of.

Incoming calls are certainly more complex than outgoing calls, and both networks are involved in the call rather than just in billing, If you are going to charge a premium for roaming based on actual costs, you would therfore expect incoming calls to be more expensive than outgoing calls. Right?

In practice, quite the opposite is the case. The cost of outgoing calls when roaming is horrific. The cost of incoming calls is more reasonable. The reson for this is simply that prices for outgoing calls are generally set by the network you are roaming to, whereas those for incoming calls are set largely by the country you are roaming from. The charge for an incoming call has generally been negotiated by your home network, and is generally based on the cost of calling any other mobile in country Y from country X. Your home network is less likely to rip you off, and so this works out cheaper, even though it is more complex.

The deal with international roaming is simple. Telcos are charging what they can get away with. European mobile companies make more than ten percent of their revenues from roaming, whereas it makes up a much smaller fraction of total minutes. They charge what they can because they can get away with it. (To really see this in action at its worst, one only needs to take one's phone to a third world country. The rates one is charged in, say, Indonesia, make the European rates look reasonable).

I was arguing the other day that the benefits of the EU's single market are very large, and should not be forgotten by people who are going to (generally quite justifiably) criticise the EU. Telecommunications, however, is an area in which the single market is not working very well. (At least, not yet, as Obi Wan might say).

Superficially, telecoms and international aviation have certain similarities between them. Traditionally, the international forms of both industries have been regulated by bilateral treaties between nations, and traditionally the international business has been dominated by often state owned monopolies and duopolies. One effect of the single market should be to transform the international aspects of these businesses into essentially domestic businesses. In the case of aviation, this has happened, but not through the traditional companies. What you have had is the traditional businesses attempting to keep operating by their old business models. When they have tried to operate by the new ones, it hasn't worked. (British Airways have attempted to operate domestic airlines in France and Germany, and to set up a London Stansted based discount airline, but the culture of the company has not been to get them to work). However, the barriers to entry aren't large, and new companies have come into being to take the slack.

In telecommunications this hasn't happened nearly as much. Yes, the cost of international calls has come down for fixed phones, but even with the cheapest carriers , it still costs significantly more to dial Paris from London than it does to dial Glasgow. Still, it's possible to call Paris for 4 pence a minute, which isn't much, so plenty has been achieved. Part of the problem is that we still have a numbering system in which dialing a different country requires dialing a different kind of number to dialing a domestic one. It feels you are doing something different, so it is possible to get away with charging something different.

However, with mobile networks the situation is far worse, and this comes from the fact that networks were explicitely licensed on national grounds. Steven Den Beste was the other day discussing the fact that in the US, a vast number of small cellular companies have basically now evolved into four national networks (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Cingular). This process hasn't happened nearly as effectively in the US. This seems to be due to the fact that, counterintuitively, licences in Europe were issued to cover larger areas. Whereas in the US cellular licences were originally sold on a market by market basis, and there were a huge number of smaller markets to merge together, in Europe licences were generally sold on a national basis. Most nations have three or four GSM networks. (The EU has required each country to have at least three). Typically, one or two licences were issued for analogue services in the 1980s, one of which was given to the incumbent government telecommunications monopoly. In the early 1990s these operators were given GSM licences and a couple of new operators were licenced for GSM. For instance, in Britain, there were two analogue operators. (Britain is quite typical. There were two analogue operators (BT Cellnet and Vodafone) who later upgraded to GSM and were joined by two new entrants (Orange and One2One). In any event, networks were national, marketing was national, a roaming structure came into being that was based on the idea that roaming calls were an ultra-expensive luxury.

