I saw The Two Towers. My response: I really enjoyed it, much more than I did The Fellowship of the Ring , to be truthful. Roger Ebert has criticised the movies for removing the hobbits from the centre of action, and instead concentrating on the more action oriented storylines, as well as for the fact that the characterisation gets a little lost in all the swashbuckling. Certainly these are fair criticisms. The central focus of the movie is on Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, rather than Frodo and Sam. But that said: the second book was quite tricky from a narrative point of view: the principal characters have been split into three groups, who meet up at no point in the story. It was always likely that one story would be in front and the other two would feel like digressions from the action, and that is what we have.

Visually, the movie is just stunning. My admiration for what Peter Jackson has been able to pull off in New Zealand is enormous. If evidence was ever needed that anything can be pulled off anywhere in todays technological, connected world, this is it. It used to be the case that George Lucas was considered eccentric for basing his movie empire in Marin County in northern California, but now the rules have changed again. Everything has been done in house in New Zealand, including all the special effects. And quite simply, wow. (The film deserves an award for its score, too, which is perfect without being too intrusive.

And, following up on what I said yesterday, Miranda Otto is absolutely luminous as Eowyn, in what is by far the largest female part in the films so far. Somewhat sadly, we lose track of her character a bit as the film gets swallowed by action scenes towards the end, but Peter Jackson may have just turned her into an international star.

Following up on my last piece on the music industry, look at this very piece by George Ziemann (via slashdot ), in which he shows that although music industry revenues are down, the number of CD releases is down by even more, so the average sales per release has actually increased . In this age in which consumer choice is generally exploding, the music industry actually gives us less choice. Ths agrees with what I was saying, which is that the music industry's has completely lost the plot. Its problem is that it is selling an obsolete product, and not only that but it is marketing the product extremely badly. Instead of attempting to find the plot, it instead blames everything on file sharing and piracy.

Brian Micklethwait over at Samizdata (who is once again kind enough to link to me) talks about being asked questions about blogging by a real journalist.

"Who is (Glenn Reynolds)? What does he do when he's not blogging?"

That seems the wrong question to me. I think it really must be "What other things does he do while he is blogging?"

I told her of particular bloggers to pay attention to, such as ...., and Reynolds of course (for the Lott story, and for his very different take on intellectual property).

I am not sure that Glenn's take on intellectual property is at this point that "different. He is pretty much in agreement with the intellectual property position that many technical people and the slashdot crowd have had for years. What is relatively new is that this position is slowly filtering out into the wider world. I have seen similar positions to the one Reynolds holds quoted in the Financial Times and similar places for a while. Over the last year it has been getting out into the realm of The New York Times and the Washington Post . Once, holding alternative views on copyright was really a very extreme thing to do. Now it is starting to feel almost mainstream. For one thing, fewer and fewer people are seeing the music companies as anything other than the semi-criminal (and sometimes not semi) organisations that they are.

Harry Potter and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link

When you read the Harry Potter books, you discover that the Hogwarts Express departs from King's Cross station in London from Platform nine and three quarters, which you can find if you magically walk between a barrier between platforms nine and ten. However, it is clear that J.K. Rowling did not actually look very carefully at King's Cross station before writing this. Kings Cross station contains is divided into two parts: platforms 1 to 8 are in a single large shed, and platforms 9 to 11 are in another smaller shed off the side. Trains going up the East Coast Main Line (to Peterborough, Durham, Newcastle, and Edinburgh) go from the main shed, and smaller more local trains to East Anglia go from the smaller shed to the side. (The main destination served from platform 9 in this smaller shed is Cambridge, so those of us who have studied there find the Harry Potter Books to be slighty amusing for this reason). This section of the station is in no way spectacular, which is why the makers of the Harry Potter movies filmed the inside of the main station, rather than the real platforms 9 and 10. This may not be too unrealistic, however, as wherever Hogwarts is meant to be, I really do not think it is in East Anglia.

(It has been claimed that J.K. Rowling was even further mixed up when she wrote the books, and that she was actually thinking of Euston station rather than Kings Cross. Euston is the terminus for the West Coast Main Line, and is where you go from if you want to go from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow).

In any event, Kings Cross Station was built by the Great Northern Railway in 1851-2, and from an architectural point of view, the station is rather drab and utilitarian. It works fine, and looks okay from the inside, but is nothing much to photograph from the outside.

This is why, in the second Harry Potter movie, when the film-makers decided to show some outside shots of "Kings Cross Station" they instead showed outside shots of nearby St Pancras Station . St Pancras station is right next to Kings Cross station, and is the terminal station for the Midland Main Line. This is where you depart London from Nottingham and Sheffield. St Pancras Station is the most spectacular railway station in London. Its was built in 1863-74, and its main shed is one of the largest enclosed spaces in London, and the front of the station consists of a spectacular gothic facade, part of which encloses St Pancras Chambers once a beautiful hotel, but now run down and not used for anything.

And, curiously enough, St Pancras Station is not used for very many trains either. It was never as important a destination as Kings Cross or Euston, and there was even a proposal in the 1950s to close and demolish it. In 1989, many of the shorter distance services on the Midland Main Line were diverted from St Pancras through a disused 19th century tunnel through the middle of London to connect with South London services to either Brighton or Wimbledon. This scheme was known as Thameslink, and it reduced the number of trains terminating at St Pancras still further.

As you undoubtedly know, in the 1980s and early 1990s, a tunnel was built under the English channel. Whereas the French decided right from the beginning to build a high-speed TGV line from Paris to the tunnel, the British decided to defer this to the future, and instead route trains from Paris along existing train lines into an existing London station. However, none of the existing southern stations had enough spare platforms for the trains from Paris, and none of the existing stations contained train sheds that were long enough to house the 20+ carriage trains. Therefore, an extension to Waterloo station was built providing new (and much longer) platforms for the trains to Paris and Brussels. When the Channel Tunnel was opened in 1994, Eurostar Services from Paris and London came into this new Waterloo international station. (The French were not particularly amused about trains from Paris going to Waterloo). Comments were made about eventually building a high speed TGV line from the tunnel to London, and the general expectation was that such a line would be built eventually but not soon.

At the time of the opening, President Mitterand of France made some remarks about how travellers would speed with modern efficiency through France and then ease slowly down 19th century English railways into London. One English minister (I forget who) responded by making a comment about how the Kent countryside that passengers would be going through was a lovely part of England and the passengers would enjoy the view. While this is entirely true, this sounded feeble even to the Major government, and it was then decided that a modern high-speed railway would be built from the channel tunnel to central London.

Now, this reopened the question of how the channel tunnel trains should come into London. Clearly there was no space above ground for a new railway line into central London, so most of the final approach into London had to be underground. Once we knew this, then a variety of options were opened up. The simplest was to just build a tunnel into Waterloo, and use the existing Waterloo International terminal. The advantage of this was that the station had been built. The disadvantage was that once trains had arrived in Waterloo, it was difficult for them to go anywhere else. Plus, the government wanted the new line to go through as many places as possible where the government was trying to ensure that urban regeneration would occur. Two big places where this was so were East London, and the former industrial areas of Kent south of the Thames. Wouldn't it be great if we could bring the new railway through these areas, build stations in these areas, and so help the urban regeneration.

For these stated reasons, a proposal (follow this link for a map and more details) was eventually approved to build the line through the regeneration areas of western Kent and also east London. Additional stations were to be built at Ebbsfleet and Ashford in Kent and Stratford in east London, and hopefully the areas around these stations would get an economic boost. And as for the London terminal, the decision was to use the presently underused station at St Pancras. This station would need to be extended in length in order that the Eurostar trains would fit, and new platforms would also need to be built in order that there would be enough space for new domestic trains (using the new high speed line) from Kent to also fit in the station.

This proposal is now being built. The first stage of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) (costing 1.9 billion pounds) will open in 2003. This will include the above ground section of the line from the Channel Tunnel to the outskirts of London, from which for the next three years trains will then use existing lines to get to Waterloo. After that, the tunnel into London (costing 3.2 billion pounds, for a total project total of 5.2 billion pounds) will be completed, and services will come into a refurbished St Pancras. The grand old hotel in St Pancras Chambers will be refurbished, and will once again be a fine hotel (plus some private apartments). St Pancras, rather than just receiving a few trains from the Midlands, will be receiving services from the Midlands, Kent, and continental Europe. The most beautiful station in London will quite possibly also be the most important station in London.

