The Barcelona Gherkin

Barcelona is a remarkable city. Like many European cities, it has an old gothic centre, and this is quite nice. However, unlike most European cities, the gothic centre of Barcelona is not the architectural highlight of the city. This is because around a century ago the great architect Antonio Gaudi designed some of the most extraordinay buildings you will see anywhere. His buildings look like they are grown rather than built, and they give the city extraordinary character.





The most extraordinary Gaudi building though is the church of the Sagria Familia, which is still incomplete today, although construction continues. (Some people believe that it should have been left incomplete rather than have lesser architects finish Gaudi's work. I disagree with this. I think that most of the great churches and cathedrals of the world were built over prolongued periods of time and using multiple architects, and regardless of the greatness of the person who initially designed this one, there is no reason why it should be different. In any event, the building is like no other church that has ever been built anywhere.



Hmm. I am not sure that my attempt to juxtapose the Sagria Familia and the Finding Nemo poster was entirely successful, but you get the point.



On the other hand, this photo I am proud of, but it is perhaps less good at simply showing the building.

In any event, Barcelona has until recently had major highrise other than the Sagria Familia, which has dominated the skyline. Barcelona is on a coastal plain, and behind and around the plain is a range of what you would either descibe as large hills or small mountains. Gaudi's famous Parc Guell (which I will discuss in another post) is on the side of one of these mountains, and the view of the city from the highest point of Parc Guell is quite spectacular. Of course, it has traditionally included a great view of the Sagria Familiar. Look at it now, though, and you see something else. That's right. It's a gherkin.



This is worth investigating. I want to see it from close up. It is not actually in the centre of town, but in a place called approximately "Place of the Glories of the Catalans", which is a real dump but is at least having some regeneration. (There is a new shopping mall next door). I walk in the approximate direction. There it is



It's an under construction gherkin, with just the frame of the top section, and a strange mottled look lower down. Let's get closer.



Why the mottled look? The dark bits will presumably be windows, but why the odd L like shapes. It almost looks like somebody has been playing Tetris on the side of the building.





Quite an interesting building. Of course, the trouble is that we do not know what the building will actually look like when complete. I suspect a layer of glass will cover the whole thing, and the mottled Tetris look will go away. The building isn't quite as curvy as the London gherkin, which is I think a better building. And this is Barcelona, city of great architectural treasures. I think putting something else to accompany Gaudi in the skyline is good, but I don't think this is quite comparable in terms of overall quality. The Sagria Familia is a work of genius. This isn't. But I still rather like it.

Of course, we live in an age where it would be possible to cover the side of the building with LEDs, get somebody to set up a PC to control them, and we would essentially have a giant screen covering the side of the gherkin. Then in an ideal world we could perhaps patch this into a wireless network, so that passing geeks could genuinely play Tetris on the side of the building from their laptops. That would be really cool, and we live in an age when it wouldn't be technically very hard to implement. I am not expecting to see it happen though. At least not in Barcelona. Although somebody will no doubt try it in Japan some time soon. Or Moscow would be even better.

Reassurance

I was in a tapas bar having some dinner on Tuesday evening, and I noticed that there were some Spanish and maybe Catalan language newspapers available for patrons to read. One of them had this headline.



I will take that as at least partial confirmation that my idea that Spain is sucking in lots of Latin American people as a way of helping its demographic problem is true.

Redirection

I have some statistics on the winning streaks of the Australian one day cricket team against various opponents over at ubersportingpundit.

A first, I suppose

One of the technological stories lurking in the background is that LED lighting is going to become much more common soon. LEDs now can come in any colour, and they are potentially more efficient and give off much less heat than conventional incandescent light bulbs. (As to how they will compare with fluorescents, well we shall wait and see).

So here it is: a fully LED lit apartment. We may all go there one day. For now, I am slightly worried about the purple (although I am sure they would call it "violet").

Update: I don't know why they went with all the purple, actually, given that it is not especially difficult to get white light from LEDs these days. (That said, LED white looks a little strange to people used to fluorescent or incandescent white, because the mix of colours going into the light is a little different).

The story behind this is that until the early 1990s, it was essentially impossible to make an LED that could generate blue light. LEDs up to then were mostly made from Gallium Arsenide, but there are phsical limits as to just how short the band gap and hence the wavelegth of the light can be made using this material. What this means is that using Gallium Arsenide you can make infra-red, red, orange, yellow and green LEDs, but not blue ones. If you are going to produce white light, you need blue. In the early 1990s an engineer name Shuji Nakamura, from a company called Nichia Chemical based on the Japanese island of Shikoku, figured out how to produce blue, violet and ulta-violet LEDs made from Gallium Nitride. This meant that LEDs can be made any visible colour and also can be made to produce white light, either by using red, green and blue LEDs together, or by using a phosphor coating around a blue LED to reduce the energy (and hence change the colour) of some of the light, which will then mix with the blue to form white. (Blue has higher energy than either red or green, so it is possible to make red or green from blue by taking some of the energy out, essentially. It is not possible to turn red or green into blue by putting more energy in, however).

LEDs have a number of potential advantages: they are light, tough, and potentially more efficient than conventional lights (although we are not quite there yet). However, making LEDs was (and is) still quite expensive compared to making incandescent or fluorescent lights (and there are one or two other issues that I won't go into right now) which is why LEDs haven't completely taken over the lighting business just yet. However, they have found their way into certain niche markets such as traffic lights, and lights used on bicycles and for other outdoor sports. Most people believe they will take out a lot of the rest of the market before too long though.

(Another niche application is giant scoreboards in sporting arenas and other large outdoor screens. You may have noticed that the quality of such screens improved dramatically in about 1995. This was because of the invention of the blue LED. Prior to that such big screens had to be made of a large number of small cathode ray tubes, and the pictures were often fuzzy. After the invention of the blue LED, a combination of red green and blue LEDs could be used to make the pixels, and these big screens suddenly produced much sharper and brighter pictures).

Another place to look for LEDs like this is in pixelated displays giving departure times in railway stations and bus shelters and the like. Older such displays will always be yellow or red. Newer ones may also contain blue or even white. Huge numbers of red and orange displays is one of the things you remember about travelling on trains in Japan, as they took to these displays in a big way early. (That said, even newer ones are often still red or orange. Force of habit, I guess. That and the fact that red and orange LEDs are still cheaper and more efficient).

Back in London

My plane was late. Easyjet said that they had had an equipment problem with another aircraft, and that they had therefore doubled up two flights. Instead of having separate flights from London to Toulouse and Barcelona, they used the one plane to make a circular London Toulouse Barcelona London trip. What this meant was that I didn't get off the plane and through customs and immigration until about 1am. Fortunately I was flying into Gatwick, which is on the main southern rail line out of London and trains run late, so there was no difficulty getting home. I just got home late: at about 2am. (A real problem with Stansted airport is that the last train runs at midnight). Anyway, the air ticket didn't cost much, so I won't complain the way the Yobbo is about Qantas.

Foodie Observations

Excellent gherkin, by the way. Photos tomorrow.

