This article in the Telegraph excessively claims that the banana might be extinct in ten years. Apparently

The doomed banana's Achilles heel is that it is a genetically decrepit sterile mutant. One of the oldest crops, the first edible variety was propagated around 10,000 years ago from a rare mutant of the wild banana, which, with a mass of hard seeds, is virtually inedible.

But because all edible bananas are sterile - effectively clones of that first plant - they are unable to evolve to fight off new diseases.

Black sigatoka, a fungal disease that cuts yields by up to three quarters and reduces the productive lives of banana plants from 30 to only two or three years, has become a global epidemic.

So banana lovers are all doomed. Actually not. Firstly, bananas can evolve a little through mutation. If farmers are very careful to watch for their most resistant plants and then clone those, you can possibly get a resistant strain. Secondly, there is genetic engineering.

Genetic engineering may be the only answer, New Scientist reports today.

Last year, scientists led by Mr Frison announced plans to sequence the genetic blueprint of the banana within five years, focusing on inedible wild bananas, many of which are resistant to black sigatoka.

But large producers have refused to back the research because of costs and fears that consumers will not accept a GM banana.

Half a billion people in Africa and Asia depend on the banana for up to half their daily calories. The starchy varieties rather than the sweet fruit is used in everything from cooking to banana gin.

Actually, it will be relatively simple for researchers to figure out which genes in the wild bananas give resistance and transfer them to edible bananas. Then, bingo. Banana yields back to where we started, or higher.

Actually this could be interesting. Imagine the scene in 2012. Normal bananas are extinct. Those of us who have been following the ongoing EU banana war for the last couple of decades know that the Germans have an almost legendary apetite for bananas. It may be that they will be faced with a choice: accept genetically modified bananas, or move to some other fruit. My money is on the genetically modified bananas. As for the wildly exaggerated half a billion people in Asia or Africa, I suspect they also will choose the genetically modified bananas over the other terrible fates the Telegraph implies they are in for.

Update:This article from New Scientist (via slashdot ) might have been the Telegraph journalist's starting point. I don't know if straight bananas are boring, but I am sure they will go down a treat in the land of the rising sun and square watermelon.

Lawrence Lessig is taking it hard.

It is the middle of the night. Sleep is awol, scared off by this question that won’t stop pestering me: Is there a principle here? Is there a way to read these opinions as consistent with a principle?

[good stuff deleted. Go read it ]

One friend offered a reason in an email of condolence. Those 5 (judges), he said, save their activism for issues they think important. They apply their principle to causes they think important. Protecting states is a cause they think important. Protecting the public domain is not.

By what right? By what g.d. right? These five justices have all the right in the world to have their own principled way of interpreting the constitution. Long before this case, I had written many many pages trying to explain the principle I thought inherent in the decisions of these five justices. I have spent many hours insisting on the same to ever-skeptical students. But by what right do these 5 get to pick and choose the parts of the constitution to which their principles will apply?

This sounds so amazingly naive, I know. But I have spent my career staring down the charge of naive, insisting on something more. Think the poster on the X-Files — “I want to believe” — but with the Supreme Court, not UFOs, in the background. Yet here I am, more than a decade into my job, just where most of my professors insisted I should have been more than a decade ago.

Harvard Professor Roberto Unger ends one of his first books by describing us, the professors, as “priests who have lost their faith but kept their jobs.” I remember loathing those “priests” as a student. They have the right to lose their faith, I thought; they have no right to keep their job.

Next week, Tuesday, I am to teach the first class of the semester in constitutional law. Who as I am not yet sure.

The precise problem with that attitude on the part of the judges (which I agree is likely what happened) is that they are not always right as to what is important, and the relative importance of things change over time. This is the entire reason why we have this mess in the first place: for 200 years people have said "this is not important" and have let one industry write its own laws, and when technology changes things so that copyright law is more important, then we have 200 years of bad law that nobody has questioned to overcome, and ingrained attitudes in government, business and the law that are based on that legacy.

Of course, as intellectual property law becomes relevant to more and more things, there will eventually become a time when the supreme court judges will consider it "important". (I honestly thought that the act that they took the case in the first place was an indication that this had happened). Of course, a lot more damage can be done in the mean time. However, I honestly believe that in the long run the tide will turn. In terms of awareness of the problem, the distance we have come in the last 10 years is really remarkable.

You have to keep fighting. Without idealists who fight, the bad guys win without a fight, and that is far worse.

Update: Dave Winer has some thoughts on this, too. Like Dave, I am just delighted we have someone of Lessig's calibre on our side.

Environmentalism, and British teaching of Geography . (Link via John Ray ).

Eighty-four per cent of teachers agreed that there was a greater emphasis on values and attitudes today, and 68 per cent said fewer facts were taught today than under previous curricula.

Eighty-six per cent said it was now more important to teach about environmental issues while 80 per cent agreed that "geography should teach pupils to respect and reconnect with nature". Many teachers went further. Two thirds thought that teaching about "sustainable lifestyles" and the pupils' roles as "global citizens" was more important than teaching basic skills such as reading maps.

"Selective presentation" of issues is also evident in geography textbooks, the study says. A new A-level textbook, Global Challenge, published by Longman, presents pupils with a series of challenges on "cutting consumption" and "lowering fertility rates".

This bias "leaves pupils with the impression that humans can only cause harm to the environment", Mr Standish concluded.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that students in geography classes should be taught about geography. Teaching them where, and indeed what, Estonia is perhaps. (Link via a different one of John's array of sites). Oddly, if we want our children to grow up to be good world citizens, there are few better things to give them than good geography lessons. Give people maps to look at and study, and the names of countries and their capitals and other cities to memorise, and explain why cities have grown where they are, and what languages are spoken, and how all these facts interrelate with each other, and children will slowly get a sense that the world and human culture is bigger and more complex and more extraordinary than can be understood from a few years of life in one town or country. Look at a few maps, and start asking questions, and suddenly the whole world jumps out at you. In short, a very traditional way of studying geography is a very good aid for people in figuring out their own values and attitudes.

(I do like the name of the "Campaign for Real Education". The name may well be based on that of the "Campaign for Real Ale". I think I am a serious supporter of both campaigns, and think their supporters should meet regularly, and preferably together).

Seriously, however, the constant use of the word "sustainable" is a huge problem. Nothing is being sustained. Our lifestyle is not static. Technology is changing the world dramatically. It is also changing patterns of human existence dramatically and changing patterns of the usage of physical resources dramatically. Our present lifestyle only has to be sustained for however long it lasts before something better comes along. When physical resources become more expensive (normally for reasons that have little to do with their "running out") we are gaining a greater and greater ability to substitute other resources for them. It is certainly true that modern civilization has created environmental problems, but the key enviromental issue is addressed in this one quesiton. Is our technology's ability to solve environmental problems advancing faster than are the environmental problems themselves?

And if you can at least acknowledge that this is the key question, another fact becomes clear, which is that it isn't physical resources that are important: human capital is the key to everything. The larger the civilization and the larger the number of people in the world doing productive things, then the greater is the chance of solving all our problems. A larger population is an advantage and not a disadvantage. (Of course, this does require that bulk of the population can achieve a decent lifestyle and get a reasonable education, but the percentage of the world's population for which this is so has increased significantly in recent decades).

This is at heart a very positive view of the world. And the facts do generally support it. So why, then, is the view so popular that we should aim for some static, "sustainable" world in which we should reduce our population, ration resources, and do the civilizational equivalent of go and hide under a rock somewhere. This view is "conventional wisdom" in many circles, like, for instance, those people who put together high school geography curricula. I really don't really get it.

I concur with Halley Suitt . That is a fabulous picture of Professor Lessig.

Perhaps this has something to do with why Americans haven't taken to SMS messaging. My goodness.

My initial tendency would be to blame this on the mish mash of different technical standards in use in the US. One might expect SMS interoperability between networks to be the problem, whereas in Europe (where everyone uses GSM) things might be easier. (However, SMS interoperability should require only a small amount of competently written code, I would have thought). However, what is really curious is that delivery rates for same network messages seem to be just as bad as to other networks, and that T-Mobile, which uses GSM and should be able to gain some sort of advantage from the experience of Europe, appears to be doing worse than almost any other operator.

Perhaps this is just general shodiness. That said, I would like to see the equivalent delivery rates for European networks when they were delivering similar numbers of messages.

Eldred vs Ashcroft ruling in.
The US Supreme court has declared the Mickey Mouse Protection Act constitutional. Fuck.