(There is also a proposal on the cards (Thameslink 2000) which would see most of the shorter distance East Anglia services that presently terminate a Kings Cross instead stop at a new underground station at St Pancras before going through an upgraded Thameslink tunnel and coming out in south London, before continuing to Surrey and Sussex and other parts of Kent. This would raise the importance of St Pancras even further).

The above is the story that the railway engineers sold to the government. It is a good story, and the project so far is coming in on time and on budget. Rather than reinventing the wheel, the contractors are simply using existing French technology (and in a lot of cases experienced French subcontractors) to build the CTRL.

This is the story that we have been told so far. However, there is one issue about this that has bothered me a little. And that is, why is a huge station being built at Stratford in East London. The argument that building this station will aid development in east London sounds good, but isn't actually convincing. For high speed rail, the key issue is journey time. You are competing with air travel, and you must keep the total journey time below three hours at all costs, and if possible you want it significantly lower than this. And for a train travelling at 300 km/h, extra stops are extremely expensive in terms of time. The train must drop from 300 km/h to zero, stop for a minute or two, and then accelerate back to 300km/h. You really do not want two stops close together. A stop at Stratford before St Pancras is going to add 10 minutes to the journey time. Given that 5 billion pounds has been spent to cut the whole journey time to Paris by 45 minutes, then giving up a quarter of this time through an extra stop seems silly. If you listen to what the train operators are saying carefully enough, it is clear that they do not expect many trains to stop at Stratford.

So, what is happening? I think the key is that trains come into London, then they go through Stratford, then the line has goes through junctions allowing trans to be diverted to either the East or West Coast main lines, and then go into St Pancras. In theory, it would be possible for the trains to go up the ECML to Newcastle and Edinburgh, or up the WCML to Birmingham and Manchester. If trains were to do this, Stratford would be the London stop for through trains (in the same way that the station at Charles De Gaul airport in Paris is the stop for trains going from Lille to Lyon). However, this does not appear to have much potential, because although the ECML is fairly modern and can manage trains at 200km/h, there are no major destinations up that line until you get to Leeds and Newcastle, and Leeds to Paris is going to take well over three hours. Similar issues are also true for the WCML, and even services to Birmingham are going to take too long to be justifiable.

However, think about the situation. The CTRL is going to be Britain's first high speed rail line. If it is successful, the whole corridor between London and the tunnel and between the tunnel and Lille and Paris, is likely to be economically revitalised by it. If it is a big success, then another fact becomes obvious: the London/Kent corridor actually was not the obvious place to build a fast rail line in the UK. Traffic on this route is less and will always be less than traffic between London and the major cities of the Midlands: Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. If the case is made for fast rail in the UK, then the case is extremely strong for a link from London to those cities. If this is done properly, then even London-Liverpool is less than an hour. Link this up with the CTRL, and Liverpool-Paris and Liverpool-Brussels come in at about three hours, the time at which fast rail becomes competitive.

Here is the issue: what the Stratford station and the north-east approach to London are actually about is building the station and the necessary links for the next fast rail line in England. Different reasons were made up to convince the government, because the government didn't want to hear grandiose future proposals for now. However, the people who designed this project knew what they were doing.

Get this right, and assuming that lines under construction in other countries are completed, and such long distance train routes as Liverpool-Manchester-Birmingham-London-Lille-Paris-Lyon-Marseilles, Liverpool-Manchester-Birmingham-London-Lille-Brussels-Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam and Liverpool-Manchester-Birmingham-London-Lille-Brussels-Cologne become possible (and maybe on to Frankfurt and other German cities if technical incompatibilities of French and German trains can (This will perhaps not be quite as useful trains between the string of cities in Japan from Tokyo to Nagasaki, but it would still be quite impressive) Railways respond to network effects. Extend them so they contain a lot of city pairs, and they are much more valuable than if they just connect two points. Building a fast rail line to the midlands would thus be very valuable.

Building such a line is not on the cards at the moment, of course. The government is presently horrified that the cost of a plan to upgrade the West Coast Main Line to something fairly but not very modern has blown out from 2.5 million to 13 million pounds, due to huge incompetence. (You could have easily built the new high speed line for that). This is the odd thing about infrastructure construction in the UK. Sometimes it is done right. The CTRL is an example of this. The rest of the time, though, it is done astoundingly badly. There seems middle ground. However, if passenger numbers on the railways continue increasing, and if the CTRL is a big success, then in ten years time, all will likely be forgotten. At that point, building it will be relatively easy, as the London links are in place. And maybe it will then be possible to get a direct service from Hogwarts to Beauxbaton.

Update: It has been pointed out to me that Manchester and Liverpool do not count as "The Midlands". (Forgive me, as I am a foreigner. I will not make that mistake again). If anyone from Manchester, Liverpool, or the actual Midlands is offended, I apologise. Still, I stand by my position that the corridor from London through Birmingham to Manchester and Liverpool has potential for a high speed rail line.

Further Update: Stephen Karlson informs us that the locomotive pulling the Hogwarts Express does not fit the loading gauge for the lines out of King's Cross (that is, the train is too high and/or too wide, and is going to crash into bridges, platforms etc).

David Krum of the National Review has good piece in which he observes that oil in the Middle East has been a very mixed blessing for the inhabitants of the region. Those parts of the world that have genuinely become rich have done so through improving their human resources. Oil has allowed parts of the Middle East to develop something akin to a developed world lifestyle, without the technical and cultural skills required to maintain it.

Plus of course there is the observation that to some extent that the war is about oil. The US's reasons for the wall have everything to do with its own security, and little to do with the oilfields. However, the Middle East would be a very different place without the oil being there. Either the region would be an impoverished backwater whose people would not pose any kind of threat to anyone, or the region would be evolving into something culturally and economically more akin to the developed world, in which case it would again be unlikely to be any kind of threat. However, this weird non-industrialised world but with money quality, which is due to the oil, is dangerous, and is why a war looks necessary.

Mickey Kaus is talking about the role of e-mail in spreading links to articles and other information around the blogosphere.

More to the point, like many bloggers I use tips from e-mailers all the time -- so often that I've come to rely on them. The vast majority of these tips are simply links to other published sources, not original bits of inside info.

Yes, and I suspect that many of the e-mailers are in fact bloggers of some sort themselves. I think this is the main way you rise through the blogging ecosystem. You find something interesting, you blog it yourself, perhaps with a little comment, and then you e-mail the link and comment to the highest profile blogger you can think of who you think might find it interesting, in the hope that they will give you a link. This is why a blogger etiquette system in which it is considered good manners to link both to the source itself and to the person from who you got the information, whether this is from another blog or through e-mail, has arisen.

The Coming Aussie Actress Invasion of 1997, with a bonus Lord of the Rings discussion.

In the period from about 1995-97, the Australian film industry was going through one of its relatively good periods, and there were more local pictures in the cinemas than is usual. One thing that struck me was that at the time there seemed to be only five actresses working in the Australian industry: Rachel Griffiths, Toni Collette, Frances O'Connor, Miranda Otto, and slightly later, Cate Blanchett came along too. It seemed impossible to see an Australian film that did not contain some combination of these actresses. This actresses seemed to drown out everyone else for the simple reason that all five were actresses of very high quality: their performaces seemed in many instances larger than they actually four.

Inevitably, all of these actresses have gone on to have international careers of assorted magnitudes.

Cate Blanchett had a very brief career (in film, at least) in Australia. She made three films only: Paradise Road, Thank God he Met Lizzie (in which Frances O'Connor co-starred and who probably had the better role) and Oscar and Lucinda, the seriously underrated film of the Peter Carey novel. She then made Elizabeth for Shekhar Kapur, got an Oscar nomination, and has made a dazzling body of work since. She may not be the biggest star in the movies, but she is one of the best.

Frances O'Connor has a very magnetic and appealing screen presence, and lots of big people in both Britain and Hollywood looked at her, thought she might be a future star, and cast her in their movies. Her Hollywood movies have been a bit of a disappointment: the misfires of major filmmakers, generally. Spielberg cast her in A.I., she was opposite Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley in Harold Ramis' remake of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Bedazzled (the original was much better) and John Woo's Windtalkers was not such a great movie. Still, A-list directors continue to cast her: she is in Richard Donner's film of Michael Chrichton's Timeline to be seen next year. Plus she has carved out a parallel career of "British" movies, and has been rather more successful in those. She played Fanny Price in Patricia Rozema's sharply divisive adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park , very successfully played the lead in Madam Bovary for British television, and was a delight as Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest earlier this year. I am still not quite sure where her career is going, but I am still watching it.

Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths co-starred in Muriel's Wedding . Neither are quite glamorous enough to be Hollywood leading ladies, sadly, but both have been quite successful, none the less. Rachel Griffiths has done a huge body of work in the US and Britain. She received an Oscar nomination for playing the mother in The Sixth Sense , is one of those actresses I am constantly seeing puting in excellent performances in what are theoretically the less important roles. (This year I have seen her in important parts in Changing Lanes and About a Boy, plus no doubt also elsewhere). Rachel Griffiths received an Oscar nomination for Hilary and Jackie, and was wonderful as one of the Southern bitch bridesmaids on My Best Friend's Wedding a few years back, and has since then received considerable acclaim for her TV work on Six Feet Under . Her movies lately have been less interesting, perhaps because she has been only able to choose those films that she could fit into the hiatus of television shooting. Personally I would rather she spending less time doing series television and more time doing movies, but that might be just me.

The last actress is Miranda Otto. Otto comes from a famous acting family in Australia, and probably in 1997 had the highest reputation and profile in Australia of anyone in this list. (Probably the Austrlian film she was in that had the highest profile abroad was Love Serenade , which is something that festival goers and serious film buffs in New York, LA, or Chicago might have seen, but not much more than that). She is very good, indeed. Oddly, though, her non-Australian work has until this point had the lowest profile of any actress on this list. My personal thought is that I have seen her for a few minutes screen time in What Lies Beneath , the very uneven thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, and for a few seconds of Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line (which was filmed in Australia, so this may or may not count) and that is about it.

But, of course, one group of people who often do see Australian films are New Zealanders. And, as a consequence of this, Miranda Otto plays in Eowyn The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers , to be released today. Hopefully this means that Miranda Otto will subsequently be cast in bigger parts and better movies.

I am in agreement with Tim Blair and Paul Kelly and I disagree with Alan Ramsey on the question of whether Australian Prime Minister John Howard will retire any time soon. I think there is absolutely no way he will go any time soon.

Howard waited nearly 25 years between being elected to parliament becoming Prime Minister. He continued to believe he could eventually get the job despite being written off reapeatedly. Given that level of stubbornness to get the job in the first place, I really cannot see him giving it up if he doesn't have to. It is possible that he might give it up voluntarily if defeat is looming and he doesn't want to go out with an election loss, but defeat isn't looming. Defeat appeared to be looming 18 months ago, but he stuck it out and won. At this point the opposition looks hopeless and Howard looks likely to win another election if he chooses to fight it.

Plus I see two other factors. When Howard was first elected, he announced in interviews that he saw himself as being PM for "about ten years". I can see no reason why he would have changed his mind, and the 10 years will not be up until March 2006. Secondly, if Howard holds the job until December 2004, he will become Australia's second longest serving Prime Minister. The man he will overtake, Bob Hawke, was PM for many of Howard's years in the wilderness, and was the man who beat Howard in the 1987 election. I would think that passing Hawke is something that would be very sweet to Howard. December 2004 will be either after the next election or so close to the next election that Howard will have to fight the next election if he still wants to be PM at that date.

And seriously, how many politicians have you ever seen give up a Prime Ministership willingly? Politicians do not leave office willingly. It is part of their nature.I would personally like to see Peter Costello succeed Howard as PM, but I cannot see this happening any time soon.

Brian Micklethwait over at Samizdata asks some questions on why it is so much more expensive to make telephone calls to some countries than others.

Firstly, here is a map of the world, which has been rescaled so that the distance of a place on the map is proportional to the cost of calling the country from the UK. This is for 1998, and the effect has become even more dramatic since then.

Secondly, I blogged on this very question in August. However, that was before I had many readers, so I will largely repeat myself now. The cost of calls has mostly very little to do with international bandwidth (although it has something to do with it when calling places that have to be reached by satellite rather than fibre optic cable, but there are not many such places left) and everything to do with the charges made by the telephone companies for terminating international calls in the country you are calling .

The (simplified) answer to Brian's main question is this. Back in the bad old days, international phone calls were governed by what was called the "settlements" system, in which countries had bilateral treaties, and agreed to charge the same amount for calls in each direction. If there were more calls made from country A to B than from B to A, then a "settlement" was made of the number of minutes of imbalance times a "settlement rate" per minute, as defined in the treaty. Settlement rates varied from country to country, and the more backward the country generally the higher the rate, but they were always far more than the cost of domestic calls.

Since then, we have had deregulation of telephone calls in some countries. If A deregulated but not B, the margins of phone companies in country A were eroded and calls got cheaper, but the settlement rate still provided a floor under the cost of calls to B. This sort of thing is still the case when you are calling Nigeria or the Ukraine from the UK.

If you have deregulation of telephone companies in both A and B, then telephone companies in country B are unable to charge any more for terminating international calls than they are for terminating domestic calls. In this case, you get international calls that are comparable in cost to domestic calls, as is the case when you call Australia, the US, or most of Europe. How low the cost of calls actually is still depends on what those domestic terminating charges actually are, which in turn depends on how efficient and competitive is the domestic market in that country. This is why calls to other EU countries vary in cost, even though deregulation has occurred in all those countries.

A final observation is that a few years ago, the US unilaterally lowered the settlement rates its carriers paid to telephone carriers in many of the worst foreign countries, and simply told them to accept the lower rates or they wouldn't be able to receive phone calls for the US any more. This is one reason why international calls from the US are cheaper than from many other places. Other countries have done similar things, but not always as successfully, as no other country has as much leverage as the US.

As for calls to mobiles, it used to be the case that it cost the same to call a mobile in country B as it did to call a fixed phone in country B. In the days of settlements, this was fine and everyone was making money, as the settlement charge was easily greater than the terminating charge that the mobile operator in country B charged for domestic calls. However, with the end of the settlements system, and the rapid fall in the cost of international calls to deregulated destinations, the cost of a "standard" international call is often less than the termination charges charged by a mobile operator in country B. For a brief while, this meant that telephone companies were losing money on international calls to mobiles, and also that it could be cheaper to (say) call a mobile in London from Hong Kong than to call that same mobile from London. Over the last year or so, this situation has changed, and international calls to mobiles in other countries now usually cost more than international calls to fixed phones in the same country. There are still a few anomalies, but this bug in the system is now largely ironed out.

There is something almost sweet about this article from the Washington Post (via aldaily). It purports to tell the story of how Amy Nguyen of Atlanta, daughter of Vietnamese refugees, is being pushed hard by her parents who want her to go to medical school, but ends up giving a nice portrait of just how it is that poor immigrants turn into Americans in a generation or two. It also gives a nice demonstation of how Asian immigrants are moving away from the west coast and into the American heartland (due to the lower cost of housing, and due to business opportunities that exist in parts of the heartland that no longer to on the coast - in short essentially the same reasons why previous generations of immigrants have moved inland.

The situation in which parents from a poor country work extremely hard at relatively menial jobs and drive their children to go to medical school is a very common one. I have seen it in Australia as well as in the US. It's always medical school. This is a high status profession everywhere. Parents understand it, and they understand that it is an option open to their children if they study hard, wheras it would never have been available back in the country they came from, in a way they do not necessarily understand that wider and more amorphous range of opportunities that exist in developed countries today. On the other hand, the thing the parents do understand is that by studying hard, their children can properly enter the middle class. Studying hard is not the only way to succeed, but it is one way, and it is one that is open to you even if you are poor yourself.

Often this sort of pressure works: you end up with serious, intense doctors who are often very good at their jobs technically but sometimes are a little lacking in bedside manner, and have no idea how to have any kind of fun, but they themselves are members of the middle class, and their children end up fairly normal, well adjusted Americans. This takes two generations.

Sometimes, though, you find that parents push children who don't quite have the necessary ability. Sometimes this means that the children are driven to an early nervous breakdown. Sometimes, the relationship between the parents and the children gets a little strained. Sometimes the dream doesn't quite work, but the children turn out okay anyway. (That seems to be how it is going for our Amy. She seems rather well adjusted in the circumstances: a good kid). Sometimes, though, for whatever reason the medical dream doesn't quite work out and the drive ends up going somewhere else, and the child ends up going in some slightly different direction, to the parents' initial disappointment and ultimate amazement. (Isaac Asimov was the child of poor Russian Jews living in Brooklyn, and he was driven by his parents to go to medical school in the 1930s. However, he didn't get accepted due to the combination of an abrasive personality and quotas on Jews in medical schools at the time. Instead he got a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Columbia, and became a science fiction and non-fiction writer, became wealthy, rich, and ultimately famous, and ended up inspiring everybody from Paul Krugman and Newt Gingrich to Master Asahara and (perhaps) Osama bin Laden (Hmm, what is my point here, precisely?).