There are quite a few Basque restaurants in Barcelona. This is not terribly surprising, as Basque food is pretty widely acknowledged to be the best in Spain. Such reastaurants here pretty much invariably have nice decor and are rather upmarket, suggesting that there is a certain trendiness to it. In the actual Basque country, one can have the same food in a restaurant with less nice decor for half the money.

On the other hand, there may always have been a substantial number of Basque restaurants in Barcelona, but I simply did now know what Basque food looked like last time I was here. Travel does indeed broaden the mind.

This looks like it will be my last Spanish blog posting. I'll be back in London (late) this evening. I have had four days of lovely weather in one of my very favourite cities. Barcelona is truly a gorgeous place. I now have to get my act together very fast, either by taking the job on offer and returning to Australia, or by finding some work in London very fast. Anyway, see you tomorrow.

Developments

Ten years ago, I found that English was not especially widely spoken in Barcelona (or Madrid, either). I guess that was a legacy of fascism more than anything else. Spain didn't join modern Europe until 35 years after everyone else. (And I felt that in Barcelona everybody was too busy being bilingual in a Spanish/Catalan sense to be concerned about English). It was really noticeable that if you went over the border into France then you could get by in English with much less difficulty.

But this has changed. Most young people here now seem to speak English reasonably well and there doesn't seem a big difference from France in this regard. (Spain seems a more fast moving, happening country in most respects though). I guess ten years of being a major destination and of being perceived as a really hip and interesting place will do that for you. And of course there is the general globalisation that has gone on in that time. And just the fact that the Spanish economy has gone gung-ho forwards, and the Catalan economy probably even more so than that of Spain in general.

Anyway, enough blogging. There is a gherkin in the skyline I want to investigate.

Kudos

This blog has been nominated for "Best Overseas Australian Blog" in the Australian blog awards. If you feel like going and voting for me, please do. If you don't, well I'm just happy to be here. (Ubersportingpundit has also been nominated for "Best South Australian blog". It's a shame there isn't a "special subject blog" category or similar that that one can't be nominated for. After all, contributors to the blog are in South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales and the United Kingdom, so the regional classification perhaps doesn't say much).

A slightly different world

Another interesting thing about being in Spain is that you are in a different world culturally and linguistically. And it is quite a big one. Walking down a street full of shops selling expensive women's clothes, one finds the same convention as anywhere else of shops giving the names of the cities where they have outlets in the shop windows. You know, "Paris London New York Tokyo Los Angeles". That kind of thing. However, in quite a few shops here the places are different. It is "Miami Puerto Rico Argentina Paraguay Barcelona", and that kind of thing. (Note: I will come back and add a photo to this post in a couple of days). The Spanish speaking world is quite big, and it does show. If I could read the newspapers and understand what was on television it would no doubt be bigger. Just as globalisation has brought the English speaking peoples closer together, it is and must be doing to same thing to the Spanish speaking world. Another issue that must come out of this is that Spain has a way of avoiding the fearsome demographic crisis that faces much of southern Europe, which is to open up immigration for Latin Americans. There are no doubt lots of Peruvians, Argentines and Paraguayans who want to come here. It's an awfully nice place, and it's these days very rich and successful. One theory of current world development is that "lifestyle cities", where the weather is nice, there is ocean nearby, and the partying is good, are the sorts of cities that attract young, well educated "knowledge workers". Well, Barcelona is gorgeous from that point of view. Even though it is not nominally Spanish speaking, it must be a huge magnet for people from throughout the Spanish speaking world. I don't know how the Catalan speakers feel about this.

And the other thing about it is that it is interesting to see how parts of the US fit into this. Britons, Australians, and Americans are terrible at speaking foreign languages on the whole. It is entirely normal for people from these three countries to go around the world, only speaking English, and getting by. But when you are in Spain, at least some of the Americans separate from the others. For the ability to speak Spanish is these days not uncommon amongst Americans - particularly younger Americans. Miami is on the list above, after all.

Update: Here is the picture. We have a reflection of the street scene rather than the goods in the shop, and "Barcelona" at the very bottom of the list is cut off, but you get the general idea.

Wireless is fun

I just applied for a job in London while sitting on a park bench in Barcelona. Cool!

Update: Of course, I also just blogged from a park bench in Barcelona. Sad!

Further update: None of my the people I normally do instant messaging chatting with are online. It would have been cool to do some of that from a park bench in Barcelona.

Even further update: It would also have been cool to post a photo of the park bench in Barcelona from which I am blogging but (sadly) I forgot to bring a USB cable with me to Barcelona. What I need is a wireless camera.

Yet further update: Blogging from a park bench in daylight is actually harder, and the ambient light level is fairly high, making my LCD screen a little hard to see. My digital camera has the same problem. However, it has a conventional viewfinder as well as the LCD screen, so one point for good design there. There would be no trouble in the grey of London, however. Mainly though, bring on Organic Electroluminescence.

Bad habits

I tend to let myself get even scruffier than usual when I travel. I tend not to shave, and my clothes get crumples, and similar. Perhaps, if I am going to continue to try and chat up American girls in cafes, this would help.

Today's American girls were from New York and Texas. One of them was in Europe playing the part of Maria in a touring American production of West Side Story. The chat was pleasant, although as regular readers of this blog know, the nicest American girls come from Ohio.

Post modern faux pas of the day

I got a little MP3 player as a "free gift" when I got my Dell laptop before Christmas. I am finding I use it a lot. I program myself a playlist, and I then listen to music as I walk down the street. Programming a playlist for your life is something like I expect it is to put together a soundtrack to a movie, only harder, although the consequences are less pad if you get it wrong. There is nothing terribly unusual about this activity at this point. If you look at people carefull, you will see lots of them with earphones coming out of their clothes. (In Guell Park today I saw a young couple lying down in the sun, with each using one of the two earpieces coming out of an MP3 player. How cute, but it probably doesn't work well with those early stereo recordings where they put the singing on one channel and the music on the other. Also, I see a market opportunity for MP3 players with multiple earphone jacks. But I digress).

A consequence of this (and also of hands free earpiece based mobile phone setups) is that it is far less unusually to see people talking out loud when there is nobody there, and being in apparent worlds of their own when walking down the street. For those of us capable of being in apparent worlds of our own, already, this is a fine thing. We are now closer to the core of global culture than we once were. But, as other people are finding, we are not as much in a world of our own as we may appear. We can come back to the world when it is necessary. Turning the music off as need be is something we get very used to doing.

Except when we don't. One should try to avoid doing what I did in Parc Guell this morning. I was wandering around and I had the MP3 player on, and I thought it would be nice to get a photograph of me in front of one of the more interesting sculptures. So I asked a man to take a photo for me. Now, when I ask people things like this, it normally happens in places where I do not speak the language and I have to get by through gestures and the like. So I did this, it worked fine, and we were making progress at getting photos taken. However, after a couple of minutes I realised that the man was talking to me, and that I had left my music on and so could not hear him. (I had not conciously been aware that I had left the music on, even though I could still hear it. My mind had just not realised there was a need to turn it off and so had not). When I turned it off I realised he was speaking to me in English. However, because I had not expected him to speak English, my mind had not thought to turn the music off as it now automatically does in cases where I expect a reply. I was of course embarrassed by this and I apologised, although he did not seem to mind. But walking off I thought it was curious. The mind plays strange tricks, sometimes.