Does the way in which he made the reference indicate that Andrew Sullivan doesn't know who Orson Scott Card is? Glenn Reynolds certainly does. And they are both right that Card's article on North Korea and China is well worth reading. Card has actually been writing interesting stuff on the war on a weekly basis since pretty much right after September 11, 2001.

It's kind of funny. As the blogosphere has grown, there has been lots of interaction between the those who came into it from the techie side (in blog terms led by Dave Winer and perhaps connected a little to the slashdot crowd) and those who came into it from the journalism and lawyerly side (let by Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Josh Marshall, perhaps). The two crowds seem to largely get on okay, but once in a while its clear that the reference points of the two sides are different. There are very few people on the techie side who haven't read Ender's Game .

Interestingly enough, this division seems much less apparent the younger are the people you are looking at. Smart younger people are techies almost by definition, and this is reflected in what they watch and read as well. It's an interesting development. There are older people who understand both sides (Glenn Reynolds and Virginia Postrel perhaps), but they are much more common in the echo-boomers born in 1980 or so. If you are over 30 and like this then you are not like other people. If you are under 25, you are like plenty of other people.

Update: I suspect another division between the two groups is that the people who come from the tech direction are today cursing and swearing about the Eldred v Ashcroft decision, whereas most of those who come from the journalism and law side are not.

Well, Reliance Industries of India today launches its CDMA2000 1x telephone service throughout India. This is licenced to be a wireless local loop (WLL) service, to compete with fixed line telephones, and it is priced on that basis. (It will be cheaper than any other phone system in India, whether wired or wireless). However, to offer this Reliance have built a mobile network based on a 3G technology, and one of the most sophisticated networks in the world. There are one or two regulatory issues about how it can be used, but the basic issue is that India now has world class wireless infrastructure, and it isn't priced at a premium over existing services. (It also doesn't have a business model based on pie in the sky applications but instead one based on providing service to a country with inadequate existing infrastructure but a growing middle class). My guess is that takeup rates on this network will be phenomenal.

Some Thoughts on Animated Movies of the Last 15 Years

Here we have an article in the Los Angeles Times about recent animated movies, in the context of which will be nominated for and which will win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of 2002. This is only the second year in which this particular award has been made, which is in some ways quite surprising, given the large number of memorable animated films that have been released over the last 15 years. No Oscar for Beauty and the Beast. No Oscar for The Lion King . No Oscar for A Bug's Life . No Oscar for Chicken Run . And going back, no Oscar for Fantasia or Snow White , either.

One reason for this can be determined simply by looking at what all those films above have in common. With the exception of the very recent Chicken Run , all of them were released by Disney. Until recently, there has been little competition in animated movies. Disney might have put out a fine movie, but coming up with a list of nominees was impossible. Withough any competition there wasn't any award. There is now competition. This year there are 17 films eligible for the Best Animated Film Oscar. (The academy has established a rule that there must be at least 8 eligible films for the Oscar to be awarded).

This is part of the story, but it isn't the whole story. To give the full details of this, it is worth going back to the early 1980s, when animation was considered to be essentially dead as a movie genre. The Disney studio was at the lowest point in its history, having fallen way behind any of the other studios on live action. The animation division still existed, but hadn't really had a proper hit since the 1960s. In 1984, Michael Eisner took over as CEO of Disney. He fairly quickly revitalised the live action division (interestingly enough, by taking the Disney name off many of Disney's films, and replacing it with "Touchstone Pictures", or "Hollywood Pictures", ssince he thought audiences were likely to associate Disney with childrens' movies). Animation though was more troubling. At that time, the animation division had been working on an intricate, darker, and more expensive animated film called The Black Cauldron , a Dungeons and Dragons type adventure. This film was not quite sure what its audience was (it was apparently aimed at teen rather than child audiences, and it was and may still be the only Disney animated film not to get a "G" rating), flopped at the box office, and at this point Eisner seriously considered shutting down Disney's animation division.

However, this didn't happen. Jeffrey Katzenberg was put in charge of animated films, and a decision was made to concentrate on light animated musicals, but animated to an extremely high standard. The invention of computers lowered the cost of traditional hand-drawn animation somewhat, as such things as storyboarding no longer had to be done by hand). The songwriting team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken was hired to write the music. The first product of this teaming was The Little Mermaid in 1989. This was the best received animated film in decades, and was a substantial but not giant hit. However, it was the film that made it clear that the rules had changed. The reason for this was that home video had reached a saturation point. Children are different from adults in that they like to watch the same film over and over again. Therefore, while the VHS rental business was a big deal for most films, childrens films tended to be purchased rather than rented. This meant that the revenue that could be raised from a successful animated children's film was truly immense. It also meant that Disney's back catalogue was suddenly immensely valuable. Whereas Disney had traditionally rereleased its classic animated films in the cinema every ten to fifteen years (so each generation of children would hopefully get to see them) it suddenly discovered that much more money could be made by releasing them on sell-through VHS. In order to aid this type of promotion, Disney put together a list of its "Classic animated films", which was somewhat selectively put together to excluse films that might now be embarassing due to racial insensitivity ( Song of the South (1946), most notably) or due to being badly dated (Victory Through Air Power(1943), anyone?).

The Little Mermaid was followed by Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin(1992) when they followed. Beauty and the Beast was instantly recognised as a classic, and is still the only animated film ever to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Pircture, and Aladdin, while less of a classic, was extremely good fun, with voice improvisation from Robin Williams. Aladdin was the first time an animated film had grossed more than $200m in the US, and with the video sales, the profit level was astonishing. (At this point, Disney started boosting its profits still further by making cheaply made direct to video sequels to its animated features, with lower production values than the cinema releases, but which sold in huge numbers to the parents of children who had liked the original). In 1994, Disney released The Lion King which grossed more than $300m in the US and was at the time the 3rd highest grossing film (of any kind) to have been released. Given that at this time animated films typically cost significantly less to make than live action, and the children and VHS effect, and the direct to video sequel, it is possible that The Lion King was at that time the most profitable movie of all time. Disney's profits at this point also received a huge boost from being able to release their library of 60 years worth of animated movies. After four hits in quick succession, Disney's reputation for animation was at its highest point in a number of decades, and the anticipation level for its subsequent films was at an all time high. The feeling at Disney was that they could release a blockbuster film like Aladdin or The Lion King every year. Production was ramped up so that in future they could achieve this level of output.

Whereas other studios had previously been willing to largely leave the animation business to Disney, with this level of profitability it was inevitable that other studios would attempt to compete. In the end, three aditional studios set up new drawn animation departments. These were Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and Dreamworks. The story behind Dreamworks is one of infighting at Disney. In 1994, Frank Wells, the number 2 executive at Disney, died in a plane crash. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who considered himself responsible for the renewed success of the animation division, was overlooked for the position. Katzenberg left Disney in a huff, and joined with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, to found the new company Dreamworks SKG. Since Katzenberg considered himself responsible for the success of Aladdin and The Lion King Dreamworks financial prospectus contained extremely optimistic projections as to the likely success of the company's animated films.

The trouble with this new level of competition is that there wasn't really enough talent to go round. A bidding war ensued for the services of talented animators. One consequence of this is that the cost of making animated films increased dramatically. Disney spent around $20m producing The Little Mermaid in 1989. The first drawn animation film from Dreamworks, The Prince of Egypt (1998) was rumoured to cost as much as $100m.

Dreamworks also signed a deal distribute feature films made by Aardman Animation, a company from Bristol in England. Working for Aardman was (and is) an animator named Nick Park, a specialist in the venerable medium of clay animation, famous in England and many other places for his Wallace and Grommit animated shorts. Park's first feature film Chicken Run was released to considerable success in 2000, and Park and Aardman look likely to produce considerable more good work for Dreamworks. It is unlikely that this indicates any general trend in clay animation, however. It just happens that Nick Park is a genius. Other people will have difficulty following, because they are not geniuses.