Over the years, these operators became successful, and tried to expand. European law (at least from 1993) allowed these operators to buy one another without restriction, but in a market where lots of companies were state owned and national governments wanted to protect them, this was hard. Lots of companies bought minority stakes in other companies, but full mergers were relatively slow in happening. They did eventually happen, but still, nobody has what could be described as a comprehensive European network. The closest we have is Vodafone, which has networks in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden (only listing EU countries) and a variety of minority stakes. Vodafone is presently trying to take control of the SFR network in France, which has come on the market due to the collapse of the Vivendi Universal conglomerate, and it looks likely to do this. Other operators are rather less advanced. O2 (the former BT Cellnet) has networks in Britain, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Orange (which belongs to France Telecom) has networks in Britain, France, and Denmark. T-Mobile (formerly Deutsche Telecom) has networks in Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, and Austria . None of these networks are complete, and roaming to networks owned by other people is therefore still important if you are going to offer a complete service to your customers.

Ideally, what we would like is for these companies to more or less complete their European networks, and then offer customers tariff plans in which the rates paid when the phone is outside their own country are the same as for calls made inside it. Ideally, there should be no charges for incoming calls in either case. It may be that call charges on such a plan would be slightly more than on a conventional domestic plan, and it may be that to call such a phone, people would have to dial a non-gegraphic number that cost slightly more to call than a domestic number. The main issue is that call charges when roaming should resemble a domestic tariff. Given that when a company such as Vodafone builds a pan-European network it should be able to do such things as integrate their billing system, this would be a much better reflection of costs than the present roaming system anyway. In a competitive market, economic theory would tell us that this is how tariffs would end up anyway, but sadly we do not have a competitive market. You would expect the first company to adopt such a model to gain a lot of market share, but the longer term result would be an erosion of margins. As it is, we have a set of sick, overindebted companies that lack the flexibility or desire to change their business models.

In the aviation market, barriers to entry turned out to be fairly low, so although the existing carriers weren't flexible enough to change, new carriers arose to take advantage of the new market. In mobile phones, barriers to entry are total. There are no new GSM licences being issued, and the only new mobile licences are for 3G licences for a technology that doesn't work. Therefore, the existing carriers oligopoly isn't threatened.

In defence of the EU here, the competition authorities of the European Commission are aware of this, and an antitrust investigation is ongoing into the high cost of roaming charges on mobile networks in Europe. Investigators have been arriving at telcos at seven in the morning and demanding access to documents and computers. I don't think it is so much the EU as the national governments who are the obstacle here. The trouble is that the forcing roaming charges to be closer to costs would weaken the financial position of Europe's telcos considerably. Given that their financial position is already generally dreadful due to the huge costs of 3G licences and equpment, most EU governments would prefer that this not happen. Given that in a lot of cases they seem determined to bail out their (in some cases still partly state owned) telcos, and this would make the job harder, there is ultimately likely to be a lot of political resistance to this. However, bailouts are a bad idea. They just prevent innovation, and if Europe had a lead in mobiles, they are going to allow it to become further eroded.

Thus we have a situation where consumers are being ripped off , the market is completely scherotic, and there are huge political obstacles to any reform. Once again, the circumstances of the European mobile market appear pretty dreadful.

And if ordinary job interviews aren't humiliating enough for you, there is this .

Virginia Postrel quotes Sean Kinsell from Japan.

CNN Asia covered it very thoroughly last weekend, when there were only sporadic updates and the death toll was steadily climbing from "about 140 people, some of whom may have been foreigners" to what we now know. I can't claim to know a representative sample of Westerners in the Pacific Rim, but even among the diehard (as it were) pacifists I encounter frequently, the reaction is very charged. The WTC represented capitalism. That meant that even though in reality it gave jobs to thousands of poor immigrants, both the left and the right who think the money economy evil could see it as an attack on a particular aspect of our civilization that they dislike. And of course, the Pentagon is central command for the Military-Industrial Complex.

But Bali to a lot of people still represents an art-centered, peaceful paradise in the middle of contentious Indonesia. It's where backpacker types averse to the money culture can indulge their soulful side while providing a living for the nice natives. And it definitely isn't the place to go looking for victims if your issues are specifically with America.