Redirection

I have a tactical analysis of Australia's win over India in the first match of the VB series cricket over at ubersportingpundit.

Homage to Catalonia, or something

I am not an impulse shopper at all, but I have a slight problem with discount airline websites, and I find that if I can buy a return ticket to Barcelona for 25 quid, I have a slightly nasty tendency to buy one. And a month ago that precise thing happened. As a consequence, I am now in Barcelona. I have spent the last week wondering if I was well enough to go, and indeed that if I should simply not go in order to catch up on all the other things I should have got done but haven't due to being sick, but I managed to persuade myself that I could in fact bring my laptop to Barcelona, find a WiFi hotspot, and get some of that work done along with getting a change of scenery. With my ultracheap style of travel, being here does not actually cost much more than staying in London, but we will see if that actually happens.

The good thing, though, is that the sky and Mediterranean are both blue, the sun is shining, the temperature is about 20 degrees Celcius, and Barcelona remains one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. The flu is just about gone, and the much nicer weather here will at least help on that front. My one previous visit to this city was in 1993, and this city feels the same, although there are a couple more lines on the underground map. And my dark little secret (that I have even occasionally lied about) is that I somehow managed to come to Barcelona in 1993 without visiting Park Guel, although I did see a great deal of other notable bits of Gaudi work. Sometimes this happens. You visit a city, and you manage to overlook one of the key attractions through absent mindedness as much as anything. This is about to be rectified, anyway.

Unpleasantness

Big blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is either in Provincetown Massachusetts or (more likely) in Washington, reports that he has the flu, and that he feels wretched. In fact, he says the following.

Man, this is brutal. I can't remember a worse bout. Now I know what everyone was going on about earlier this winter. I had one of those day-nights when you don't seem to be sleeping but you also don't seem to be awake. In bed, I get drenched every two hours. Out of bed, I get the chills. Thanks for your many emails. Is this a new genre: flu-blogging?

I can only agree. I have also still got the flu to some extent, and I am feeling slightly less than wretched, but I was wretched as recently as yesterday. Worse, I have had it for something like three weeks, and I simply had not been able to shake it. (The various bodily abuses we subject ourselves to over the Christmas / New Year period probably haven't helped. I should have gone off the booze for the whole time, but I didn't really want to. This had horrible consequences on New Year's Day in particular. But like him, I have to agree that this is just about the nastiest bout I have ever had in my life. And half of the people who I know in London seem to have it too. (This is a big factor behind the negligible posting on Transport Blog, and the low posting on Samizdata). I don't know if it is actually the influenza virus that I have had, but I suspect the answer is yes. If so, it is those bloody Southern China / Hong Kong chickens and pigs again, of course. These viruses cross the world and cross the Atlantic incredibly quickly these days.

Of course, a really nasty influenza virus actually kills lots of people, so we should be grateful. We got a little bit of a demonstation of this last year, although SARS was really just a a hyper-powered version of the common cold. An airborne hyper-powered version of influenza is far nastier, and we are not prepared for it.

But, for about the first time in three weeks I feel sort of okay rather than disgusting. May this last.

A little movie blogging

Yesterday, I read the review of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (which opened today in the UK) in the Evening Standard. It was a good review, but it said that the film was shot on digital video, which I had not heard before, and which struck me as surprising given Sofia Coppola's pedigree (although perhaps not surprising given the film's budget of only $4m).

However, seeing the film this afternoon I do see what the reviewer meant. The film takes Tokyo, one of the most cinematic cities on earth, and makes it dark and muddy looking, just like stuff shot on DV often does look dark and muddy looking. (At times the cinematic qualities of Tokyo shine through anyway, but it could have been visually so much nicer). I checked the credits at the end and found a credit given to the company that produced the dailies so no, it was not shot in a digital format. (When shooting on film, it is necessary to have the film processed and prints that can be watched immediately made every day - the director then watches these "dailies" to see whether the shots turned out and reshoots are necessary. This is not necessary on digital, because you just look at the LCD screen on the back of the camera, or equivalent). The Internet Movie Database tells me that the format was 35mm (which I knew already, as the film didn't have the grainy look of 16mm - it was just dark). So perhaps we should just blame the cinematographer.

I enjoyed the film. I thought the two central performances were just great. I liked the music. Despite having commented in the past that people who have not visited Japan do not always get how incomprehensible and over the top it can be, I actually have to say that I agree that the Japanese characters were slightly more in the way of being caricatures than they needed to be. Yes, in Tokyo you do indeed find everything seen in the film, but it is not quite such a continuous full on experience as it was portrayed as being in the film. And for the purposes of the film it didn't need to be.

But, unless I got a bad print or an incompetent projectionist, my main criticism of the film is the photography. (Given that the critic whose review I read yesterday saw the same thing but interpreted it in a different way, it probably is neither of these things). I didn't think it was well done at all. Perhaps I will have to become a cinematographer myself, to ensure that someone photographs Tokyo properly.

Update: The Director of Photography was Lance Acord, who also shot both Being John Malkovich and Adaptation for (Sofia Coppola's husband) Spike Jonze, and also Buffalo 66 for Vincent Gallo amongst other things. I can't recall anything wrong with the way those films were shot, so I am a little puzzled by this. Edward Lachman, who shot The Virgin Suicides, is someone who has a lot of experience and often shoots much bigger budget films, and that film featured much nicer photography than this one. But given that I am puzzled, perhaps it was a technical issue with my viewing of the film. Perhaps I should go and see a different print shown in a different cinema.

Further update: Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze are apparently getting divorced. This suggests that the allegedly autobiographical aspects of the film are more than alleged. If you have seen the film you will know what I mean. (It's worth remembering that as well as an actor and director of motion pictures, Spike Jonze is a very famous director of music vidoes and occasionally commercials).

I probably shouldn't go here

Time Blair skewers the late Princess of Wales' paranoia appropriately.

Do you believe that Prince Charles was plotting, in the manner of a 1930s Hollywood villain, to slash Diana's brake lines and send her to her death? Given the usual traffic conditions in London, where most of her driving was done, the old brake trick would probably only have sent the Princess into the rear of a minicab at 10km/h. Foiled again, evil Prince Charles!

It is an unbelievable story, so much so that Diana evidently did not believe it herself. If she did, she might have considered it prudent to take certain basic precautions . . . like wearing a seatbelt.

(Go read the whole thing. It's good).

It is now also being reported that Diana believed that the Saudi royal family was plotting to have her killed. Now that is paranoid.

As far as I can tell, the Saudi royal family wants to kill a lot of people. What made Diana think she was so special to have a specific plot against her? Talk about delusians of self-importance.

Virginia Postrel, and bridges

I have just about finished Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style which for some reason it took me a while to get into. The book actually is at its best at the end, when it discusses the economics of choice, I suppose you would call it. Better aesthetics means better products that people like more, but this is almost entirely not captured in economic statistics. I think this is one case of a more general thing, which is that modern economic growth is about increasing choices, increasing subtlety, and increasing variety and complexity rather than increasing production volume. This doesn't show up in the numbers, and this is how we show that the productivity paradox is not in fact real. I wrote about something very similar in this Samizdata piece about supermarkets.