In any event, nobody was able to ever produce the sort of hit that Disney had had with The Lion King or Aladdin ever again, at least not for a conventional drawn animation movie. (It was ultimately achieved with computer animation, which we will get to in a moment). Disney released a succession of movies that were mostly profitable, but were disappointing. Lyricist Howard Ashman died of AIDS in 1991: the last film he worked on was Aladdin, and his absence did show subsequently. Many subsequent Disney animated looked rushed, and the animation seemed a little lacking in quality. Disney had hits: Tarzan (1999) for instance, but the anticipation one felt for a new Disney animated film in the 1990s is almost completely gone. Three of the last four Disney animated films: The Emperor's New Groove(2000), Atlantis: the Lost Empire (2001) and (particularly) Treasure Planet (2002) are likely to count as outright disappointments. (Interestingly, two of the best Disney animated films of recent years, Mulan (1998) and Lilo and Stitch (2002) were the work of a separate animation unit that Disney set up in Florida. This separate unit was set up largely so that visitors to Disney's theme parks in Florida could see animators at work, rather than for artistic reasons. Oddly, the animation unit in question has turned out to be excellent).

20th Century Fox released a version of Anastasia in the standard Disney musical style (but without the visual sophistication of the best Disney animation) in 1997, which was only moderately successful. They followed up with the animated space adventure Titan A.E. in 2000, which was supposedly aimed at a teenage male audience, but this was a disaster, Bill Mechanic, the head of 20th Century Fox, was sacked over the film, and 20th Century Fox's drawn animation operation was closed.

Warner Bros. released The Quest for Camelot in 1998, which was notably unsuccessful in both critical and commercial terms, and The Iron Giant in 1999. Adapted from a children's book by Ted Hughes, this latter film is one of the great masterpieces of animated cinema and was a critical triumph, but Warners ability to promote is was so poor that very few people saw it. Animation fans weep to this day over the film's fate. After this, Warners animation efforts faded away somewhat.

And then there is Dreamworks. Dreamworks produced an animated biblical epic The Prince of Egypt in 1998, which was quite well received and which made money, but which was not the blockbuster Jeffrey Katzenberg had hoped. This was followed up by The Road to El Dorado in 2000, which was a clear misfire, and Stallion: Spirit of Cimarron in 2002, which probably broke even. Drawn animation at Dreamworks had clearly not lived up to Jeffrey Katzenberg's hopes, but Dreamworks was still doing interesting, ambitious work in the genre in 2002.

This is the story for drawn animation, the impression is that in recent years there have been a lot of films made, but that quality has been variable. A monopoly has broken down, and perhaps as a consequence of this, the hits haven't been coming the way they did before. There is still good work, but somehow the magic is gone. It may come back, it may not. Maybe though, drawn animation is on the way out. Because, after all, we now also have computer animation.

In the early 1990s, Disney signed a deal with a company named Pixar. Pixar belonged to Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple computer, and had been producing interesting animated short films. These films had been generated entirely using computer graphics and were quite impressive. Disney thought that this new technology might have some future, and so did the deal: Pixar would produce three animated feature films and Disney would distribute them. It was a very one sided deal: Pixar made the film, and Disney funded and then released the film, and then took all the profits, basically. Pixar needed Disney much more than the reverse, and the deal reflected this. In any event, Pixar got to work, and its first feature film, Toy Story was ready to be released in late 1995. Nobody had high expectations for the film. Disney was much more interested in drawn animation. Disney did not promote it hard. Toy stores were not full of associated merchandise, even though the film lent itself perfectly to merchandising. The film was considered an experiment only. And of course it was an enormous hit. Everyone in Hollywood looked around, and pretty much acknowledged that this was the future. The academy, very smartly, awarded a Special Achievement Oscar to John Lasseter of Pixar for the film.

Copying was a difficult thing for other studios to do, however, as Pixar had the technology exclusively and making a film with the technique was a lot of effort even for them. However, 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks, Disney itself, and probably other organisations, decided that they had to follow and decided to set up their own computer animation companies or divisions. Pixar renegotiated their deal with Disney so that revenues were shared equally between the two companies, but in return the deal was lengthened by three further movies. (The deal does not include sequels, and so Toy Story 2 was produced under a separate deal. All up, Pixar will have produced seven films for Disney by the time the deal is up, probably in late 2005).

No further computer animated films were seen until 1998, when Disney and Pixar released A Bug's Life and Dreamworks subsidiary PDI released Antz , two films that, somewhat curiously, had almost identical plots. A Bug's Life was more of a children's film, and featured some of the most beautiful animation ever seen. (The DVD of the film is still a favourite of people who want to demonstrate the high quality pictures that can be achieved with DVD players and fancy modern screens). Antz was technically much cruder, but had a rather witty screenplay and a pleasantly self-deprecating voiceover from Woody Allen. Both films were successful: Antz was a moderate hit, and A Bug's Life was another major hit for Pixar. Subsequently, Pixar have followed up with Toy Story 2(1999) and Monsters Inc. (2001). All four of Pixar's films have been critical favourites, and have been absolutely state of the art in terms of animation. Disney have never been able to repeat their success of Aladdin and The Lion King in drawn animation. Pixar have managed to achieve similar success in computer animation. Disney's deal with Pixar will likely expire at the end of 2005. Disney clearly wants to renew it, but at this point Pixar doesn't seem very keen. With the decline of Disney's traditional animation, Pixar has been Disney's main source of animated hits in recent years, and now, interestingly enough, Disney needs Pixar much more than the reverse. If Pixar does renew its deal, the deal will be one sided in the opposite way to the original deal: Pixar will be receiving virtually all the money, and Disney will be largely just receiving a distribution fee. (There are various rumours of some extraordinary project that Pixar is preparing for 2006 or 2007 to celebrate their freedom from Disney).

As for other studios, Disney has developed its own internal computer animation department, from which we have presently seen one movie, Dinosaur (2000). That film was moderately successful, and we will no doubt see more from them. 20th Century Fox released its first computer animated film Ice Age in 2002. This was a very substantial success and was very encouraging for them, but in animation terms it was much cruder than what Pixar and Dreamworks/PDI have been able to produce.

Dreamworks/PDI did of course produce Shrek in 2001. This film was an absolute blockbuster: the first major animated hit to be distributed by a studio other than Disney. Shrek grossed more than $250m in the US, and it was the sort of hit that Jeffrey Katzenberg assured investors he could produce when Dreamworks was founded in the first place. The film contained various sly references to Disney animated films and Hollywood in jokes made at the expense of Michael Eisner. It was more satirical than we had seen in animated film before, but not in my mind in a very sophisticated way. Its animation was of high quality, and Dreamworks/PDI are clearly the number 2 in terms of the quality of their computer animation, but they are still not Pixar.

Which was where we were with the first Oscar to be awarded for Best Animated Feature a year ago. The Academy had finally decided that the volume of animated features being released was sufficient to justify a separate award. (There has long been an Oscar for animated short film, which led to the peculiar situation where most major animated filmmakers have won oscars, but for their student films, their demonstration films in which they test new technology, and for their fun weekend projects rather than their major work). There had also been a feeling that an Oscar for animated feature would mean that animated films would never be considered for best picture. However, as animated films never seemed to be considered for best picture anyway (that one nomination for Beauty and the Beast notwithstanding) the animation crowd decided that an animated feature Oscar would at least reward their work.

There had been two major animated hits in 2002: Monsters Inc from Disney/Pixar and Shrek from Dreamworks/PDI. One was a simple, beautifully told children's story, the other was that, but also a Hollywood satire. Both were well animated, but to be frank, Monsters Inc was simply beautiful, and Shrek was not quite at that level. My feeling is that Monsters Inc will look like a classic in ten years whereas Shrek's jokes will fall a little flat. But both are good films. The Oscar went to Shrek somewhat to my disappointment. I was also a little sad that the first Animated Feature Oscar did not go to Pixar. The company has led the field to such an extent, and has produced so much good work over the last decade that has not been rewarded with Oscars, that I thought it a little sad that the first award went to the upstarts. Still, that was the way it went.

This year, as the LA Times article suggests, there is nothing quite as good as either of the two films that fought it out last year. There has certainly been good work, and the Oscar certainly should be awarded, but there are no potentially classic films in the list. Last year, the Oscar went to Shrek . The year before it could have gone to Nick Park's Chicken Run . The year before that to Toy Story 2 . The year before that to A Bug's Life ). Although there are more animated films this year than ever before, the best of them is weaker than for some years. Which is rough on the films of those years, given that there was no Oscar for them.

Of course, there actually is a classic film on the list, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. (I have refrained from discussing Japanese animation in this post because it is long enough already, and I am not an expert. All I can say is that at its best, Japanese animation is magnificent, particularly that of Miyazaki). I think it is unlikely, though, that the academy will award the Oscar to a Japanese film in only its second year. I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.