There is a fairly mobile expatriate culture throughout Asia. It consists of people who are comfortable moving from country to country, and culture to culture. East Asians themselves (particularly the Japanese and Koreans) are often not comfortable with this sort of cross cultural experience, so the sort of jobs that involve this sort of thing tend to fall to others. This expatriate community contains Europeans and Americans. It contains lots of Indians, too, especially in IT roles. It contains lots of Australians. This is due to the proximity of Australia, and is I think also due to the nature of Australians. As I wrote last week, we are not Americans and we are not Europeans. We have certain doubts about our identity. This is I think one factor in why are so obsessed with beating other countries in sporting contests, and I think it is a factor in why we travel so lot. In any event, we fit well into that East Asian, country to country expatriate thing. This is a culture of skilled people who possibly don't quite fit in at home, and who bring western expertise to poorer and more isolated countries, and who build things. (The spirit of this is captured wonderfully in this article by Neal Stephenson. It's six years old and very long, but well worth a read). It is generally a culture of people who work hard, drink hard, and party hard, and have a slightly cynical and world weary quality at times. You meet them in bars in certain districts of Asian countries. And you meet them in bars in airports. Clive James was sort of describing this

A few days after the towers collapsed in New York, I flew east myself, from London to Sydney, thence to keep a speaking engagement in Adelaide. I flew by Malaysia Air, on a flight in which the crew outnumbered the passengers. The transit lounge in Kuala Lumpur was where I had my revelation. There was a prayer room for the faithful and an open bar for the rest of us. The two schools of thought were getting along fine, but it wasn't hard to imagine another breed of traveller who wouldn't stand for it. Here was an obvious target, and there were plenty more on the way to Australia, including the whole of Indonesia, where the fundamentalists were getting a lot better hearing than they were in Malaysia, but only because the Indonesian government was even more scared of what they might do.

and certainly given the amount of Asian travel he has done, it's a culture he is familiar with. James isn't the same kind of expatriate, but he is one just the same. He has the type of global view that expatriates have. (As for instance, does Ian Buruma (who is a complicated cultural mixture, who again has travelled in Asia and written about it a log). This type of thing comes across in his books as well).

I don't think it is a coincidence that these are the two people writing clearheaded stuff for the Gaurdian. The expatriate experience illustrates what is at stake in this war pretty well. Bali is full of bars full of expatriates: it is the place they come (at least came) to unwind between jobs. And in a sense this bomb seems an attack on the expatriate lifestyle. These are western, crosscultural people, who are helping some of the poorer countries of Asia to modernise and westernise. They like to drink beer and party. A lot of them died last week. And in their murder it becomes clearer what it is the islamofascists hate. It isn't America so much as what America stands for. It isn't capitalism even. It is the secular, modern world itself.

There's a good piece by James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly discussing what America is likely to have to do in Iraq after they invade, and how difficult it is likely to be. (Plus it gives some history of the place). Well worth a read.

Clive James' piece in the Guardian has been linked to by Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and Denis Dutton, so it is fairly hard to imagine that anyone hasn't read it, but there are a few things I want to say about it. To quote Sullivan again,

Clive James is a very smart and funny man, but I never knew he was this clear-headed as well. In the Guardian, yes, the Guardian, he lays into the Fisks and the Pilgers and Australia's allegedly liberal media honchos for just not getting it. His epiphany is yet another milestone on the gradual and perhaps accelerating maturation of the left:

I don't think James has had any epiphany: the article makes it pretty clear that his views on the subject have evolved gradually and were there well before September 11. And he hasn't suddenly become clearheaded. Despite his television programs in which he made fun of foreign (and at times British) popular culture, he has always been a fairly canny observer of culture when he wants to be. This is in his books of criticism, and it is in his novels. ( Brmm Brmm was pretty astute about Japan). To quote James

The (Australian) consensus considers itself to be leftwing in the best sense. The appellation is one that an old-stager like me is reluctant to grant, because the consequence of granting it, and then expressing dissent, is to be classified as conservative. In my own case, the main thing I want to conserve is the welfare of the common people: in that regard I am plodding in Bob Ellis's zig-zag slipstream as he carries his ramshackle torch.