However, the basic point of the book is essentially that people are more concerned with appearances and things that are aesthetically pleasing that was once the case. This is because aesthetics is something that people have always cared about, but that modern technology has made the marginal cost of making aesthetically pleasing choices relatively cheap. (In the days of mass production they were relatively expensive). Given this, people are being more concerned with aesthetic choices. This is good. This makes people' lives better. This is a good enough reason for being concerned with aesthetics as with any other economic activity, and we shouldn't belittle it or the skills of people that provide it. This is all a bottom up thing. Taste and fashion is not being imposed on us, but in fact it is a matter of choice. People's styles differ, and while we live in a society which cares about appearances more than was the case a couple of decades back, we none the less have much more choice with respect to appearances. It is an age of diversity and not conformity. Ultimately form and function are mixed together. Well designed products are easier to use and more pleasant to use than aesthetically less pleasing products. (That said, the book devotes a fair bit of time to discussing how people try to impose their own aesthetic choices on others, particularly in architecture and urban design, so this is a simplification, but I think the point still holds).

This is true, of course. I am much freer to dress like this and still be a fully functional (and indeed extremely economically productive) member of society than was the case a couple of decades ago. (This is the age of the geeks, after all).

Personally, though, I have a very mixed attitude to all this. I have long been someone who at least affected to despise fashion and to pay little attention to his own personal appearance, but I have been simultaneously fascinated by design for a long time. In fact I am almost obsessed by what things look and feel like. Industrial design is one of the most interesting subjects out there. There are historical reasons why I am like this, and I am most unlikely to change. It's a little self-contradictory - after all there is no real hard line between fashion and design anyway - but that's okay. I am allowed to be a little self-contradictory.

But as I was reading all this, one realisation came to me, and this is, I think, a reason why I love bridges so much. For some reason the construction of bridges builds a perfect, well, bridge, between form and function. Bridges are things that look beautiful if they are well designed in engineering terms. A structurally perfect bridge is gorgeous looking almost by definition. A more poorly designed bridge looks awkward. The beauty is in the engineering lines, somehow. Attempts to be ornate almost invariably do now work, and just make the bridge look awkward. Stronger materials do give bridge designers more flexibility than they once had (especially in terms of smaller bridges), but even so, they are always working within the engineering constraints. The structure is always paramount when you look at it. There is probably no other field in which form and function are so close to being the same thing.

Postrel actually mentions bridges once in the text. As a demonstration of how people's tastes can change over time, she quotes a critic in the 1930s commenting on the ugliness of the Golden Gate bridge, who decries how the great natural vista has been despoiled for all time. (I suspect actually that this was a minority view even in the 1930s). Like everybody else, though, I don't think that. The Golden Gate bridge is structurally beautiful, but I think the red colour is just a little over-ornate. I would like something that blends in with the greens and blues of the surrounding a little better. As far as large suspension bridges are concerned, I actually like the George Washington Bridge in New York better, and I may even agree with the caption on the photo that I just linked to that it is the most beautiful bridge in the world. (The view of New York I saw from it when walking across it at two in the morning in 2000 was one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen in my life, but it has of course now been spoiled for all time). When it was built, it was the longest span in the world, and was nearly twice as long as the second longest. And an interesting thing about this bridge is that the design originally called for more ornate towers, but the raw materials were left showing due to a budget crisis in the Great Depression. A few years later the plans to finish it to the original design were revived, but popular opinion was strongly against this and the bridge was left as it was. People thought it was just beautiful in its natural state. As do I.

Will we have these in the future?

Where can I get an all in one provigil/sudafed/aspirin/caffeine pill? That would be useful.

My questions have been ripped off

Cool. I think that the questions might be slightly too bridge fixated for the list to be too widely distributed. And my opinion as to what is a "great bridge" is perhaps narrower than that of Ros. Might I also point out that if you count Wales and Scotland as separate countries, my "total countries visited" list goes out to 35, and I still win.

But that trip to Africa sounds like fun. I have been to Tanzania, but not to either Zanzibar or the Ngorongoro crater. I really need to go back, because these are two of those places that I think really must be visited.

Home theatre versus cinema

James Russell has some comments on the cinema versus home theatre experience, making the point that picture quality is much better in the cinema, and however convenient it is and how big your screen is, the home cinema experience does not match it. He gets a couple of things slightly wrong though, so I will elaborate a little here. (You may want to go and read James' post first).

Analogue PAL television is normally described as having 625 lines. However it takes time for the electron gun in a conventional television to move from the bottom of the screen to the top, so those lines which are being transmitted while the gun moves from the bottom to the top are not seen. The number of lines actually seen varies slightly depending on the TV, but as James says it is about 580. (The BBC invented a neat hack to transmit information in this hidden lines, which is how we got teletext). Digital television only transmits 576 lines, as this is enough to fill the screen, and with digital technology it is okay to not transmit quite in real time. (In fact it is required). High definition television uses either 720 or 1080 lines. (1150 was used for a couple of semi-experimental analogue HDTV formats, but is no more. The full resolutions for the two current formats are 1920x1080 and 1280x720). The digital movie cameras used for the best digital movies are produced by Sony, and use 1080 lines shot at 24 frames per second. (The 720 line HDTV mode also has 50fps and 60fps modes, and some people claim that these look better than 1080 lines at 24fps. However as film projectors normally use 24fps, this won't help if you are transferring to film and projecting in a cinema).

However, there have been a number of films that have been shot on digital equipment and blown up to film and then projected in cinemas that have used varients of the DV semi-professional format. (For instance "The Anniversary Party"). These have usually been shot in 576 lines and then blown up to film, and they look pretty muddy when projected. Films such as Russian Ark, which have actually been shot in 1080 line HD, look much better, although in my mind still not as good as film.

One final proviso is that one reason you have all that resolution for films is that you want it to look good from anywhere in the cinema, including right up the front. Most of these formats are fine down the back, but up front you can see the lines. In your living room, you are close to the screen, but the screen is much smaller and the lines are much thinner, so in terms of the arc width of each pixel, the situation is akin to sitting in the middle or back of a cinema. What that means is that although there are fewer lines on the screen, in practice a 1080 line plasma screen showing HDTV is in most instances going to look as good or nearly as good as watching a film in a cinema. (However, HDTV shown in a cinema is not going to look nearly as good as film in a cinema). In short, I disagree that cinema is always going to win out, but I agree that it wins out for now although in the best possible case only by a little.

The trouble is that at the moment we have few opportunities to actually watch movies in that best possible case at home. Plasma screens with 1080 (actually more commonly 1024) lines do exist, and formats for storing high definition movies on optical discs do exist, but not as consumer products yet. It is not generally possible to buy recorded movies in HDTV format (although there are one or two high definition movie channels on American satellite television). For now, even if we have high definition screens we are normally restricted to watching DVD format movies, and these have resolutions of either 720x576 (The PAL/SECAM world) or 720x480 (The NTSC/PAL-M world). So for now, home viewing is not as good as cinema viewing. But home viewing that is as good as cinema viewing is not far off.