Over the weekend I read Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956). This book has been long regarded as one of the classics of science fiction, but for some reason I had never read it. All I can say is that the book really does deserve its reputation. (Plus the battle between getting to the end of the book and falling asleep, which was so common when I was fifteen, is not something that happens to me much any more. It did with this one, however). I'm not going to review it here, but it really doesn't feel like 1950s science fiction. It feels like it was written in about 1990. Its influence on many things that came later (from the New Wave to Cyberpunk) is so obvious and so large that it is really a shame I didn't read it 20 years ago.

I see that the new Harry Potter book is likely to be published in July 2003. (Link via Instapundit ). This is good, as I am looking forward to reading it. However, in terms of timing for Warner Bros and the next movie, the date is about as bad as can be. Warners released the first Harry Potter movie at the end of 2001, which was just about the peak of Harry Potter mania. They had the idea that they could release one movie every holiday season for seven years and make squillions of dollars each time.

And the first Harry Potter movie did make squillions of dollars (okay, $900 million at the worldwide box office, probably plus a similar amount again on VHS, DVD and various other media, so in fact billions of dollars). The movie was competently made, faithful to the book, and fairly lifeless, and in box office terms its performance was somewhat "front loaded", meaning it did most of its business in the first couple of weeks, and word of mouth and repeat business were not all that great. Clearly, the magic is in the books, and not the films. The films are not central to the franchise, and are just about coming along for the ride, despite what Warners would like you (or at least its long suffering shareholders) to think.

Warners then got the second movie made, and we saw it a couple of months ago. It was once again competently made but not all that exciting, and while it made plenty of money, its grosses were down about 20% on the first film. Warners had hoped that J.K. Rowling would have the fifth Harry Potter book out by then, and that the publicity from the release of another book would help promote the movie. Sadly, though, that didn't happened. On top of that, the cast and crew of the films found the pace a bit gruelling, and so Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire), the director of the first two movies, quit, and it was announced that a new director, Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, A Little Princess), would take over for the third movie. The release date of the third movie was delayed for six months to May 2004 in order that everyone could get some rest. This did solve a certain problem that Warners had with their release schedule, as they will be releasing The Matrix Reloaded this summer and Matrix Revolutions this November, and it would have been a bit awkward to find a date for the third Harry Potter movie that didn't get in the way of the Matrix film and also The Return of the King . (While this is not technically a Warner Bros movie, it was produced by New Line Cinema, which also belongs to AOL TIme Warner, and Warners have to show their corporate partners some courtesy by staying away from their release dates).

However, the new book is now out in July. We should therefore expect lots of Harry Potter hype for the second half of the year, and from this point of view it would be good for Warners to have a new Harry Potter film out at the end of the year. And there isn't going to be one. Yes, the paperback release of the fifth book will probably coincide with the release of the third movie, but I suspect most children will have nagged their parents to get them the hardback by then in order that they avoid social death. The presence of the new book will no doubt boost the film, but not as much as it would if the timing was better.

Plus of course there remains the issue of whether the third film (and the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh films) can be any good. The strategy that has been adopted so far, which is slavishly film every scene and event in the books, is a low risk strategy, but it will not work for much longer. This technique leads to long, slow paced, not very exciting films, which are at least of decent quality. It minimises the chance of making a terrible film, but also makes it unlikely that we will see a very good film. The effort put into making the films has been technical. There has been very little intellectual effort put into seeing, say, which parts are the story are more important.

This can go on for one more film. The third book is longer than the first two, but is relatively short. However, the fourth book is twice as long. By all reports, the fifth book will be even longer. The books are getting longer, denser, and more morally complex. Structurally this makes perfect sense, as life gets denser and more morally complex as you go through your teenage years. When the filmmakers get to the fourth book, they will either find themselves making films that are five hours long, or the writers doing the adaptation start doing some actual adapting.

This will probably be good, as the audience will be getting tired of dull adaptations by then. If grosses continue to drop by 20% per film, then the fourth film is about the time Warners will start to be getting unhappy with them, too. Thus the middle to end of 2005 is probably when we discover whether the Harry Potter movies are going to successfully sail their way through the whole series of seven books or whether they are going to turn into the debacle that most Warner Bros franchises seem to. Batman and Robin anyone? The Batman movies reached a situation where the movies themselves became overwhelmed by all the marketing and all the studio interference after three or four movies. This may or may not happen here. The positives here are that (a) J.K. Rowling does have considerable creative control over the movies and (b) Alfonso Cuaron is a good direction, whereas Chis Columbus is a hack. The Batman movies went the other way. The first two movies were directed by a good director ( Tim Burton), and then the next two were directed by a hack ( Joel Schumacher). So, we can hope.

Still, I am not sure I have ever seen a series of seven movies without at least one bad one.

Update: J.K. Rowling has turned in the book, and the publication date is June 21. The book is apparently 255000 works: about a third longer than the last book.

Just before Chrismas, in a slightly eccentric post I noted that 1997 was for some reason a big year for breakthrough performances by new actresses in Australian cinema, and I cited five actresses who were omnipresent in Australian films at that time: Rachel Griffiths, Toni Collette, Miranda Otto, Frances O'Connor, and Cate Blanchett. (I was ambivalent as to whether Cate Blanchett belonged in the same group as the others). My motivation for writing this piece was my feeling that The Two Towers was about to turn Miranda Otto into an international star, which I think it probably has.

Having made that post, I now note that three of these actresses - Rachel Griffiths, Toni Collette, and Miranda Otto, have got married in the last fortnight. As far as I know, Frances O'Connor is still single. (Proving she doesn't belong in the group after all, Cate Blanchett has been married for years and years).

I guess Miranda couldn't wait for me any longer. This is so sad. How am I ever going to find another woman as cool as this.

While on Lessig, this piece of his in Red Herring is interesting. He talks about how a great portion of Japanese manga are dojinshi: works that are set in the universes of other writers and are technically illegal. However, the dojinshi tends to raise the profile of the original works in that universe, which often adds value for the original works. In a way, it isn't too dissimilar to the intellectual property conventions that exist for video games.

My feeling is that present intellectual property law gives original authors far too much control over derivative works. Quite simply, if the original author has complete control over every use that is ever made of anything based on his work, then the work of future artists is going to be hindered, and creativity in the long run is going to be hindered. This is simply because all works are derivative works, and everything is in some way based on what came before. The question is where do you draw the line, and this is not an easy one to answer. However, in order to try to answer it, you have to at least acknowledge the question, and if you simply say something like "The author controls all future uses" you are not acknowledging the question.

Secondly, it is worth acknowledging that there are two questions. One is "When should the author be compensated for derivative works?" and the other is "When should an author be able to control or stop derivative works?". These questions do not have to have the same answer, and even under present law they don't. If I hear a song on the radio and I like it, it is perfectly okay for me to record myself performing this song and sell CDs of the recording. When they sell, I then have to pay royalties to the composer. However, the composer cannot stop me making the recording. If, however, I make CDs of the original recording and sell them, the original performer can stop me.

I think an ideal copyright law would have a relatively narrow definition of "derivative works" that the author can control or prevent, and a much wider definition of "derivative works" that the author cannot control or prevent but can expect compensation from. Then there is the outer ring of works for which there may be some influence but which compensation cannot be expected from. For instance, there may be something to be said for the nephew of Samuel Beckett receiving royalties when Waiting for Godot is performed. However, he should not be able to control the interpretation of the play.

Of course, all this is good in principal, but in practice extremely difficult. Where exactly do you draw those two lines. I don't know, and the answer is going to vary wildly from medium to medium. However, the question is becoming so paramount that we have to try.

Glenn Reynolds is discussing who the Republicans should appoint to various offices to confuse their opponents

And I have their ultimate Supreme Court pick -- but I'll save his name for later.

I personally would go for Lawrence Lessig, but I suspect America isn't quite ready for that. (Actually, it could be interesting. Bush supports Lessig. RIAA, MPAA, and their congressional supporters (many of who are Democrats) scream like there is no tomorrow. Bush is denounced on pages 1 through 76 of Variety. The RIAA, MPAA, and Sen. Hollings then have to defend themselves and their business practices in the most public way imaginable. The Republicans present themselves as the friend of the average American consumer, and the Democrats look to be in hock to rather dubious business interests. The good guys win.

However, I suspect that this scenario is too far from the way lawyers inside the Beltway actually think to happen any time soon.

Yousa steala precious from meesa!

I think that Jar-Jaromir belongs in Peter Jackson's film of The Hobbit, if he ever gets around to making it. What is needed instead in The Return of the King is for us to see Aragorn's coronation in front of a crowd of Ewoks.