The thing that comes out of the story, though, is that these people are becoming Americans, and good citizens at that. Many countries are keen on getting foreigners to come and do work that natives don't want to do. Sometimes this is exploitation. But in situations where the children of the immigrants are given citizenship, and are given opportunities to succeed in the same way as are natives, and to be accepted as full members of society, it really isn't. It's a two way thing, and America generally gets this, in a way that many other places don't. (I think Australians generally get this reasonably well, too). Some coutries are less accepting than others. Many countries mix up nationality and ethnic identity. It is much harder to become a German than to become an American, and I think Germany is the poorer for this.

In Australia, the humanitarian component of our immigration program has declined in size in recent years. This saddens me, for simple humanitarian reasons, and also because on past evidence I think that refugees and similar immigrants are often the ones who make the most of the opportunities given them, and who try the hardest to become succesful members of society. In the long run, they and their families seem to me to become many of our best citizens.

And there is this. At a wedding:

Later that night, the reception is held at Happy Valley Seafood Restaurant, a Chinese banquet hall with gold dragons on the red velvety walls. All the Vietnamese wedding receptions are held at Happy Valley because the parents like it. Many of their children would rather be in a hotel ballroom in Buckhead. But it's here on Buford Highway they always come. Amy sits near the entrance, signing in the 370 guests, including her parents.

Happy Valley is jubilant bedlam. Waiters crashing into each other with platters of jellyfish soup and chicken feet. Guests taking to the stage to sing Vietnamese karaoke. Old men clinking Heineken bottles, their hands stamped with tattoos from the reeducation camps.

That's the other nice thing about this story: the actual Vietnamese immigrants themselves, despite lives of long hard work, actually seem to have found better lives for themselves.

An incomplete post entitled Harry Potter and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link accidentally escaped into the wild a couple of hours ago. I have recaptured it for now, but if anyone read the first half and is now eager to read the rest, I will post a complete version in a couple of hours.

Update: Actually I got distracted by the subject of international telephone rates, and this post will likely not go up until tomorrow.

I Must Try This

A court has rejected a 60-year-old man's attempt to invoke the ancient right to trial by combat, rather than pay a £25 fine for a minor motoring offence.

via Samizdata

Getting Priorities Right.

Well we clearly cannot have the US navy taking something as dangerous as rogue MP3s into Iraq, can we? I mean, the Iraqis are bad enough with chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons, but if they learn about music piracy, that would truly be the end of the world.

Ah yes, another report (via slashdot that New Zealander Richard Pearse may well have been flying before the Wright Brothers. Even if true, this remains only a footnote, as the Wright brothers were the ones who actually managed to sell their inventions and thus actually found the aircraft industry. That said, over the last few years Pearse has become a little bit of a cult Kiwi hero.

Possibly the least known of Peter Jackson's films is the spoof documentary Forgotten Silver a which tells us that much of the technology of modern cinema was in fact invented by obscure and now forgotten New Zealander Colin McKenzie, who also went on to make the first full length feature film with sound - in 1908. Jackson was partly inspired by the Pearse story, and by reactions to the Pearse storyin New Zealand. (Forgotten Silver was so well done that when shown on New Zealand television, a great many people did not realise that it was a spoof and took the story seriously).

It just keeps coming

We have now got to the views of Trent Lott's mother, and the question of whether young Trent was in fact brought up the way he claims. Lott surely cannot survive much more of this. (Josh Marshall also continues to excel on the Lott issue. He's not amazingly kind to John Ashcroft, either).

Adriana Cronin has a piece over at Samizdata on today's marches against the introduction of a very broad anti-subversion law in Hong Kong.

One of the striking things about Hong Kong is that the terrirory's elites when interviewed always make comments about how "Hong Kong is an economic city and the people are not interested in politics", and "Democracy requires a level of sophistication to avoid being the rule of the mob, and the people of Hong Kong lack that sophistication". (Plus various western sycophants have echoed the same words. For one thing if you can make yourself believe this, it is easier to pretend that you weren't screwing the people of Hong Kong over when you handed them over to the Chinese five years ago). However, whenever the people of Hong Kong are given the opportunity to show some democratic spirit, they always do so in huge numbers. We had enormous demonstrations after the massacre in Beijing in 1989 (and on its anniversary every year). We had huge numbers of votes cast in favour of democrats when the people were given limited voting rights by Chris Patten. And we had another demostration today. (If you read the chapter on Hong Kong in Ian Buruma's recent Bad Elements he goes and talks to ordinary Chinese people in the New Territories and he finds a very strong desire for democracy). A comparable country that is also ethnically Chinese is Taiwan, and that country has turned into a vibrant democracy.

I don't know what you do about it, but seeing the rights of the people of a rich, sophisticated and fairly liberal city slowly being taken away by the thugs in Beijing is pretty depressing.

I don't believe that China's fate is to be forever ruled by thugs, and I believe that in the long run China itself may evolve to democracy in the way Taiwan or South Korea did. (If this happens, it will be slow and painful, but it is not impossible). However, in the short term, having Beijing assert its power over Hong Kong is not at all good, although it was sadly predictable. The people of Hong Kong can protest and march for now, but if things really come to the crunch, the mainline Chinese can and will assert their much greater power. A military crackdown is not necessary to do this: you simply use laws like this anti-subversion law widely and arbitrarily.

This story of the Sydney police working with Asian shopkeepers to smash a protection racket is very encouraging. Ethnic gangs of various sorts exist in Australia (as everywhere) and they mainly get publicity when they terrorise or harass people outside their own ethnicity. However, the vast majority of their victims are people from their own ethnic communities, who often are not able to receive proper police protection because the police do not have contacts in the community, and do not understand the language and/or culture of the victims of the crime. Obviously, such people are entitled to the same help from the police as anybody else, and in this instance it is good to see them getting it.

The Top 10 Internet Hub Cities

This is like the old chestnut of "London Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world" which means that Heathrow has more international flights than any other airport in the world. This has been repeated so many times, and misinterpreted so many times that a substantial portion of British people believe that Heathrow is the busiest airport in the world, where in fact Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago (and now probably more) are substantially busier, but their traffic is mostly domestic.

Still, this is quite interesting. San Francisco is nowhere to be seen, meaning presumably that most of America's international traffic is to (or via) Europe rather than Asia. And what have the Danes been smoking lately?

Update The above post is possibly overly cryptic. I found an interesting list of the world's largest international internet hub cities (most of which are in Europe), and linked to this in the title of the post. It then crossed my mind that the list looked very similar to a list of the world's largest international airports, and that the lists were perhaps misleading in the same way. My first paragraph is talking about air hubs, and the second about internet hubs, although this is not particularly clear unless you have first followed the link. The point is that San Francisco, despite its status as the center of the internet universe is a hub for domestic and not international internet traffic. The US's principal hub for international traffic is New York, suggesting that the traffic is mostly going via Europe or to Europe.

Why do Greens hate the Green Revolution?
One of the key questions of our time. I could come up with a couple of highly unflattering (to the Greens) answers to that question, but I will leave this to Tim Blair . I have written about this before . I will merely add that Norman Borlaug is a very great man.

"We need this. This serves a useful purpose," Borlaug says, rapping the table with a pen. "What's happened more and more, from my point of view, for the last seven or eight years since all of this biotechnology has been coming on, is that the gene for common sense and judgment has been eroded all to hell and it doesn't function anymore." Borlaug believes opposition to biotechnology stems more from fervent anti-corporate ideology than concern for human health or the environment.

Where does this anti-science, anti-technology activism come from, precisely? Why, when on issues like food production you can come up with stunningly good news, do you get such hostility to it? We get fervent anti-corporate rhetoric from people who claim they want to help people in the poor world, and yet they are opposed to technology that is the only thing that can feed the poor world. This is quite simply obscene.

(I do wish though that Glenn Reynolds would stop taking cheap shots at the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. The committee gives the prize to someone genuinely admirable more often than not, and the good done by giving it to the right people (Aung San Suu Kyi, Desmond Tutu, even Andrei Sakharov, just to give three that immediately come to mind - there are plenty more) outweighs the fairly minor harm of the occasions where they have got it wrong)).

People of Earth, Your Attention Please.