And it is worth considering just how far things have improved. A decade ago we were watching pan and scanned VHS video tapes on 20 inch televisions and listening to mono sound on one tinny speaker on the front of the television. In my opinion, the distance to genuine cinema quality from where we are now is rather less than the journey since those days.

Resolve

My good friend David Carr points to some of the wonderful photos coming back from the NASA Spirit rover on Mars, and expresses the sentiment that "That is the vista that will greet the first humans to set foot on that planet. I do not expect to be around to share in that experience but I still tingle with excitement at the prospect". I don't share his pessimism on this. I don't think that sending humans to Mars with our present level of technology is all that hard - it is certainly much easier than it was to send people to the moon with the level of technology we had in the 1960s. The trouble is that the resolve is not there, and the nationalised American space program has been sent off on useless projects with principal aims of political pork-barelling such as the space shuttle and (even worse) the International Space Station. If the amount of money spent on these two items had been spent sensibly on manned Mars missions, we would be there by now. The trouble is that NASA (particularly the parts that deal with manned space travel) is a bureaucratic monstrosity that is not capable of spending money sensibly on anything, and the political resolve is simply not there.

This is a different thing from saying that public desire and public interest is not there. The main Nasa website aplogises that some of the images are low resolution because "By early Tuesday, visitors downloaded nearly 15 terabytes of information from NASA/Mars Websites" and they are suffering bandwidth issues due to all the high resolution images. There is an awful lot of public interest in this.

This is good

Readership of this blog appears to be quite significantly up. I didn't have the expected drop over Christmas, and then in January I did have the expected after Christmas rise. We will see if this lasts.

Thwarting the MPAA

Okay, my DVD-ROM drive is now region free. That was easy. (How easy it is depends on the make of the DVD-ROM drive, however). Given that one of the main functions of DVD-ROM drives on laptops is to allow internationally minded people to watch movies while they fly from one continent to another, the whole idea of region locking does seem particularly ridiculous in this case. (I have a DVD collection which is a mixture of regions 1, 2, and 4, so doing this was particularly important for me).

Oh No

I allowed myself to be photographed wearing a suit. I am so embarrassed.

Redirection

I have a wrap up of the Australia v India test series over at ubersportingpundit.

Ruminations

I have a terrible head cold. (I think it may actually be flu, actually). This is getting me down, and is somewhat restricting my ability to do stuff. A follow up piece giving more detail on this and I think answering many of the questions I would be asked in an interview, has been delayed a little due to a combination of my illness and the fact that MS Outlook Express crashed when I had been writing something for two hours in it without saving.

Trends in computer brands

I am sitting at a cafe in the food court at Victoria station, typing away on my laptop. Someone just interrupted me and asked me if I was happy with Dell. He said that his present machine was an Apple, but that he was planning in switching to a different brand for a new machine. I answered that yes, I was happy with the Dell. (I didn't tell him that the machine was only a month old, but that probably didn't matter). I could have qualified it with "but it needs more USB ports", but I didn't. Despite that small issue, I continue to think that my laptop is a lovely piece of equipment. It is big for a laptop, but that is just because I wanted a desktop spec machine in a laptop case, and I wanted a really big screen. And let's face it, a laptop with an "on steroids" look is very me.

Of course, I have one slightly annoying thing. My old laptop (an IBM Thinkpad) was smaller and lighter, and I generally carried it around in a backpack with other items. I tend to think that it got too much wear and tear that way, and that this is one reason why it eventually failed on me, and I have been thus carrying the new machine around in a dedicated laptop bag (which, ironically, I got when I bought the IBM). What is annoying is that this laptop bag came with a shoulder strap, and I cannot remember what I did with the shoulder strap, which I now need. Oh well.

A couple of thoughts on languages and accents.

When I was a child, my next door neighbour was an old, very self-reliant Scottish woman named Mrs Shepherd. (I still don't know what her first name was). Although she was invariably kind to me and to my brother and sister, she was very severe in a Scottish Presbyterian sort of way. And although she must have lived in Australia for something like 50 years, she also spoke with an incredibly strong Scottish accent. (I think she may have come from Inverness, but I am not sure). I remember her now and I think that she was more Scottish than anyone in Scotland could possibly be, but of course when I was seven I didn't think of it this way. These were not national characteristics. They were just the characteristics of Mrs Shepherd.

Which is why, when I was older and actually visited Scotland, I found the Scottish accent to be very familiar, but in some ways disconcerting. Regular people spoke with Scottish accents. Children spoke with Scottish accents. (That was the weird part, actually, when my mind assumed that Scottish accents were merely the accents of white haired 75 year old women). Beautiful young women spoke with Scottish accents. (That story is longer and sadder, and I am not going into it right now). The idea that the Scottish accent was an accent spoken by real people who went about their ordinary lives with it was something that deep down my mind took a little while to get used to.

Similarly, in 1992 I visisted France from the first time. In the same way, people in France actually went about their lives in French. They spoke to one another in French all the time, when they went to the supermarket, when they were complaining about poor postal service, and when they were insulting people. I was at least familiar with the sound of the French language, as my parents had taken me to see many French movies when I was a child and I continued to go to see them from time time time as an adult. (I am not especially fond of recent French cinema, however). When I went to France, my subconsciousness again had difficulty getting used to the idea that this was a real language used by everyone in France, and not just a language used for making pretentious movies.

Thirdly, in 1999 I went on a trip to the United States. I got on a flight from Chicago to New Orleans. When I got on the plane, I heard an accent that was extremely familiar to me, that I can only describe as the accent of blues singers. Of course, music from Louisiana is internationally famous (for the simple reason that it is often wonderful), and I had often heard people sing, and appear on TV chat shows the like in this accent. (I think that one reason I was familiar with the accent is both that it is a very distinctive accent and it is an intensely musical and charming accent to my ears, and a lot of people feel the same way. Of course, when I got on the plane I heard this accent coming from various directions around me. The stewardess was attempting to find a seat with an empty space next to it for an enormous black guy who looked like a blues singer (and probably was a blues singer) who spoke with the accent in question and was having a little difficulty fitting in one seat.

And what can I say. I went to New Orleans, met up with a friend, we went out to a club and listened to some live music, I drank some whiskey, and I generally had a marvellous time. The accent was part of the charm of the place, and it went with the music. Although I again found that an accent I had been familiar with in a small context was widely spoken, it somehow wasn't disconcerting this time. It was somehow comfortable. Perhaps it was that the "blues singer" accent is a minority accent even in New Orleans. Or perhaps it is that the accent is one associated with terrific music, and being in a place that the accents signalled was obviously the home of that music was a different experience to the other two. I'm not sure. It's emotional thing, and as Sherlock Holmes said, "all that is emotional is opposed to that cold reason that I hold above all things". Well, not exactly. It just felt like a good quote somehow.

And I am rambling.