Actually this is kind of troubling. The first LOTR film was a spectacle like nothing we had ever seen before. The second was more familiar than the first, but was done even better than the original. The third one has a title beginning with "(The) Return of the..". Until I thought of this, my expectation for the end of the year was another triumph from Jackson. Now I am not so sure.

Clay Shirky (via Instapundit ) has an interesting piece discussing the circumstances in which communications companies become competitors to their own customers. Essentially, provide an open end to end network and the customers will build the network extensions themselves to provide high value services, and they and not the network operators will gain the most value from services offered over the network. Customers will not pay a premium for wireless service, when they can add this themselves for a hundred bucks for an 802.11 card. Even worse, as I have discussed before, with digital telephone networks the prices being charged for long distance and international phone calls are legacies of past technology and past regulation and bear little relation to the cost to the telco of providing the service today. The data network is the product, and ordinary voice telephone calls are the value added service. We have direct access to the data network for customers via broadband internet access, and the technology that allows customers to add the phone service themselves now appears just about mature. Allow for all these things, and the result will either be that people provide their own phone service using their broadband access, in concert with a group of small, very competitive companies who provide connections to the existing phone network, or the existing telephone companies keep a sunstantial market share, but their pricing comes to reflect the underlying cost of providing the service, not some weird legacy of the analogue days.

What is interesting is how the reverse of what played out with dialup internet service appears to be playing out for broadband. When internet service came along, telcos and ISPs intially attempted to charge by the minute for it, even though this did not refect their costs very well. However, it turned out that the hardest service to offer was actually the communications: the phone service. Typically you could only get this from your local telephone company (RBOC). Lots of ISPs sprung up, and while many of these tried by the minute charging too, it didn't last. Some provided unlimited service, and as this was what the customer wanted and this better reflected the ISP's costs anyway, this was soon the standard. (In countries with timed local phone calls, it has taken a lot longer to get to unlimited time, flat rate internet service). In many places the telcos are also large ISPs, but they have been forced into a flat rate pricing scheme they wouldn't have chosen for themselves.

Now, we have broadband, which is available generally at flat rates. Telephone networks are digital, and the marginal cost of providing a call is negligible. However, telephone call pricing still depends on a cost (and regulatory) structure that was forged in the elder days. The telephone companies are happy with this, as it allows them to provide what is now a value added product at a price way above cost. However, we now have the same situation again: the cost of the equipment to provide the value added service is low, so customers and a large number of small, competitive companies add hardware on the ends of the networks to undercut the telcos. Once again, the big telcos may or may not remain the largest providers of telephone service in future, but the pricing scheme will not be the one of their choosing.

In any event, time to sell your RBOC shares.

Yes, the world does contain a housing market that is less sane than the one in Sydney.

So, if you want to make money in the Hong Kong property market, you can simply follow these easy steps:

1 Buy a flat that doesn't yet exist.
2 Wait until it does.
3 Sell it immediately.

What? There's a problem with this plan? Oh, yes - someplace to actually live. You can't rent, of course, because that would eat up your profits. Fortunately, Hong Kong is liberally blessed with flyovers, so I'll see you in one of those cozy nooks beneath them!

I wonder how long it will be before Bjorn Lomborg decides he has had enough of this, and moves to America, where he will be involved in a robust but more openminded debate, and where, incidentally, he is likely to be paid a lot better.

If so, it will be an interesting circle completed from reading this 1997 Wired article , to concluding it was "simple, American right-wing propaganda", to setting out to debunk it and discovering he couldn't, to becoming a worthy successor to the late Dr Simon himself, to being excommunicated by the Euro-left, and I suspect to now discovering that has a great many friends and admirers in the largely American anti-idiotarian movement (which appears, at least to the Euro-lefties, to be part of that same American right Lomborg recoiled from in the first place).

In any event, at this moment I will note that Julian Simon was a devout Catholic, which makes it at least logically consistent to suggest that he might be looking down from somewhere and finding this all to be in some way amusing.

In an encouraging move, the Australian Labour Party is apparently elevating Mark Latham to a senior front bench position, despite that fact that the man has not always been what could be described as a team player. This at least seems to be a move towards someone who cares about policy and away from dreadful party hacks veering off into unelectable lefto orthodoxy that we have had in the ALP since Paul Keating's election loss in 1996. As a sign that Australian Latham has what in sporting terms would be referred to as the "sledging skills" necessary for success in Australian politics. Foreigners should be aware that a rude and crude quality in an Australian politician does not necessarily indicate a lack of policy sophistication - it is more a basic survival skill in certain male-dominated parts of Australian survival.

It's interesting that the SMH reports this in terms of ALP internal politics - this may be a bad move for Opposition Leader Simon Crean as it moves someone who may stab him in the back closer to him - rather than in terms of how it affects the question of whether Labor can actually win an election any time soon. The fact that it is happening at all indicates that Labor is starting to get interested in the second question again. Until the last election, Labor seemed to be sitting there and assuming that pretty soon the electorate would come to hate Prime Minister Howard as much as they did, and that they would then sweep into office. This clearly didn't happen, and their choice then was (and is) whether the fade off into oblivion or whether to actually do something. They now may actually be doing something.

I am now coming around to the conclusion that dropping the Waugh twins (Steve particularly) from the Australian one day cricket team for the world cup was a bad move. Even without them, I don't think that Australia's position is terrible for the World Cup.. Sri Lanka and India are going to have trouble in South African conditions, and South Africa don't really have the batting to do this. I think Australia still has a decent chance of winning the tournament, but tossing that much skill and experience aside is looking more and more shortsighted.

William Gibson now has a blog. We will see if this survives for the long term, of if it will die away after the promotional effort for Pattern Recognition is over. (We will also see for how long he uses Blogger). Gibsons comments on the use of non-standard or esoteric English are particularly wise.

Someone posts to complain of the wealth of grammatical errors in my fiction… I would have to say that some are errata, some are nonstandard grammatical choices on the part of a character (and these can be part of the text, as interior monologue or an aspect of “POV”) and the rest are, for the most part, conscious and deliberate stylistic choices involving nonstandard usage.
I suppose the idea that a writer would deliberately choose to “break the rules” would puzzle some people, and annoy others, though it’s a bit of a stretch for me to imagine what it would feel like to be in that particular relationship to prose fiction.
...
But a character like Rydell doesn’t think in formal standard English, so when I’m interfacing with the narrative through the lens of that character, you don’t get formal standard English. Though that shouldn’t lead you to assume that the more general narrative voice of a given book is “me”. If I’m doing my job, it never is.

Wonderful stylist that he is, Gibson puts this much better than I could, but there are few things more irritating than someone who insists that your a word or grammatical structure in your writing is "wrong", when you know that it is non-standard (and it may be that you are using a word you have just made up) and you did it deliberately for stylistic reasons. (I wish I had been taught Latin and Greek, not to mention Old English, so that my clever made up linguistic structures could be grammatically much cleverer, but alas, my schooling failed me in this.

This is not to excuse typos and genuine errors of course. Alas, I make quite a few typos in this blog. Often I finish a posting and just want to publish it and go to bed, so I do, and discover typos the next day, or never discover them at all. Plus I have a curious form of dyslexia when I type: rather than the word I intend to write, I write a homophone of the same word. Thus I will type "there" when I mean "their" or "they're". I understand the difference between the words, and the error is immediately clear to me when I read the piece back, but for some reason I make the error when typing. Curiously, I never make this type of error when writing things by hand.

And of course the other revolution that has taken place in the consumer electronics market is that almost every consumer electronics device other than the PC itself has evolved into a PC peripheral. I think we are at the stage where this trend is going into reverse: which is that every electronics device is going to have a PC built inside it, and they are going to be able to talk to each other. The first instances are already here: mobile phones, video game consoles, satellite television set top boxes, personal video recorders. These are all essentially PCs designed for specific functions. What is of course interesting is how opposed to this process the music companies and movie studios are. This evolution means that software can easily be transferred from device to device, and as a consequence of this copying becomes easy. They are so terrified of piracy, that they want to make their devices unable to talk to anything else at all. This is so contrary to the technology trends that all they are going to do ultimately is marginalise themselves, but still they do it.