James is one of many of us who doesn't want to see himself as being a conservative, but none the less can't accept the moral relativism that a lot of the left have used to somehow identify with fanatics who murder innocents and who want to destroy modern civilization. Like Ian Buruma, who also writes for the Guardian, James has spent too much time actually looking at other cultures to be able to accept this. He talks about his friend the editor of the Independent being out to lunch, but that none the less he is a friend, and this is at times difficult to deal with. James concludes, however, that

I count the editor of the Independent as a friend, so the main reason I hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.

I wrote about this myself last week, after the Bali bombings had happened, but before I was aware of them. I said

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.

What James is saying is that it is worth the argument. And of course he is right. I was stupid to say otherwise, even if I'd rather not have the argument with my friends. And what is different this week, is that if you feel anti-American, the Bali bombing is much harder to reconcile with your anti-Americanism than was the World Trade Center attack. I was never especially anti-American, and I am somewhat unsettled by the fact that so many people linked the fanatics' attacks on New York with their own anti-Americanism in the first place, but it seems to be so. At least more people are now realising who the enemy is. I think the ground is shifting in Europe. There is a war on. When there are people who want to kill you, you have to fight. I think this is becoming clear, even in Europe.

I've just discovered that Scott Lysaght , who was in the same class at primary school as I was, and was in my scout troup, and who I later also knew at university, was one of the victims of the Bali attack. He was not a close friend, but was none the less someone I knew quite well and in whose company I did a lot of enjoyable things: mostly hiking and camping. I last saw him at my 21st birthday party in 1989. This is quite shocking. My sympathy and condolences to his parents, to his wife, and to his young daughter.

I promised a couple of people by e-mail that I would post a piece on GSM mobile roaming, and how this is related to what is wrong with the EU's telecommunications regulatory market. Sadly, this piece has got a little out of control and isn't finished yet. I shall post it tomorrow though. I promise.

Hamburg is a striking city

The invention of container shipping is one of the things that has changed the world most in the last 50 years. It did for the moving of physical goods what the invention of packet switching and the internet did for the moving of information. The flow through effect that it had on what our cities look like is reasonably widely understood by people who think about these things, but probably not so much by the general public. Basically, container shipping led to much bigger ships and the requirement that there be large amounts of machinery (generally enormous cranes) next to where the ships docked. This meant that many traditional ports (often a few miles up rivers and close to the middle of cities which had grown around the ports) were utterly useless for loading and unloading containers. This meant that the container ports had to be buit somewhere else, usually a few kilometres closer to the mouth of the same river. This meant that the traditional port areas of the cities became rundown, and in the last ten to twenty years these areas have provided areas for residential and office development near water. Hence we have London's docklands developments, huge areas of Sydney harbour foreshore becoming residential, ships no longer dock up the Avon River gorge in Bristol but instead dock in the Severn Estuary, and waterfront developments have occurred in the space left behind as ships have ceased docking in traditional locations in virtually every traditional port city in the world.

Hamburg is an exception. For reasons of history, Hamburg was built by the side of the mighty Elbe river. Unusually, the city is next to a very deep and wide portion of the river. And, almost uniquely out of all the port cities I have seen, this has allowed the container Port to be built essentially next to the same water used for the traditional port. The container port is on the other side of the river to most of the city of Hamburg, but it is close and visible to the city itself. The port dominates the city.

Due to the non-departure of the port, there has been relatively little space for waterside redevelopment as there has been beside rivers in other ports. Warehouses are still used as warehouses, and so cannot be converted to housing. Some of the old docks can no longer be used as docks and are a little run down, and there are one or two areas which were clearly important in the past but no longer are. The container port appears slightly downstream from where the conventional port was, but only slightly. There has been some development in this area, but this has an interesting character, as it is built close to working port infrastructure. We have a theatre hosting a production of the stage version of The Lion King surrounded by port infrastructure. We have suburbs rather closer to the container port than is the case with container ports in other cities, and other associated infrastructure nearby too. (Most notably, there is a beautiful cable stayed bridge). We have one or two tourist attractions, but no large scale redevelopment. The port is still at the heart of Hamburg, and this is very unusual for a modern city.