Well, people of London, mainly. Does anyone feel like meeting up for a pint and/or dinner some time over the festive season? It would be nice to organise a get together. If so, e-mail me at mjj12@btopenworld.com or post a comment to this post.

Bruce Sterling:

Al Qaeda is way into martyrdom per se. It doesn't make any tactical sense for three suicide car bombers to blow up one hotel. Shouldn't three guys have blown up at least three hotels? And how come it took Al Qaeda 19 guys to bag two skyscrapers, four airplanes and part of the Pentagon? If Al Qaeda had 19 Tim McVeighs and Unabombers on the loose in the USA, blowing up important buildings and people and then hiding and running away, man, the Administration would be coming out of its skin by now.

This is true, but I don't think it is the point really. If they were doing that, they would be fighting a fairly conventional guerilla war. The more conventional what you are doing becomes, the more insane the idea of fighting a war with America becomes. (America might take a hit or two first, but America will win in the end. The saner you are, the more likely you are to realise this). In order to declare such a war in the first place, you have to be pretty disconnected from reality. Hence, the whole martyrdom complex.

Iain Murray points to Peter Ridell's article in the Times, discussing how Britain's long term ban on political advertising on television is likely to be overturned as an illegal restriction on free speech by the European Court of Human Rights. However, both main political parties support the ban, as they think that paying for television ads will send them bankrupt. The fear that such a change will lead to hugely expensive American style political campaigns and associated fundraising is brought up at length.

Something similar happened in Australia about ten years ago. Australia had long allowed television political advertising, with the bizarre proviso that there was an "electronic media cooling off period" for three days before the election in which the election was not permitted to be mentioned in any way on television or radio (be it in advertisements, news programs or any other context).

About ten years ago, the two main political parties decided that television advertising was too expensive for them, and passed a law banning it, and requiring that established political parties be given a certain amount of free airtime, as in Britain. The television networks challenged this law in the courts, and the High Court of Australia eventually declared the law unconstitutional. (The Australian constitution does not explicitely guarantee free speech, but it does guarantee free electrions, and the court ruled that free elections are not possible without free speech, and therefore that the constitution implied free speech on political matters. This seems quite reasonable to me. The "cooling off period" was brought down at the same time). Therefore, Australian television networks continue to carry campaign advertisements.

Americans no doubt find the idea of banning political advertisements bizarre and undemocratic, and I pretty much think they are right. Politics is much more of a closed shop in Britain and Australia than it is in the US. You have to have go through a certain lengthy career path in the party and parliament before standing for any high office, generally, and the American idea that anyone can spend lots of money on a campaign, enter a primary, and get elected is something that the other countries don't really have. Politics is instead for a certain political class, and genteel bans on advertising and free air time given to established parties (and hence their chosen candidates) are a symptom of this. (Airtime is based on votes in previous elections, and it works on a basis of thresholds, so that the official opposition gets equal treatment to the government. Obviously, though, this protects the existing political class). Foreigners are astonished at the huge sums of money spent on political campaigns in the US, and the fact that this to some extent restricts politics to rich people is clearly not good, but American politics is much more of a free for all, and I think this is generally good.

The peculiar thing here is that Australian politics resembles British politics much more than American politics, even though political paid ads are allowed in Australia, and always have been. The sums spent on Australian campaigns are not especially large, and party structures in Australia are similar to those in England. It may be that the ban on TV ads in Britain is more of a symptom of the the closed shop than a cause of it. It may be that the huge sums spent on political campaign in the US have more to do with the structure of American politics (primaries especially) and government (directly elected executives and officials rather than a parliamentary system) and the wealth of America, and the history of American democracy (a free for all is the American way of doing things), than to the fact that paid TV campaigns are legal. If so, the structure of British politics remains safe, even if the law is changed.

Okay, I have avoided talking about the whole Trent Lott thing, because I am not in America, and the blogosphere is full of it already. However, I can't help but read a lot about it, and at this point, my jaw is starting to drop in horror. My comments in a moment, but first a few repeated quotations explaining why my jaw is dropping in horror.

Start with Andrew Sullivan.

MORE ON LOTT: Let's recap a tiny bit. He fought integration of his college fraternity; he has hobnobbed with white supremacists; he submitted an amicus brief defending Bob Jones University's right to prohibit inter-racial dating; he has twice regretted the fact that Strom Thurmond didn't win the 1948 presidential election on an explicitly segregationist platform; he voted against the Voting Rights Act extension in 1982; in 1983 he voted against the Martin Luther King Jr holiday; last year, he cast the only vote against the confirmation of Judge Roger Gregory, the first black judge ever seated on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In these last three instances, even Strom Thurmond voted the other way. I don't know. What do you think? Again, much of this was already well known about him.

Josh Marshall has the following to say.

In 1989," according to a March 29th, 1999 article in The Washington Post, Trent Lott, "refused to co-sponsor a congressional resolution designating June 21 as Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner Day after the three civil rights workers murdered 25 years earlier in Mississippi."

And, by the way, there is this lovely Council of Conservative Citizens which Lott is close to. In the brief this group has recently filed in a case defending the lovely practice of cross burning, we get this

The particular emphasis of the Council is the protection of the expressive rights of the millions of Americans of British and European descent who hold to conservative views on matters of racial and ethnic relations.

Yum. As Josh said, you can defend cross burning on free speech grounds as you would defend flag burning (which I personally will defend on free speech grounds) but I am not sure that is exactly how I would go about it. And as Brink Lindsey points out, these are really lovely guys.

So I decided to check out the group's website. Let's put it this way: It ain't subtle. At the top of the homepage is a Confederate battle flag. Elsewhere there's a link to an anti-Martin Luther King Day tract, a link to a headline "Caucasian Skull Oldest Found in Americas," and a photo of a black Vanderbilt professor, identified in the caption as an "affirmative action hireling," posing in front of a Che Guevara banner, under the headline "Vanderbilt University 'Professor' Shows His Colors!"

As pointed out by Brink and Andrew Sullivan, here is how these guys defend Lott now.

Sad, sicko raciopaths rule the day, dear friends, and they roil about like maggots in a garbage can eating the flesh of aracial whites who are too stupid to even know they're being repressed and exterminated by those who hate all whites and who seek high profile examples such as Trent Lott to condemn any expressions of white identity. And, the whites who have been weakened by years of trying not to be white, lest any non-white people be offended by their whiteness and white ways, go happily to their genocide rather than standing up and demanding the right to their own self-determination and identity.

And this is all just the start. It goes on and on and on.

You do have to ask one question here, and that is "Given that almost all of this was known already, why did this man become senate majority leader in the first place?"

My own politics here. I come from the left. I was brought up to favour social justice. I was brought up to dislike poverty. I was brought up to loathe and detest racism. When I was 19, I would have described myself as a socialist. When I was 19, I would have described myself as a Green. I changed. I realised that government is not the solution to the world's problems, that large government is inefficient and effective, and that the left wing caricature of big business as a group of greedy capitalists out to exploit the third world and rape the world of its resources is largely wrong. I discovered that the mainstream Green movement's cries of impending doom are largely wrong, and I grew tired of the movements undemocratic nature, anti-technology bias, and refusal to listen to clear thinking. I became aware of the fact that free trade, and capitalism, and not aid that enriches corrupt officials and builds pointless dams is the best way to help the poor world become less poor. I became annoyed by the political correctness of the left, and its unwillingless to listen to views other than its own. I found its attitude that "Because we so obviously care and everybody else doesn't, we are morally superior to everyone else" to be tiresome. It's corollaries that "Because we are morally superior, we don't have to listen to your arguments" and "Because you use economic arguments, you are using the language of the enemy, and so you are one of them" are really tiresome. (This is obviously a caricature, and I am ranting about the people who annoy me the most. There are plenty of moderate lefties who don't fit it, but you can find people who fit the entire caricature pretty easily. The key reason I left the left is essentially that I concluded that large government is not the solution to the world's problems).

I discovered that the political left is on its last legs, quite frankly, and I needed somewhere else to go. Many right wing parties support free trade and theoretically support smaller government, and so there there is a certain temptation to support them. And there are plenty of actual enemies out there to fight. If you want to actually help the poor world, there is a tremendous fight against agricultural subsidies to be waged. Free markets are about creating more competition and lowering prices, making the economy on the whole more efficient, and thus helping consumers, not about doing deals, protecting vested interests, and keeping the present rich as rich as possible. And the right wing political parties, the Liberal Party in Australia, the Republican party in America, and others, are also the parties of the traditionally wealthy, who in the South one imagines meeting at the Augusta Country Club to discuss how to get the Bush admistration to protect their hereditory wealth for them. In most cases, people who are already rich become quite conservative: they want government to protect their interests in particular, and not to foster a healthy competitive economy. This flows into true conservatives in a more literal sense: people who want to keep the values of the past. Racist values at times do get mixed into this. Christian Conservative values do at times get mixed into this.