As an example, see this article in Slate about the two better quality CD formats, DVD-A and SACD. These have much better than CD quality sound. Both are essentially DVD formats: the same high density discs and the same colour laser used for DVD are also used for these formats. In an ideal world, you would be able to play them on your computer using the DVD-ROM drive, and your computer would be able to do interesting things with the bitstream. Standard DVD players would soon be able to play the audio from both formats. However, we instead have a situation where due to fear of privacy, the only allowable DVD-A and SACD players are stand along machines, that are only capable of analogue audio output (which is going to degrade the sound quality from what is possible). Plus the machines are designed to be incapable of talking properly to other digital devices. To protect against privacy, we remove most of the advantages of modern technology.

Of course, audio of this quality may easily be recorded on a PC, stored on a DVD-ROM, and then played back however you want to play it back. There are computer compatible high quality audio formats, however they are simply not interchangeable with DVD-A and SACD. (In the CD world, CD-ROM and CD audio are interchangeable most of the time). There is no way whatsoever that the RIAA is going to keep high quality audio off the PC. All they are doing is creating orphan formats. They may well be assising a whole new class of audio recordings from springing up outside their supervision. That would of course be such a shame.

Globalisation and the New Economy

This piece in the Los Angeles Times on the fact that consumer electronics companies and retailers are not making any money on DVD players, tells us more than anything how much the world has changed. The big Japanese companies have been waiting 20 years for another "blockbuster" product, the last being the VCR and the CD player in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is The gist of the article is that DVD players are now really cheap: selling for $59 or less. That such a complicated technological product could sell for so little, astonishes some of the people quoted in the article, and it certainly also astonishes me.

"The joke is you're going to get a free DVD player with the purchase of a DVD [movie] pretty soon," said Noah Herschman, vice president for video at Tweeter Home Entertainment Group of Canton, Mass.

"You can buy a DVD player that has a laser and all sorts of advanced technology ... for less money than it costs to buy a necktie," he added. "It doesn't make any sense."

When you think it through, it does make sense, and for two main reasons. One is economies of scale. The size of the market for consumer electronics products has expanded extraordinarily over the last decade. Go almost anywhere in the world, certainly anywhere throughout asia, no matter how poor the country, and there is now a market for this stuff. Virtually the whole world now watches television, and the whole world is a market for stuff like DVD or VCD players and satellite dishes. These are products where the costs of development are high, and the costs of setting up factories to make the products are perhaps high too, but the marginal costs of making individual products are very low to negligible. And the marginal costs are dropping. The article alludes to a reason for this

Even worse for consumer electronics makers and retailers, the DVD experience may be a harbinger of things to come. Competition at the market's low end is intensifying for all sorts of digital gear, fueled in part by low-wage assembly plants sprouting up across China.

Yes, it is our friends the industrialists of the Pearl River estuary in action. They can use low cost labour to produce products much more cheaply than can anyone else. The PC revolution and the internet have led to a logistics revolution, so components can be sourced much more cheaply and easily in the past, so setting up a DVD player factory is suddenly much cheaper. All this means that there are more DVD player manufacturers, and that markets for new technological products get commoditised much faster than before, and once this happens, prices collapse. With low transport costs due to container shipping and superior logistics in Wal-Mart's distribution and retail system, the product ends up on a shop shelf in the US costing $59.

It isn't just DVD players: such things as printers and scanners, low end digital cameras and the like from no name manufacturers are now incredibly cheap, even compared to three or four years ago, but the DVD player market was particularly vulnerable to be captured in this way for a couple of reasons. For one thing, traditional consumer electronics companies attempt to segment the market. They produce a variety of models, some low end, some high end and some in the middle, with varying features, and for reasons of economies of scale many of these are often made on the same production line together for about the same cost. (Genuine high end products are often made separately to higher standards and sold to people who genuinely care, but the low end product is usually just the middle product with some features disabled. The middle product does not cost any more to make than the low end product).

Although segmenting your market in this way is how the electronics companies have traditionally operated, it still involves duplication of some costs and costs money. The cheap Chinese companies generally don't bother, and go for a one size fits all approach. As the additional features of the mid-level product cost very little for the manufacturer to add, cheap players often have more features than low end products from Sony or Panasonic. Thus, a customer may be faced with a choice of $59 for a Chinese no-name product, $100 for a low end Panasonic with fewer features than the Chinese player, or $150-200 for a mid level Panasonic with the same features as the Chinese no-name. This makes Panasonic's market segmentation strategy look obvious and silly.

Plus there is one other thing about the DVD player that made it vulnerable, which is the deliberate crippling of the product by the consumer electronics industry to make the movie studios happy. DVDs and players are region coded, so that DVDs sold in one part of the world will not play in players purchased elsewhere. It is quite easy to produce a DVD player that will play any DVD. It is also in most places perfectly legal. However, electronics companies are prevented from doing this by the nature of their contracts with the consortium that devised the standards for DVD players. If, however, you are making DVD players in Dongguang, the nature of your contract with the DVD consortium is somewhat nebulous, and in any event, you can only be sued through the Chinese courts, which means you are safe, at least you are if you are well connected. Therefore, Chinese DVD players almost always come out of the box without any regional coding. (A small industry has sprung up to disable regional coding for brand name players, but this adds hassle and cost). Therefore, if you want to watch discs you have bought from Amazon.com and you are in London or Sydney, then a Chinese no-name player may well be better. Hopefully, this result will discourage companies to deliberately cripple products in future. (That said, when the crippling comes from pressure from the MPAA, this message will not get through for a while. The MPAA is not known for learning things quickly).

All this means that customers are better off, which is surely good. However, it also means that life is hard for the large Japanese consumer electronics companies. However, there is a good side of this too. To quote the article once again

"You survive by making new technologies," explained Andy Parsons, a senior vice president at Pioneer Electronics Inc. in Long Beach.

One area with potential is DVD recorders. Mike Mohan, director of audio-video merchandising for Good Guys Inc. of Alameda, predicts that more DVD recorders than players will be on the market within two years. And he expects them to sell for $200 to $300 per unit.

That is, if you have ferocious competitors snapping at your heels, you innovate faster and faster to try to stay ahead of them. Sounds good to me.

Aside: Of course, there have actually been other successful consumer electronics products since the CD player. As far as I can see, there have been three of them. Firstly, there is the mobile phone, which has been dominated by non-Japanese companies (Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and maybe now Samsung). Secondly, the video game console (which has benefited one of the traditional Japanese consumber electronics companies, Sony, enormously, but which has not been the sort of commodity product that all the Japanese producers could produce and earn fat margins on. Thirdly, of course, the personal computer. This was, of course, a product like no other. Microsoft got control of the software market, and the hardware market turned into the combination of one or two very high value parts (microprocessors, mainly, dominated by Intel) and a mass of low value components came ultimately from Taiwanese, Korean and Chinese manufacturers rather than the Japanese. Sony, Panasonic etc were not playing in this particular market in a big way, but the way that PC hardware became commoditised was the precursor to what we have seen with DVD players, and they really should have been watching.

There are lots more details of the Sendo-Microsoft falling out here . Lots of apparent bad faith on the part of Microsoft. Once again this looks like (if nothing else) a tremendous public relations disaster for Microsoft. I cannot imagine they will find many other mobile phone companies to partner them in the future.

It's something of an old joke that real programmers remember telephone numbers in binary, but this is ridiculous.

Tim Blair points out once again that depleted uranium is (from the point of view of its radiological properties) completely harmless. (It is, however, poisonous in the same way lead is). It is worth observing that there are approximately 1.5 tonnes of depleted uranium in the wings and tail of every Boeing 747. The weight is necessary to ensure that the wings are balanced properly, and uranium is used because it is the densest naturally occurring material. That is, the 1.5 tonnes of weight can fit in a very small space if you use uranium. Thare are various mentions of this on the web, for instance, here.

You can also find various conspiracy theories concerning this use of uranium, many to do with the El Al crash in Amsterdam in 1992. (Given that an Israeli jet managed to crash into a housing block full of muslim immigrants, conspiracy theories were inevitable for that one).

In a university physics department in which I once worked, we had a little demonstration of the weights of different materials for visitors on open days. They could pick up a number of objects the same size and see how much heavier some were than others. One thing we had was a piece of depleted uranium (that somebody had somehow obtained from someone in the aviation industry and that had supposedly come from a decommissioned airliner) which we and large numbers of members of the public all picked up from time to time. Nobody that I know of has suffered any ill effects. (Given how little radiation - and what kind of radiation - the stuff gives off, the claims of the conspiracy theorists are just ludicrous. They should all go and get an education).

This article by Bella Thomas in Prospect on what people in different countries watch on television is fascinating.