Success at last

Nasa/JPL's lander Spirit has successfully landed on Mars, and has started transmitting pictures. Yay. Meanwhile, the British team are still saying that they are looking for Beagle 2, but nobody thinks that there is much hope. Various explanations have been made as to what might have happened to it, but the central message has not been emphasised by the media. This is that landing on Mars (particularly using the air bag bouncing landing method that was used) is difficult, that the tiniest of errors was likely to lead to Beagle suffering much greater stresses than intended and smashed to pieces, and that by far the most likely explanation for Beagle's non-transmission of signals is that Beagle was smashed to pieces on landing.

It has been interesting being in Britain during the Beagle mission, however. It was striking just how much national pride there was that Britain was attempting something like this. There was lots of media coverage and the overwhelming feeling was that this was a fine thing to be doing. Even after the mission apparently failed, the national pride didn't go away. It was still a general feeling of "Isn't it great that we tried. Bring on Beagle 3". This was actually a nice attitude.

Redirection

I have a piece on why things would perhaps be better if McDonald's ran the post office over at Samizdata.

Shakespeare Adaptations

When you are making a movie, there is almost nothing as important as getting the music right. Because they are such a familiar medium, it is very easy to forget that we have to learn the grammar of movies before we can properly appreciate them. People who have never seen a movie before find watching a modern Hollywood production like watching an opera or a ballet for the first time for those who do not regularly watch opera and ballet. (This sensation is more common for opera and ballet, because relatively few people do watch them regularly). If you have never watched a movie before, you can be impressed by the artistry and the technique, but it doesn't necessarily work as a whole. (Also, watch Bollywood movies for instance. The grammar is different. It takes a few movies to get the hang of. Or at least the Bollywood conventions stand out for a few movies before you get the hang of them. (And that is an industry that looks at and copies Hollywood a lot. Coming to movies cold is much harder).

And, in movies, a lot of this grammar is in the soundtrack as well as the visuals. An enormous amount is told to the audience in terms of audio and musical cues. And in terms of getting the emotional message across, the music is the central issue, I think.

Which is why these comments by Tex on the 2000 modernised adaptation of Hamlet are interesting to me. (I have mentioned this film briefly in a different context before, and at more length in this Samizdata comment).

Basically, though, the film didn't really work for me. The obvious comparison is with Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, which for me did work. I think the criticisms of Romeo and Juliet are fair. The transposition to a modern setting is messy (although this is partly alleviated by the fact that the modern setting is a fantasy modern setting - it isn't a real place or time), and the acting is highly variable. (I think the acting is better in Hamlet although the interest is more in the supporting performances. In particular Bill Murray's Polonius is one of a series of excellent and really interesting performances in his recent career - Wes Anderson's Rushmore, which is incidentally far better than his subsequent The Royal Tenenbaums in terms of Murray's performance and the whole film - Hamlet and now Lost in Translation). However, Romeo and Juliet did work emotionally for me, and I think the chief reason for this is the music, which is in my mind one of the most brilliant popular music soundtracks I have ever heard. As far as the Almereyda Hamlet was concerned, the music was disjointed and uninteresting, and this is I think a huge reason why the film doesn't work nearly as well as the other.

As for Tex's comment that the modernised setting translates better for Hamlet than Romeo and Juliet, I agree to a degree. In fact, I agree until the fencing match at the end. This is in the play, and is untranslateable to a modern setting, so it is left as is in the film. So these modern corporate types agree to settle a corporate struggle through a fencing match with poisoned swords. It didn't work for me. Perhaps you could make a modernised Hamlet with a sporting setting. (Hamlet and Claudius fight for power in the international Olympic Committee. That's it). Or perhaps the fencing match would have worked with better music. I don't know, but I had a serious suspension of disbelief problem by the end of the movie. I never got this in Romeo and Juliet.

More on Tate

Brian Micklethwait has some follow up thoughts on Tate Modern. He reiterates an earlier point of his.

Thinking about it some more, I think what we may be witnessing here is the divergence along two separate paths of, on the one hand, "art" (i.e. paintings, sculptures, stupid objects), and on the other hand the process of attracting people to, and entertaining people in, what are still called "art" galleries.

This is a trend I thoroughly approve of, because on the whole I think that "art" these days is too big for its boots, and depends far more than it realises on the fact that people simply like going to art galleries, regardless of what's in them, simply because they are nice places where you can hear what any person you go with is saying and have a nice cup of coffee and a bun and buy an amusing biro. Discos without the bloody disco music, you might say, and with less disastrous drugs.

If this is so, then the Tate Gallery actually does this kind of thing better than most. Although I have reservations about the art, Tate Modern is tremendously successful as a place to go for a Sunday afternoon: quite entertaining temporary displays such as this "Weather Project", an interesting building, good cafes with nice views of London, and a shop selling books and CDs and stuff. But I don't think it is just Tate Modern, so much as the Tate Gallery in general. They are quite big on the idea of the "branch galleries", and as well as the two museums in London they have additional museums in Liverpool and in St Ives, Cornwall. As it happens, I have been to all four museums. In the cases of Liverpool and St Ives, I happened to be in those parts of the country for other reasons and I dropped into the museums because they were there, I suppose. The Liverpool one was pleasant enough and in a new waterfront development, but there was little art worth mentioning, at least not compared to what I can find in London. (When I went there was a special exhibition of "The Art of the Supermarket", which didn't look worth spending money on so I didn't go in). In the case of St Ives, I didn't even get to see the art, as the museum was closed for a "rehang" at the time. However, at the door I was told that the cafe and gift shop were open if I wanted to go in, so I went and had a latte and a piece of cake and sat and read a book for an hour or so and looked out the window at the view of the beach. Very pleasant. The building was nice. Somehow the art was largely irrelevant.

The Tate people also put out a magazine, which you can find for sale in bookshops and newsagents. This is the sort of thick paper, nicely printed glossy lifestyle magazine that looks nice on your coffee table. So they do the "galleries as entertainment and lifestyle" thing very well, even if they probably wouldn't put it that way if you asked them.

However, there is presently a "Turner and Venice" exhibition at Tate Britain which I should go to before it closes, and that one really is about the art. So it is possible to mix things. But this brings us back to British Art, which is where the Tate collection is strong. I am not as negative on Modern Art as Brian is. I just don't think there are any good collections of it in Britain, and relatively few in Europe. The best ones are in the US.

But the Tate Gallery is essentially a state owned institution, which makes it hard to expand outside the UK. The New York based Guggenheim has of course not been restricted in this way (although they have been happy to take public money too), and now has museums in New York, Las Vegas, Bilbao, Venice, and Berlin. I visited Bilbao last summer, and although I liked the building, I didn't have quite as fun an experience as I have done at Tate Modern or Tate St Ives. The reason for this is relatively simple. It wasn't the art. Like with the Tate, the best art is in the oldest museums and not the newer branch museums. The art wasn't great, but I expected this. (A nice young lady from Liverpool I was chatting with in the museum said that the one in Venice had the same problem. Like most nice young ladies, she had a boyfriend with her, sadly).