In a sense, if there is a grain of truth in the left's caricature of the right, this is where it is. The vast majority of Republicans are not like this at all. If you come from the left but have moved right because you find the left silly, this is what you are sensitive about. The racist right is not large, but it is the demon you were brought up to loathe most. If you have moved, say, into the Republican party, and you find that your fellow Republicans loathe it too, and will not tolerate it, then fine. You as a former leftie haven't betrayed anyone. If, however, they are willing to keep its company, you find yourself asking questions about them. Do they secretly share its views. If not, why are they willing to tolerate it. Is it because they want to gain power or stay in power so much that they are willing to sign a pact with the devil? Why is the president prepared to tolerate it. (George W Bush is clearly anything but a racist. But still, why did he visit Bob Jones University? Personally I think it was no more than an error of judgement, as he only appears to have done this type of thing once. Plus he has appropriately rebuked Lott). Combine this with the Lott business, though, and people start asking questions about Bush's party, and inevitably some of the mud sticks to him. Was gaining power so important to him that he was willing to cosy up to people like this? If so, does he really have any principles?

What it comes down to is this very unoriginal conclusion. If the Republican party is willing to keep company with someone as loathesome as Trent Lott, and to keep him in a position of leadership, people like me will never vote for the Republican Party. (Of course, I am not American, so I wouldn't anyway). Probably younger people brought up Republican in a post desegregation society will see the Lott affair as a relflection on Lott in particular more than on Republicans in general. Their response is likely to be to hold their noses and vote vote for those Republicans who clearly do not hold Lott's views, but if Lott remains Senate leader, non-traditional potential Republican voters will see the whole party as contaminated by this stench.

In this case, the Democrats will campaign ruthlessly on the issue for the next two years, on a "Where there is smoke there must be fire" basis. The tactic won't even be particularly unfair, given that Lott has managed to get away with these revolting viewpoints in the Republican party, and has managed to actually become senate majority leader, with them. (I have been trying to avoid saying something about this being the party of Lincoln. Oops, failed). The Republicans will suffer very badly in the 2004 elections as a consequence.

However, this pragmatic reason is not why Lott must go. The reason why Lott must go is that the man's views are loathesome.

One of the joys of the blogosphere is that you can rant at length and then send it to the whole world, and nobody will tell you to stop.

Update I am very unconvinced by this William Saletan piece in Slate. There are simply too many instances of Lott having dubious connections and saying dubious things coming to light. His apologies are too half-hearted. It's easy to say something you don't mean in passing because you didn't think about it, but if you do, you simply come out and unequivocally apologise. "I believe that the end of segregation was a tremendous advance for this country. If what I said could have been construed to suggest otherwise, then that was not what I intended and I apologise". He has instead just waffled. Plus one thing that bothers me is the business of voting against the Martin Luther King Day holiday. That just seems a matter of spite. And check out Jake Tapper's piece (via Andrew Sullivan ) in Salon on Lott's friendship with segregationist Richard Barrett. (The piece is subscription only, but you can read it by clicking on some ads, plus Sullivan quotes the important bits. I wonder if his editors at Salon mind).

Virginia Postrel expresses her amazement (although given her politics, I suspect she is not actually amazed but more simply just impressed) that she can buy five pounds of flour for 69 cents. Brad DeLong follows up by observing that the average American can buy 450 times as much flour for the wages of an hours work than could the average medieval peasant of 1500, and by that measure people today are 450 times richer than in 1500.

I think in actual fact the situation is even better than Brad and Virginia have said. Yes, we are 450 times richer in terms of the amount of food staples we can buy.

However, consider someone who was 450 times as rich as the average person 500 years ago. That person could spend a small fraction of his income on food, and then the rest of his income on other things. However the selection of other things that could be bought was not all that great.

Now consider the average person in America today. He can spend a similar proportion of his income on food as the rich person of 500 years ago. He could then spend the rest of his income on other things. The choice of things to spend the money on today is enormous: vastly greater than what could be purchased in 1500. Cars, DVD players, computers, a much greater selection of foods, and a great many things that would have appeared to be magical in 1500. In purely material terms, the average person today is much better off than a very rich person of 500 years ago, due to the greater choice of products that can be bought. In this instance, greater choice means greater wealth. I think that greater choice indicates at least as great an increase in wealth as the dramatically lower prices (in terms of income) pointed out by Brad and Virginia.

I was talking about similar things when I wrote this article about Ikea a week or two back.

Also slightly related to this is an article (abstract only available online, sadly) by William Nordhaus of Yale, on the "price of light", that is the cost of artificial illumination. He was mainly demonstrating how measures of inflation fail badly (and therefore that statistics understate economic growth badly) over long periods of time.

Traditional measures of the cost of light do not take into account the fact that the quality of the devices we use for illumination (oil lamps, gas light, electric bulbs) have improved dramatically over time (getting brighter for instance). Uf you measure the actual cost per lumen-hour Nordhaus concluded that the cost of light dropped by a factor of 400 between 1800 and 1992. (This is in inflation adjusted terms, I think. I don't actually have the paper handy, so I cannot check that. In terms of the increase in the amount of light that can be purchased with the fruits of an hour's work, the result will be even more impressive).

Of course, our response to this drop in cost is to buy a lot more light (which is not the case so much with wheat) but this is another remarkable statistic.

(Further googling finds me extensive comments on this paper by Brad Delong, which leads me to conclude that Brad is familiar with it)

Spam of the year.

"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

(Pointed out in the print edition of New Scientist ).

Scott Wickstein uses the expression Classic Den Beste to describe this piece in which Steven ruthlessly and in great detail demolishes the anti-Americanism of Harold Pinter. It's well worth reading. On a lighter note, my favourite piece of classic Den Beste is the USAF versus dragons discussion. Steven responded to the (terrible) movie "Reign of Fire". In this movie, ancient dragons are discovered underground and revive. We flash forward 20 years, and civilization has been destroyed by dragons but a few brave people hold out.

Steven responded to this by writing a series of articles in his usual style discussing just how the US Air Force, and in a pinch the RAF, would do in aerial combat against dragons. It was his usual thorough discussion of how this particular weapon would do against dragons, just what the capabilities of dragons would be likely to be, whether the USAF pilots superior training would be effective, et cetera. Stylistically it was just like one of his discussions of how (say) the US marines would do against the Iraqi Republican Guard. Steven eventually concludes that

What I suspect that they'll discover is that dragon skin makes good shoes and belts, assuming they can find any pieces large enough to be used for that after all the shooting stops.

The follow-up articles, in which questions of more experienced pilots flying lower tech planes, Vietnam, dogfighting, air to air missiles, are even better, WWII in the Pacific, the transition to jets at the end of WWII, the manoeverability of the Mitsubishi Zero, and much more are discussed, all in the context of fighting dragons. It's all completely deadpan, and it is hilarious.

Of course, since dragons are mythical semimagical creatures anyway, it's difficult to guess what flight characteristics they might have. (As Bill points out in another email, strictly speaking dragons as described are impossible for several important physical reasons.)

Flapping wings have many virtues, but one thing they don't do is create huge amounts of thrust (i.e. comparable to a jet engine). The fastest winged creature in existence is a falcon in full dive, which can reach 200 MPH. No natural flier is remotely that fast in level flight. The wings of a dragon are not designed for high speed anyway; they would create tremendous turbulence and drag (if they didn't break off).

An A-10 Thunderbolt II (i.e. the Warthog) is rated 450 MPH. F-15's can exceed Mach 2 for short periods, and typically cruise at 600+ MPH. It is inconceivable that dragons would be able to fly at speeds remotely that fast.

Which means is that the jets would control the pace of combat. They can circle the dragons, come into them from behind, make slashing attacks and leave again, and then reform for the next attack. They can choose when to engage and when to run away, and they can engage when conditions are to their greatest advantage. If the dragon lands, they can strafe and bomb; if the dragon stays in the air they can circle and slash.

Or they can stand back and fire missiles from outside of firebreath range. The problem there would be coming up with a missile which would home in on a dragon, given that they're all designed to attack aircraft. Radar homers would probably be useless; a dragon is big, but it's also flesh (unless it's a bronze dragon heh-heh-heh).