Virginia Postrel is apparently receiving an e-mail deluge from people who believe that Blade Runner is Philip K Dick's vision rather than Sir Ridley Scott's, as she claimed. I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously, given that Scott made a book adapted from Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , then the answer has to be "a bit of each". Scott is certainly responsible for the visual style of the film. That said, the style is in keeping with the sort of semi-post-apocalyptic worlds that Dick favoured, and that are in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep . Phil Dick unfortunately died before a complete cut of the movie was assembled. However, he was shown a 20 minute reel of some of the highlights of the movie before he died. According to Paul Sammon's book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner Dick had this to say upon seeing the footage

"How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I'd imagined it! How'd you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?!

And of course, the film is entirely about the key questions that come through most of Dick's work: What is it to be human? and What is real? . The plot is quite different from the original book, but it is about the same things. The sorts of ethical questions that led to Virginia bringing up Blade Runner in the first place are questions that constantly fascinated Dick. The third key contributor to the film was the first screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who originated the film project and who were more responsible for the structure of the film than anyone (including Ridley Scott). To extent Fancher took the story away from Dick's original sensibilities, but Scott brought it back. The unicorn is a very Dickian devise, and that was entirely Scott's. The "Deckard may be a replicant" suggestion was there in the book, and while it was not entirely absent from Fancher's versions of the screenplay, it was given much greater emphasis by Scott.

One of the great things about Blade Runner is that although it was quite different from Dick's original text, it was very true to the spirit of it. No other film of a Dick story or novel has come as close: certainly not Spielberg's Minority Report which seemed determined to remove all the Dickian elements of the story. The first two thirds of Paul Verhoven's Total Recall actually does a better job than you might expect: although the film then turns into "Arnold solves all the problems by shooting everyone else on Mars", unfortunately. And we shall see what John Woo and Ben Affleck come up with in their forthcoming film of Dick's Paycheck.

My compliments to the British government for recently knighting Ridley Scott. He richly deserves it. Now, if the academy could give him his much deserved Oscar some time, that would be even better.

Here we have more advance buzz on William Gibson's new novel Pattern Recognition , which I recently mentioned in passing here . A sample chapter can be found here, and another here. I recently reread Gibson's classic Sprawl novels, and a few months ago I wrote about how vital they still seemed to me. I had expected them to feel dated, but instead I found that Gibson had predicted the mood of today extremely well. Even if the details of the exact communication technologies were wrong, Gibson got the sense of disconnection in an increasingly globalised and omni-communicating world extremely right. Which is why it is interesting that his new novel is set in the present. He is not alone in this. Two of the other most famous "cyberpunk" novelists are Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. It is debatable whether either of them have written anything recently that could be called cyberpunk, but the most recent novels of both have been essentially set in the present: Sterling's Zeitgeist , set in turn of the millenium Turkish Cyprus and the southern United States, and Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, set partly in the Second World War, and partly in what now feels like the dying days of the tech bubble. It is now no longer necessary to use a future setting for the types of things these guys want to write about. It is also no longer necessary to write fiction: Sterling seems to be spending more of his time on futurism and other non-fiction (although he continues to be the most prolific fiction writer of the three, so I am not complaining), and all three writers have spent at least some time on this. You have a tendency to find their bylines in Time or Fortune or The New York Times, too.

So we have the present setting. Also, though, we have the London setting. Fundamentally, Gibson's novels are about finding patterns, and connections, and details in an ever more technologically complex world, and finding structure in complexity of that world. And if you find this type of thing fascinating, there are certain places you go for the most complexity. London is one such place. Tokyo is another. (Gibson talks about both places in this article from the Observer). In both places you find the same obsession with detail, the same types of shops selling ultra-ultra-ultra niche products, that there is a need for a shop that sells them somewhere in the world, but probably only one or two. You find obscure and highly specialist service businesses. You find the height of globalization in both places. (My basic rule of thumb: the more globalized chain stores there are in a place, the more culturally complex the place. London and Tokyo have more global chains than any other cities anywhere. In some instances these are Japanese chains who have few non-Japan stores but many in London, and vice versa). You find the most advanced technological gadgets in both places. Both are media centers. Both seem to be major sources of the global Zeitgeist.

As for other cities, New York lacks the international aspects of London and Japan. Try to buy a German newspaper in New York, or even an English newspaper. (Yes it can be done, but it is hard). New York contains the best examples of particular mainstream stores in the world, but lacks the ultra-specialist quality of some in London or Tokyo. America as a country has more complexity than any other American city, and America has more complexity on average than any other country, but it is more homogeneous in the US. Somehow it lacks the peaks of intensity you can find elsewhere. Perhaps it is simply that America exports its culture to the world, so you can find the best of America in London, but the reverse is less true. Or perhaps it is that America is comparmentalised. New York is New York, Los Angeles exists as a source of the global Zeitgeist but has no other purpose, so its contribution to the Zeitgeist consists largely of movies containing explosions. San Francisco and surrounds is the American tech center, but again is too isolated from everything else. On the other hand, Hong Kong possibly is getting there. Here you have a tremendous mixing of culture from all of greater China, plus western and other Asian influences, being mixed together. You have a film and television industry for the Chinese world. And you have the industrial heartland of the world just down the road. This one is interesting, but perhaps hard for an anglophone to understand.

So somehow London appears one of the epicenters of the type of world Gibson is writing about. He understood this by the end of the Sprawl novels, hence the lengthy section in Mona Lisa Overdrive describing the daughter of a Japanese Yakuza boss wanderting around London which seemingly had little to do with the rest of the plot. And of course he got Japan from the beginning of Neuromancer. Now he has decided to write about London properly, and I can't wait to read the book.

The problem with publishing this blog to blogspot has now apparently been fixed, so my posts from the last couple of days have now appeared. A couple more posts are coming shortly.

Blogger is refusing to publish my front page. Although there is new material being written, it is only appearing in my archives. Some people are going straight to the archives due to a link from Iain Murray, but most people are not going to be able to see this explanation either.

Iain Murray has responded to the discussion going on in my comments section about best cricket teams of all time. Iain has challenged other people to select the best team for each country (from all players who have ever played for that country). Here is my first draft. When selecting a team like this, one wants to go beyond merely great players and into players who can be described as "giants of the game". For some reason, as Iain has demonstrated, the West Indies have an awful lot of these. Australia have plenty of great players, but relatively few of the giants. Anyway, my side:

Arthur Morris
Bill Ponsford
Victor Trumper
Don Bradman
Greg Chappell
Adam Gilchrist
Keith Miller
Alan Davidson
Shane Warne
Dennis Lillee
Bill O'Reilly

Some comments: Most of Australia's very best bats tend not to have been openers. I will take Morris, because both Bradman and O'Reilly had such a high opinion of him, and at his best he was clearly something to behold. As for the other opener, that is hard. (Hopefully, in five years time the answer will be "Hayden" but we are not quite there yet. You can take a pre-war great like Ponsford, or one of a number of outstanding post-war openers: Hassett, Lawry, Simpson, Taylor. I will go with Ponsford in the end because of his propensity to make big scores. As for the number three, I will go for Trumper due to his being held above all other batsmen of his day, at least in Australia, and because people who saw both Trumper and Bradman still often rated Trumper very highly. (Statistically, he was no great shakes, but I will blame that on sticky wickets). Of modern Australian batsmen that I have seen, the best was Chappell, who had great power and elegance, plus gritty determination when he needed it. Gilchrist isn't the best keeper to play for Australia, but given his batting I will forgive him this. Miller is the only absolutely top notch all rounder Australia has ever produced. Not quite Sobers, but still quite a player. Davidson is statistically the best Australian quick bowler of the last 100 years, and he also has the added advantage of being a left armer for the sake of variety. Lillee was the canniest and smartest of fast bowlers, and had as fine an action as you will see.

Finally, I have selected two leg spinners. This won't work for all conditions, but with these two spinners it will work for most. I commented on Australia having a lack of players who were giants of the game: well, O'Reilly and Warne both quality, so I need to select them both. If the strongest competition that this all time Australian side encounters is Iain's all time West Indies side, the two leg spinners might be an advantage. Perhaps the one weakness of the great 1980s West Indian sides were their inability to play decent legspin bowling. In the 1980s, they didn't encounter one bowler of the class of O'Reilly or Warne: two against them would be interesting.

If you were playing in Perth, you could drop one of the spinners and play another quick: perhaps Lindwall, McGrath, or even Spofforth. If you wanted to strengthen the batting, you could drop one of the spinners and play another batsman: maybe Harvey, Border, Steve Waugh.