Andrew Sullivan observes that support for the war is stronger amongst the younger generation than the older one.

I'm fascinated by the generation-gap. The big difference between the anti-war movement during Vietnam and now is that this time, the young are pro-war. Or rather today's anti-war movement is essentially your father's: it's the same boomer peaceniks, unable to let go. I've long believed that 9/11 could reshape an entire generation's attitude toward foreign policy. Slowly, the polls are supporting that possibility.

I think he is absolutely right. I also think the reason for this is actually pretty obvious. People of the younger generation in the west are much more widely travelled, much more likely to have friends and partners with different cultural backgrounds, much more globally minded and much more cosmopolitan than are the older generation. Our parents generation spent a lot of time talking about cultural pluralism, but ours is the generation that has actually got on with living it. It isn't theoretical for us. This war is being waged against us by people who almost above everything want to destroy that pluralism. This is why we have to fight.

Now this is what I want. A laptop that can run for ten hours and, even better, can be refueled by simply adding some fuel rather than plugging it into a power socket for hours. No more need to travel with electric plug adaptors. No more need to be constantly on the lookoot for electrical sockets in cafes. Tremendous.

Taken together with recent announcements indicating that relatively low concentration methanol solutions can be taken onto aeroplanes safely, this may be an indication that this market is starting to emerge.

The market is starting to emerge? Get a working version of this product onto the market and the result will be like being run over by a steamroller.

Back to Blighty

Okay, back in London after my little sojourn in Germany. Various brief comments. I only had two days in Hamburg and one in Lubeck, so my comments will inevitably be superficial.

It was really hard to find internet cafes. In fact, I did not see a single internet cafe in three days. There were coin operated internet terminals in hotels and railway stations, but these were expensive, and not ideal for a lengthy internet session, as the connection speeds were slow, and the keyboards were designed to be vandal-proof rather than for typing. What I wanted was, well, an internet cafe. I wanted to be able to sit down for an hour or so, catch up with my e-mail, browse the web a little, and maybe do a little blogging. However, I didn't see any such cafes. I wasn't make a concerted effort to find one: I simply expected I would find one in my wanderings. But I did not see a one. I am sure such internet cafes are easier to find in Berlin and Munich. Such cafes probably do exist in Hamburg, too: Googling for "Hamburg Internet Cafe" does find results. However, I have stumbled across them in the middle of tiny villages in the third world. I wouldn't have thought they would be hard to stumble over in the city that gave us the Chaos Computer Club. Is this German labour and trading laws? I know that Richard Branson closed all his Virgin Megastores in Germany because he found German trading laws made it impossible to run his stores the way he wanted to. (He wanted them to be open on the weekend, for instance).

Germany has great Turkish food. Go up to a fairly ordinary looking kebab stall in any random suburb of Hamburg and buy a kebab, and it is every bit as good as what you will get in Istanbul.

Australians sometimes complain that events involving us never make the news in foreign countries, and that foreigners have no idea who our leaders and politicians are. My chief exposure to English language news over the past few days has been snatches of CNN and the BBC news channel caught in lobbies and restaurants, and Australian prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer have been omnipresent. This is one of those situations where you should be careful what you wish for.

In a bar in a somewhat industrial suburb of Hamburg, I was sitting in a railway station bar having a beer or two. Into the bar came a Russian, aged about 35. (This sounds like the start of a bad joke). He attempted to order a beer, but had a little difficulty, as he knew no German whatsoever. (I don't speak very much German, but I do speak enough to order a beer). However, he spoke excellent English. This demonstrates the total failure of the Soviet Union. They friends were supposedly the East Germans, and the Americans were their enemy. Thus in their schools they were taught German. But, they didn't actually learn German

Anyway, back to serious blogging tomorrow.

I am in the Free, Hanseatic and very hard to find internet cafes in city of Hamburg. My thoughts on the place when I am able to log in for longer.

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