Heat seekers are a different matter; if a dragon has firebreath, how warm is it? It's probably running hot anyway just because if its proportionately large volume relative to surface area. Still, it might not be hot enough to be detected by an AIM-9 Sidewinder unless that was recalibrated to look for a different kind of heat signature.

Which is why I think that it would mainly be necessary to rely on non-guided weapons. For fighters, that means their cannons, which is why the A-10 would be particularly effective. Its 30 mm GAU-8 gun is truly fearsome; it's a 7-barrel Gatling gun, which has a very high muzzle velocity which is added to the forward velocity of the jet resulting in monumental kinetic energy, specifically designed to pierce very heavy armor. I don't believe that even mythical creatures would be resistant to it.

In all there is about 5000 words of this. If you were trying to parody Steven Den Beste, it is hard to imagine a better effort, but he did it himself.

I was talking to a South African friend of mine today, and the subject of the impending cricket world cup to be played in South Africa from February came up. We discussed who we thought would win it. The two most favoured sides are Australia and South Africa. These clearly are the two best teams in world cricket, and they are playing in conditions and cultures that are familiar to them. Both sides have bowlers capable of taking advantage of the hard, bouncy pitches of South Africa, and both have batsmen who play well in one day cricket. Australia in recent years have had a psychological edge over South Africa, and when they play in a big match South Africa tends to crumble. For this reason, if the two sides meet in a semi-final or in the final, my expectation is that Australia will win.

So, how about the other sides. In no particular order

England have been traumatised by their present tour of Australia, are carrying a lot of injuries, and do not really have the playing depth to compete. They will not make the semi finals.

New Zealand have an exceptionally fine captain in Stephen Fleming, are extremely well coached, are often the best prepared side in world cricket and play well in South African / Australian conditions with hard pitches. My expectation is that they will start extremely well and will make the semi finals. In the end they probably lack the playing depth to win the tournament, but they will acquit themselves extremely well.

Sri Lanka are close to being the best side in the world when playing on the subcontinent. If the tournament were being played in India or Sri Lanka, they would be a good chance to win it (as indeed they did when it was last played there in 1996). However, their performances in South Africa (both during their current tour and their previous one in 2000-01) have been very disappointing. Muttiah Muralitharan, one of the best bowlers in the world, has not been very successful against either Australia or South Africa. I do not expect Sri Lanka to make much of a dent on the tournament.

India are the great frustration of world cricket. They have on paper the best batting side in the world, although their bowling is ordinary. In India they can be magnificent. Elsewhere they are very inconsistent. (Actually, that is wrong. Outside India they lose consistently). Their present performance in New Zealand is not inspiring. I don't expect them to go very far in the tournament either. For them to have a shot at winning the tournament, one or more of their world class batsman (probably Sachin Tendulkar) is going to have to have an absolute blinder of a tournament, by which I mean he is going to have to score four or more centuries. He is going to have to do this against the bowlers of South Africa and Australia, which will be hard. To win, India have to score large totals consistently and prevent their opposition from doing the same. They do not have the bowlers to win low scoring matches. A win by India in the tournament is unlikely, although not actually impossible.

Pakistan are for me the great unknowns. They have the ability to produce wonderful players from nowhere, and they have the ability to win anywhere in the world. The last time the tournament was held in conditions like this (in Australia in 1992) they won it. They have bowlers who can exploit bouncy pitches. They played wonderfully to beat South Africa in Port Elizabeth yesterday. (Saleem Elahi appears to be one of those exceptionally good players who appear from nowhere). And yet against Australia a couple of months ago they were terrible. I would bet a large sum of money on Pakistan puting in at least one shocking game and at least one brilliant game in the tournament. (This happened when they won the tournament in 1992, and happened when they were beaten finalists in 1999, although on that occasion their shocking game was the final). However, my feeling is that if any side other than Australia or South Africa wins the tournament, it will be Pakistan. For me they are clear third favourites.

The West Indies only have a chance to get anywhere in the tournament if Brian Lara can recover from hepatitis, get fit, and then dominate the tournament like nobody has ever dominated a World Cup before. Lara is inconsistent, but goes through hot patches every now and then, and when he does he bats more like a god than any other player I have ever seen (with apologies to Viv Richards, who isn't far behind). This is not especially likely to happen, but boy will it be something to watch if it does.

Zimababwe, Bangladesh, Kenya, Namibia, Holland and Canada are just there to make up the numbers.

My overall prediction is that the semi-finalists will be Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Pakistan. If Australia and South Africa are in different semi-finals, the final will be Australia versus South Africa. If not, the final will be Australia versus Pakistan. In either case, Australia will likely win the final.

I have been blogging away since March, and at various times since then I have received little bits of feedback and comments, but not a very large readership. However, in the last few weeks, I have received quite a few links and comments from various people, and my readership is up considerably. This is really nice. Thank you to everyone who has linked to me, and thank you to everyone who has been reading the blog.

I popped into the National Gallery in central London today, mainly because I wanted to look at Raphael's The Madonna of the Pinks , about which there is presently a little bit of a fuss. Basically, the story behind the painting is that many copies of Raphael's original were painted in the 16th century. Until 10 years ago, the original was believed lost, and the painting in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland was believed to be one of the copies. However, one of the curators of the National Gallery saw it, thought it was a particularly good copy, and carefully investigated it and determined that it was in fact Raphael's original. The painting has been on loan to the the National Gallery since then and is considered one of the best ten paintings or so in the National Gallery. (It's not a striking painting in terms of size, but it is a beautiful painting. The expression on the face of the baby Jesus is really quite marvelous, somehow).

However, the Duke of Northumberland has decided to sell the painting for $50 million to the Getty museum in Los Angeles. If this was New York and it was the Metropolitan, then no doubt some wealthy benefactor would step in and match the price. However, this is London and there are not that many people that rich and there is less of a tradition of philanthropy.

British law requires that the Duke sell the painting to a British buyer rather than a foreign buyer if the British buyer can match the price and the government specifies that the painting is a treasure that should not leave the country. (In the event that a British museum can raise the money, they will certainly do this).

Therefore, the National Gallery has launched an appeal to raise the money to buy the painting, and has applied for 20 million pounds of lottery money in order to do so.

This gets us to the peculiarly British way of dealing with tax receipts from their national lottery. Until about 10 years ago, lotteries were illegal in the UK, although there were one or two forms of betting, such as football pools, which were very close to being lotteries. However, the Major government decided to change this, and a monopoly licence was granted and a lottery was introduced. Rather than the taxes on the lottery being simply funnelled into general government revenue, as happens in most places including my native Australia, a significant portion of the taxes were placed into a fund for "good causes", and a body of trustees got to allocate the money for funding for the arts, for building sporting stadiums, and essentially for funding other activities that were perceived as worthwhile but which the government could not justify funding from general revenue. (The great debacle paid for out of lottery money is the millenium dome). It is from this "good causes" fund that the National Gallery seeks to obtain the money to buy the Raphael.

Personally, I find this practice indefensible. A tax on a lottery ticket is surely no different from a sales tax on a packet of cigarettes, or a hamburger bought in McDonald's or on anything else. The government has a duty to its voters to use the money wisely and in the public interest. (Governments may not always do so, but they have such a duty none the less). The "good causes" fund seems to somehow be an excuse to subvert this: the money can instead be spent on minority, elitest interests, and the spending the money is not subject to the same scrutiny and accountability to voters as is the spending of other government revenue. And I seriously cannot see why it should not be. The question should be, would it be appropriate to buy the painting for the gallery out of peoples income taxes, because as far as I am concerned it is the same thing. And, to be honest, I also cannot see why so much public money should be spent on this painting. I would rather the government devoted its time and money to more prosaic things like schools and health.

I have to say I prefer the American model to the British model. American museums are generally more run by private foundations and by donations from benefactors. Yes, the separation between government and private ownership is often blurry in America too, and public money is often used for the running costs of museums, but the Americans seem to avoid situations where huge amounts of public money are to be used for acquisitions.