Like many galleries, this one includes a posh restaurant as well as a cafeteria. The posh restaurant had a lunchtime special of three courses and wine for about €13. As it would cost about €50 to eat there a la carte, I decided to go with this. The food was good and the decor nice, but I was rushed through it. I felt like I had about 20 minutes for my meal. Now, if I had paid more money I would not have been rushed, and similarly if I had gone to the self-service cafeteria I would not have been rushed. I do understand why they did this: in order to provide good value for money but also make a profit they had to serve lots of people. But somehow, it made the visit to the museum less fun. If they had charged €20 for the lunchtime special, I probably wouldn't have eaten there, but this would have actually been good as it would have meant that I would have likely eaten at the cafeteria where I would not have been rushed and this would have actually been more enjoyable. People who were willing to pay €20; would have had more time and would have got a better experience, so I think that in this case higher prices would have been better all round.

So, my gut feeling from this is still that the Tate people know what they are doing better than the Guggenheim people. And all of this has little to do with the art.

Happy New Year, Everybody

I am very deliberately going to answer the same questions I answered 12 months ago, even though some of them are perhaps not quite the same questions I would ask of myself twelve months later. If I think of any new questions, I will put them at the end. Looking back from January 1, I am struck by how much better were the parties I attended this year.

Countries I visited in 2003
United Kingdom, France (three times), Spain, Germany, Australia, Japan, Belgium.

Countries I visited in 2003 that I had not visited before
None, although I almost went to Denmark and Sweden

Greatest product I discovered while travelling to one of these countries
No such countries.

Greatest product I discovered in a country I had visited before
Authentic bouillabaisse in Marseilles

Total number of countries visisted in my life
33 (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, USA, Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Kenya, Tanzania, Portugal, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Japan, Ireland, Thailand, Nepal, Macau, Finland, Estonia, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Belgium, Turkey).

Number of these countries that no longer exist
3 (Czechoslovakia, Macau and Hong Kong, although you can argue both that Hong Kong and Macau are still countries or that they never were).

Best theatrical production I saw this year
I didn't see a single theatre production on stage this year. (Pathetic. Must do better).

Movies I most enjoyed in 2003
Spirited Away, The Return of the King, Matchstick Men. (It has been a truly awful year for movies).

Most over the top (and very Japanese) movie I saw this year
Spirited Away . (Not actually over the top, but Japanese at least. Must see more over the top Japanese movies in 2004).

Books that I most enjoyed reading in 2003
Engines of Creation by K Eric Drexler (which I should have read a decade ago), Beyond a Boundary by CLR James (ditto).

Musical acts that I would have liked to have seen, and that I could have seen in London in 2002 if I had bought tickets in time, but didn't
Saint Etienne.

Favourite television program of 2003
For the last time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Most stunning place I visited in 2003
The Basque coast between Bilbao and Donostia/San Sebastian, with Marseilles being a close second. (Tokyo is always stunning, too)

Place I visited where I felt most like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he spied the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other, wild with surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien
The observation deck around Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles, looking out over the Mediterranean.

Great bridges I walked over in 2003
The year wasn't actually a great one for me and bridges. The trip to Sweden and Denmark was intended as a principally bridge related trip, but it got called off at the last moment. I also had some thought of going to see the Akashi-Kaikyo bridge that connects Kobe to Shikoku, but I was unable to manage the stopover in Osaka that would have been necessary for this. I suppose that the Pont de Gard counts as a "great bridge", although it is actually an aqueduct. This is another of those "Must do better" situations. (I really need to see the Iron Bridge in Shropshire).

Great Bridges I travelled over in vehicles in 2003
Isambard Brunel's Saltash Bridge at Plymouth.

Great Bridges I saw, but did not travel over in 2003
None immediately come to mind.

Great tunnels I travelled through in 2003
The Channel Tunnel.
The Rotherhithe Tunnel.
(These were listed last year, but I did go through both of them again this year on multiple occasions. Possibly I need to go to Switzerland to do better in this category. If I had made the trip to Denmark, this would have give me something extra in this category, too).

Other places I visited in 2003 that are of interest to the hacker tourist
The Museum of Undersea Telegraphy in Porthcurno, Cornwall. I think the Pont de Gard probably qualifies here, too.

Places that are of interest to Jane Austen fans that I visited in 2003
I didn't really do any Jane Austeny things this year. (I still haven't managed to get to Lyme Regis where Louisa Musgrove fell over in Persuasion).

Most upsetting event of the year.
Terrorist attacks on both Turks and British in Istanbul.

Rawest emotional reaction of the year
My reaction to the anti-Bush demonstrations in London a month or two back.

Moments in 2003 that most reminded me how Australian I still am
Watching the World Cup cricket final in a crowd of Australians in a bar in Shepherd's Bush. Watching the World Cup rugby semi-final in a faux Irish pub full of Australians and New Zealanders in Shibuya, Tokyo. Being quite annoyed by the extent to which the Australian sportsmanship was disparaged by the English press during the rugby World Cup. Sitting in a bar in Belgium with a couple of random Sydneysiders and drinking beer for the evening.

Most time consuming but rewarding activity I took up in 2003.
Digital photography. (Not nearly as time consuming as blogging, which was the answer last year).

And, we have one new question.

Most surreal literary/travel experience in 2003.

Sitting in a cafe in Avignon in Provence, reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, a scece of which was set in the exact place I was sitting, but 125 years in the future.

May 2004 be as interesting.

Update

Most unexpected thing that happened to me in 2003

Becoming a world famous hobbit

What I learned yesterday, and this morning.

If it is December 31, and you are going to a new years party that evening, it is a bad idea to go to the pub to fill in some time earlier in the afternoon.

Part of my afternoon yesterday

In the comments of the previous post, Cecile Dubois was kind enough to ask me what I was doing to celebrate my birthday. As I answered there, the answer was basically that I met up with a friend and pottered around the South Bank of the Thames and then part of the City of London. My friend wanted to visit the Tate Modern art gallery, because she had heard that the present display in the turbine room was worth going to see.

Traditionally, the Tate Gallery has been the second art gallery you go to after the National Gallery. It's traditional specialties were both British art and modern art. In practice, modern art was not held in high regard in Britain for much of the last century, and although the Tate's collection of British art was (and is) marvellous, the modern art collection was at best patchy. However, it was decided a few years ago that London needed a big museum devoted to modern art, and with some lottery money the Tate got new premises on South Bank. The existing building at Millbank near Pimlico became Tate Britain, and the new museum became Tate Modern. (The Tate Museum has in recent years also been opening branches in other parts of the UK: one in Liverpool and one in St Ives in Cornwall). The really interesting thing about it was the building chosen for redevelopment was the Bankside Power Station - a disused (coal fired) power station on the South Bank of the Thames, just across the river from St Paul's Cathedral. This was and is a rather brutal structure, but it has the advantage for a modern art museum of being utterly enormous, although I can only find a tiny photo. (Photo © London Tourist Board).



It also has the advantage of being extremely central. The south bank of the Thames was once held in disrepute, so the power station was built just a few hundred yards from St Paul's Cathedral. To connect the two once the power station was converted into an art gallery, a footbridge was all that was needed. So they built one. (The footbridge has another story that I have written about before).