All that said, I think Iain's West Indian side would mostly win.

This Guardian piece (via BuzzMachine) contains lots of sense on what the tech trends of 2003 are likely to be. I think the observation that blogs are in some ways the new Usenet is a fairly astute one. When I first discovered the net in the late 1980s, Usenet was the key information application for me, and for me it was very interactive. Then, a few years later, I spent my time getting information from more static sites, from Hotwired to Feed to Suck to Word to even Slate and Salon, which was more a case of reading than writing. Now, however, where it is happening is in the blogosphere, and I am back to doing a lot of writing. Certainly I now write relatively similar things for my blog that I once did on Usenet.

One key difference though is that Usenet is divided up into reader spaces. All the readers interested in a subject are in one place, and will read an article that anyone posts on that subject. As an author, you post in different places when you are writing about different subjects. If you pick up readers in one place, they may not be familiar with the work you post in other places and on other subjects. With Usenet, you follow subjects rather than authors.

The blogosphere, on the other hand, is divided up into writer spaces. Everything an author writes is in the same place. He may write on different subjects, but these are mixed together. Readers tend to follow authors rather than subjects. If you write on your blog on a particular subject that you do not normally discuss, then your regular readers might not be interested, and readers who are interested may not find it. In the blogosphere, you follow authors rather than subjects.

What would be really useful would be a search engine that indexes large numbers of blogs, and indexes posts in those blogs individually. If you are interested in a particular subject, the engine lists all recent individual blog posts that are connected with that subject. Some google like factor ranks the posts in order of how many other people have accessed them / how often they are linked to / how often the blog that contains them has been linked to, etc. Once you have this, you would have a true successor to Usenet, only easier to use and less geeky.

Also on that Guardian article, I thorougly endorse the recommendation that people read Clay Shirky , one of the stars of the old Feed . And it seems someone has given Jim McClellan an Advance Reading Not For Sale copy of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition . Lucky bastard.

In most countries in which the GSM cellphone standard dominates, the sending of messages using the Short Message Service (SMS) is extremely popular. These allow short text messages of up to 250 characters or so to be sent from one cellphone to another. Mobile phone companies these days get something over 10% of their revenues from SMS messaging.

This revenue is close to free for the mobile carriers. Associated costs are close to zero. To carry an SMS message, they need to provide a maximum of about 2000 bits of network capacity. To carry a voice call, they need to provide around 15000 bits of network capacity per second . On my mobile phone, I am charged 10 pence to send an SMS message, and I am charged 5 pence per minute for a voice call. That is, I am being charged around 5 pence for 1000 bits of data for SMS, compared to around 0.005 pence per 1000 bits of data for voice. That is, the carriers are somehow able to get away with charging 1000 times as much for SMS. Even better, unlike for voice, where you are having a real time conversation, the transmission of SMS messages does not have to be instantaneous. If the network is busy, then the phone simply waits for a lag in network activity before sending the message. If the phone is in a network blackspot when the message is sent, then the phone simply waits until it is back in a coverage area before the message is sent. Therefore, while phone companies are constantly upgrading their networks to deal with greater demands on their capacity and blackspots in the network for voice, such upgrades are never needed due to increased demand for SMS services. Therefore, money spent on SMS is entirely profit.

The demand for SMS took mobile carriers entirely by surprise. The feature was built into the GSM phone standard from day one, but there was little expectation that many people would use such a limited service. The use of SMS only really took off when large numbers of teenagers got their hands on mobile phones. These are people who are price conscious. Although one SMS message is being charged at a much higher rate per bit than is a voice call, the cost of a message is still usually less than the cost of a voice call. More importantly, these are people who are willing to play with their phones and start using features other than the most obvious. This did not happen until mobile penetration reached around the 50% mark in individual countries. Once it did, and once the phone companies discovered there was money in SMS, then they improved the service. At that point, we got SMS interoperability between mobile networks, both in the same and different countries, information services giving you sports scores by SMS, and the market really took off. The thing worth noting is that network effects are dramatic when mobile mobile penetration rates are high. When penetration rates go from 50% to 70%, SMS message numbers may go up tenfold. Also, at that point, SMS usage escapes the teenage ghetto, as teenagers start sending and receiving messages from adults. Then adults start using them themselves. (I regularly send and receive messages from my 63 year old mother in Australia). Most recently, we have started seeing all sorts of hybrid uses for SMS messaging. The business model behind this is the equivalent of 900 numbers in telephone service: the receiving party and the telephone company split the revenue from the call. With 900 numbers, the caller is charged a premium for the call, but with SMS messages this is hardly necessary, as the margins on SMS messages are utterly enormous anyway. (However, the phone companies have created premium charge numbers for SMS regardless.

This type of arrangement has become particularly popular with the media, especially television companies. SMS messaging is an ideal way to add some interactivity to television programming, allowing viewers to enter competitions and the like. With reality television and talent shows having become a big deal lately, this provides an easy way for viewers to vote for the winners. Of course, television contests involving viewers phoning in have a very long history, but the advantages of doing it with SMS messaging are twofold. Firstly, your mobile phone is akin to a remote control. Most of us carry them with us most of the time, and we therefore don't have to get up from the television and make a phone call. Secondly, television stations do not need to maintain huge banks of operators to answer phone calls, as a computer can accept and process the messages very easily. (Plus, as an added bonus, networks are unlikely to be overloaded by SMS messages, however large their number).

All this was completely unexpected, and it just evolved out of a not very sophisticated technology being there, being useful, and being fairly ubiquitous. Which is why I am actually not all that convinced by this article by Brendan Koener in Slate, arguing that Americans are somehow different, and that American teens will not use data services on their mobile phones (including SMS) for what are essentially cultural reasons. My personal belief is that Americans will be sending SMS messages in surprisingly large numbers within a couple of years: yes, they have been slower in take up of SMS than have Europeans and Asians, but the reasons for this are largely technical. Penetration rates for mobile phones in America are lower than in most other developed countries. I blame this on one factor: Americans pay for incoming calls. This has hindered take up rates of phones in general, and has reduced the amount of time Americans leave their phones switched on. This has also led to the unfortunate idea that mobile phones are things you have "for emergencies", rather than constant everyday use. Secondly, Americans have been much slower switching from analogue to digital phones than Europeans and Asians, and therefore many fewer phones have been SMS capable. When they have switched to digital, Americans have used three different technical standards (D-AMPS/IS-136, CDMA/IS-95 and GSM). While all these standards support SMS, the differences between them have hindered full SMS interoperability between networks. All these factors have meant that the effective penetration of SMS capable cellphones in the US is much less than in Europe. Remember, SMS messaging did not really get going in Europe until penetration rates got over 50%.

Let us look at Koerner's arguments in detail. Firstly, internet access is cheap in the US, and teenagers often have their own computers and their own flat rate internet access in their homes. This is not true in many other countries. My response to this is that this varies widely from country to country, which is good, because you can then attempt to correlate these things If you do, there does not seem to much of a correlation between internet use (and/or the presence of flate rate internet plans) and SMS use elsewhere. My native land of Australia is culturally very similar to the US, flat rate internet access is standard and cheap, teenagers are pampered with their own computers and the like almost as badly as are teenagers in the US, and SMS usage in Australia is enormous. Britain is not as culturally American as Australia is, but it is more so than anywhere else in Europe, and flat rate internet access is once again cheap and very widely used. SMS usage here is enormous too. What Britain has is very high mobile phone penetration. (It may well be that the high take up of a more complicated technology like i-mode in Japan is related to high priced internet access otherwise, but I doubt it for SMS). In both Australian and Britain, teenagers use things like instant messaging all the time when they are at home. I see no evidence whatsoever that this makes them less likely to use SMS services on their phone when they are not at home. (People that age like to communicate with one another a lot).

And I am really not convinced that American parents are any more or less likely to blanch at their children's mobile phone bills than are European parents. European parents spend money on other things for their children too, and are less rich.

American analysts basically think that SMS messaging will not take off there because they see it as a feeble, unsophisticated little techology and think they can see better alternatives. The fact is, though, so did Europeans before it took off. And it took off anyway. To take off properly, the technology requires high digital mobile phone penetration and interoperability between networks. That's all. Its failure in the US until now can be blamed on the lack of these factors. These factors are now in place in the US too, and I expect a major increase (in the order of 300% or more) in the number of SMS messages sent in the US this year.