For all that, the National Gallery in London has a magnificent collection of art and I visit it frequently, and this is at least partly thanks to many British governments of the past, so I am not entirely dogmatic on this. I think my position more has to do with the amount of money that the painting would cost than any great principle). And the other reason I feel this way is that in the end, I have to say I don't think it would be a catastrophe for the painting to end up in the Getty museum. Here we have a young but great city that has established an art museum whose benefactors want to build up a world class collection. This is the last known Raphael in private hands, and the last chance that the Getty museum has to acquire such a painting. The loss to the people of London is more than made up by the gain to the people of Los Angeles, and if the painting ends up in LA I will no doubt drop in to the Getty museum and look at it some time. I think without question that having the painting in a fine museum in LA is much better than having it lying disregarded in the home of the Duke of Northumberland, which was the case for many decades. If in a few decades if the Getty museum in LA has world class collection, then this is surely a good thing.

And of course an ironic fact is that when you walk in to the National Gallery, on your left you find a bust of Sir Paul Getty. If you look at the lists of benefactors on the wall in the National Gallery, members of the Getty family are listed again and again and again. Plus, in the National Gallery, there is a contribution box into which you can donate money to the fund to keep the Raphael in Britain. Just looking in, it was striking how many greenbacks were in the box. British art lovers have much to thank America for.

Yes, I know:

Virginia is prettier than I am, and she also has a better haircut.

This is what I like to hear from insane, bearded New Zealanders

There has been rumors about returning to some smaller scale Zombie film after this trilogy. Is it true ?

Peter Jackson... The answer is yes. I'm a big fan of zombie movies but nobody's making it anymore, that's irritating. I'm sure one day I will do one again.

Update: There is a good (but perhaps slightly pompous) profile of Peter Jackson, including an extensive discussion of his early and disgusting (but in a good way) movies over at Slate.

To one degree or another, Jackson's pictures—the early and the late ones—explore the juxtaposition of normalcy and depravity. There's an innocence behind the malevolence: Much of the humor in Dead Alive comes from the protagonist's futile efforts to care for his decaying, undead mother. There's also a sweetness to Jackson's naive heroes, who struggle to remain calm in a world that has collapsed around them. At its heart, the Lord of the Rings is this same story on an epic scale. With its stark themes, good-vs.-evil imagery, and clear notions of the good guys and the bad guys, it's a zombie movie without the zombies—and it's painted with the same black-and-white palette.

Yes indeed. Along with the simple fact that he has great technical skill, this is why Jackson was so perfect to make The Lord of The Rings , and it is why his version of King Kong will likely be terrific. He will take the 1932 innocence of the original and put a new, imaginative twist on it. This is another movie I cannot wait for, although I clearly am going to have to wait for it.

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the financial markets had a lot of doubts over the economic management ability of this governor from a small Southern state. Largely out of a sense of duty to his party, Lloyd Benson stepped forward agreed to take the job of Treasury Secretary for two years. He was somebody that everybody knew, and whose competence everybody had faith in. He did an excellent job for two years, and then stepped aside to make way for Robert Rubin, who had been has deputy. Eventually Larry Summers, who had been Rubin's deputy, took the job. Both of these men were also extremely capable. As a consequence of this, Clinton's economic policy team was held in high regard for Clinton's eight years in office. This showed in certain ways, like for instance that the Clinton administration's position on free trade was not in question. (It is greatly to the discredit of Congress that Clinton's fast track authority was not extended. He could have done good with it). (Clinton's foreign policy team was much shakier, and although the final team he ended up with in his second administration was okay, it was never much better than okay).

Now, however, we have the Bush administration. On foreign policy we have Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld. I have a lot of faith in this combination of people. On economic policy, however, we had O'Neill of Alcoa, who has now been sacked to make way for John Snow of CSX corp. This, and a few policy decisions (Steel tariffs, farm bill etc) seems to indicate that the Bush administration has no overriding vision about the economy or what they should do with it. Generally, CEO types have anything but the best interests of the economy (and hence the people) in mind. Generally they are interested in their company making as much money as possible, and in gaining as much market share as possible, and what they want is to do deals with government in order that they are helped in this aim. This is clearly not about promoting competition, it is clearly not about lowering prices, and it is clearly not about improving things for consumers.

It's perhaps not surprising that President Bush: someone who has done a lot of mildly dubious corporate deals himself, has appointed people like this. The problem is that he doesn't seem to realise that he shouldn't. There also seems to be nobody in the administration to tell him he shouldn't, either.

Steven Johnson has a piece in Slate discussing how Apple is leading a move away from a single desktop metaphor for all file and data access towards more application specific interfaces. I don't think this is new. Desktop interfaces did a great job of making computers useable by large numbers of people, but they are inherently limited. (For one thing, you sacrifice power for ease of use. Trying to do the equivalent of

cat -asq */*.txt | ps -af

in a graphical desktop based interface is really slow and painful).

For another thing, this isn't especially new. I think we started the move away from the desktop to more application specific interfaces with the invention of Quicktime. And the innovator in that case was once again Apple.

I see that the mighty Instapundit is writing op-ed pieces for The Australian . Besides the obvious observation that publishing this is smart on the part of the editors of the paper, I wonder how this happened. Did Mr Blair have anything to do with it?

Today, I posted a couple of Christmas presents from England to Australia. One of them was a book.

One of the curious things about international air mail, is that the cost of it varies according to what you send. There is an unrestricted "full letter rate", for which you can send anything at all, but there are two other special airmail postal rates (which both cost around half as much).

These are "printed papers", that include (to use the precise definition) advertisements, books, calendars, catalogues, diaries, directories, greetings cards, illustrations, magazines, maps, musical scores, newspapers, order/subscription forms, leaflets and pamphlets, plans, postcards, price lists, printed drawings and notices, proofs, prospectuses and timetables, but not letters, including personal messages or greetings (other than five words allowed on greetings cards), handwritten receipts, photographic negatives, slides or film, postage stamps or blank stationery.. This is what I actually used.

The second postal rate is for so called "small packets". These allow goods, gifts and trade samples, audio/video tapes, magnetic tapes, and photographs. You can include a letter, invoice or other document, if it relates to the contents of the item. .

I find this situation to be a little bizarre, to tell the truth. Can the aircraft really tell whether it is carrying newspapers rather than letters and therefore use less fuel as a consequence? I can imagine some bureaucrat of the past deciding that there is something morally virtuous about sending newspapers, and therefore letter writers should subsidise the senders of newspapers. And why precisely should some bureaucrat decide that one sort of mail is more morally virtuous than another in the first place? And why should laws actually encourage officials to open people's mail to see what is inside it?

Perhaps the logic is that letter writers should be encouraged to use thinner paper and special air mail stationery, or perhaps to send letters on microfilm, whereas it is impossible to make a newspaper or book weigh less than it does already. This does assume somehow that air transport is a scarce resource, and therefore that the total amount carried must be minimised wherever possible. I don't actually believe this. (If there is lots of mail, then I am sure that the airlines will put on extra flights, and I don't think this is bad, particularly. I am also not convinced that this differential pricing policy will ensure this. It is more likely to just ensure that people send books and newspapers (possibly with letters smuggled between the pages) rather than letters). In any event, if people want to send airmail letters on thick paper and pay extra for the privilege, I am not sure why they should be penalised (above the actual cost of carriage) for doing this.

The fact is that the various international treaties that define the International Postal Union incorporate these definitions. And treaties of this sort are so hard to unwind that we are stuck with them, however stupid they are.

To be truthful, in these days of e-mail, fax machines, and other similar technologies, it is a very long time since I actually sent an international letter. If I want to write to someone, I send them e-mail. Physical post is now used (by me) only for gifts. It may be that in a few years the letter rate will be meaningless, as nobody sends letters anymore, and the other rates simply reflect the cost of carriage. This would be good.

There's an interesting report on Princeton University's website (found via slashdot ) about ancient bacterial life being found two miles below the surface of the Earth. The point taken from this is that if life can survive in such inhospitable conditions on Earth, it can survive in equally inhospitable conditions elsewhere, with the key point of interest being Mars.

Steven Den Beste was talking about Mars the other day. His belief is that despite some recent claims to the contrary, the evidence is clear that in the past Mars had both water oceans and an atmosphere (necessary for the oceans). I tend to agree. If Mars had both these things, it seems extremely likely that life would have evolved. (Current evidence suggests it isn't all that hard, although there is a fair amount of supposition). If life evolved then, and if life can live in environments as hostile as this Princeton study shows, then it seems extremely likely that there is some still there. It may have retreated miles underground, and it may be very simple life, but it is surely still there).

Fifteen years ago, I believed that the solar system was empty of life except for on Earth, and that while there was probably going to be life elsewhere in the universe, we would have to travel a long way to find it. Now I am quite confident of the opposite. Life on Mars (or Europa) may not be very interesting life, but I am fairly confident it is going to be there.