The front section of the building consists of half a dozen different levels filled with modern museum galleries, and the other associated things that go with them in a modern museum, including several restaurants, cafeterias, cafes and bars. If Brian Micklethwait is right that the major purpose of modern art museums is to provide places where middle class intellectually minded people people can look at a couple of paintings and sit down in a nice cafe and have a cup of coffee while they feel cultured, this museum functions very well. (In fact the locations of the relative facilities have been rearranged since it opened. I don't think this was admitted, but the take away cafeteria, which was initially placed on the top floor with the best view, was simply too popular. People would buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee and then sit at tables, on the floor, next to the window, or almost anywhere where they could watch one of the best views in London, and it was always extremely crowded. I think you now have to pay more money to eat with the best view).

But the back of the building is one enormous empty space, the turbine room. This must be the largest single room in any art gallery anywhere. In particular, the ceiling is vastly higher than it would be in any purpose built gallery. The main way of entering the gallery is through this room, and it can also be seen through glass windows from the back of each of the more conventional gallery levels.

However, the size of this room is good, because modern art can at times require large spaces, and there is a lot that can be done with them. When I visited the Bilbao Guggenheim earlier this year, the brochure they handed out that talked about the architecture mentioned this a lot. The Bilbao Guggenheim has one very big gallery on the ground floor that stretches under a nearby bridge and has a high section on the other side of the bridge, but nothing on the scale of the turbine room at Tate Modern.

The curators of the museum have changed the content of the turbine room a few times since the museum opened. Often these have been such things as giant spider like sculptures with ladders and observation decks that can be climbed. At the moment, however, the turbine room is devoted to something called "The Weather Project" by Olafur Eliasson. I will not bother with the discussion of its symbolic importance on the accompanying brochure, but essentially a large artificial sun has been installed on the wall. This has been done with a very monochromatic yellow light, so that everything in the room appears this one shade of yellow. The room is also partially filled with artificial fog, and the ceiling has been replaced with a giant mirror. There is a section at the far end from the entrance where people can sit on the floor and with the reflection on the ceiling it has the look of people sitting on a beach.

I am not sure what this symbolises, but it is certainly the sort of exhibition you walk into and say "cool". It probably doesn't require any more than five minutes of your time, but those five minutes are a pretty cool five minutes. It also demonstates the effect that weather and climate and light has on mood. You walk in from the grey English winter, and it is something different.


Make a point of looking at the reflections on the ceiling at the top of the photo.


So how old do you think I look?


It's interesting that different digital cameras behave quite differently in an optical sense in low light.

What I find interesting is that art light this is not possible without modern cheap technology. The fog machine, the large monochromatic light source, the very large mirror on the ceiling. Just a few years ago, these things were extremely expensive to create if they could be created at all. They are now cheap and easy, and the effects that can be achieved are quite spectacular. I am not sure whether it is art, however, or whether it would be better described as theatre - certainly effects departments in theatres do an awful lot of this kind of things these days too - or perhaps whether it simply belongs in the Science museum. Certainly when creating large artificial environments, these sorts of issues are considered in great detail by people who would not consider themselves artists. (Yes, Virginia Postrel has written about this kind of thing, too).

This is not the first time I have had this kind of feeling. When I visited the Saatchi Gallery with the same friend earlier this year, the best item in the whole museum consisted almost entirely of a tank of sump oil, and rather than being art in any meaningful sense it was more a demonstration of the very interesting reflective properties of high density liquids. The fact is that the surface of this oil scatters a negligible amount of light, the surface itself is not visible, it is close to impossible to realise that what you are seeing reflected in the oil is actually a reflection of the ceiling, because it does not look like a reflection. Again, it might better belong in the Science museum.

Or perhaps it is fine where it is. If a demonstration was ever needed that there is no hard line between art and science, I suppose this is it. The strongest argument for putting this Weather Project in Tate Modern is simply that they had a room big enough for it, although the obvious industrial qualities of the building help, too. If any of my readers are in London, I recommend going and having a look. (It is free). You can walk into Tate Modern, look at the turbine room for five minues, say "cool" and then head for the cafe. To be quite honest the art in the permanent collection at Tate Modern is a little lacking. (This may be simply the consequences of Tate Modern being a new museum. After 100 years of bequests it may have a very fine collection. For now though, it is a long way from being the Museum of Modern Art, or even the Pompidou Centre). What the curators of Tate Modern do have is a very unusual and extraordinary building and it is clear that they are learning how to use it effectively.

Ouch

Today is my 35th birthday. How did that happen?

Redirection

I have an overview of the three Boxing Day cricket matches around the world over at ubersportingpundit. (Quick summary: Pakistan beat New Zealand to win the series 1-0. South Africa beat the West Indies to go 2-0 up with two to play. Australia beat India to level the series at 1-1 with just the Sydney test to go). Also, I have had an epiphany about the rules of Mornington Crescent over at Transport Blog.

Redirection

I have link to a silly bouncing ball simulation over at Samizdata. (Yes, I am really clutching at straws today. Time to go and get a beer, I think).

Redirection

I have a (possibly slightly hyperbolic) piece on the present Australia v India cricket match, the Australia v India series, and Australia v India cricket generally over at ubersportingpundit.

Christmas decorations

Yesterday, as I was walking from the West End to Pimlico, I walked past the front of Buckingham Palace. A light show was taking place, with a series of patterns being projected on to the front of the palace. It was quite pretty.





The actual thing being projected was changing ever couple of minutes, but I was in a hurry, so I just took a couple of pictures of the Union Jack. (This is one of those occasions when my film camera would have been useful too - digital doesn't always do great in low light).

The flag was flying on the flagpole, meaning that Her Majesty was at home. I don't know whether all these strange lights shining in the windows were upseting her television viewing, but I am sure she was coping somehow.

Further repercussions of Virginia Postrel moments

Natalie Solent deconstructs my dress sense here. Yes, I think she is pretty much right. (Mum, go and read this. Right now).

The miracles of modern technology

In the late 1970s, I spent rather too much of my time and pocket money hanging out in milk bars with slightly unsavoury people and playing the first generation of coin operated video games. As an activity, this (and a passion for the very first microcomputers) was at the time not in any way cool.

Right now, I am in the cafe on the basement floor of Richard Branson's first (and flagship) Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street, London. The floor is mostly devoted to (electrical) musical instruments (this is probably actually an instance of the Virgin Megastore subletting space rather than selling musical instruments itself, but I digress). However, the cafe (which is part of a chain called "Costa Cofee") has a real retro look. It contains a mixture of serious and comfortable chairs (in the Starbucks manner), a couple of listening stations for sampling CDs sold elsewhere in the store, and also four cocktail version coin operated video games from about 1980. (Scramble, Galaga, Pacman, and one other that is out of order). It also contains a couple of pinball machines, but 1990s era pinball machines.

I was sitting here using the free WiFi to chat to Scott Wickstein in Adelaide about this, and he expressed a certain admiration for this - this is a cooler retail environment than in Adelaide. My immediate next move was to get out my digital camera, take a photo, transfer it to the laptop, and send it to Scott, so that he could see it for himself.



I will have to say that the fact that I was able to do this is just mindblowing when I think about it in the abstract. We live in an amazing world.

It's also interesting that what was not cool in 1979 has become cool in a retro sense. I understand that cool people took to computer technology in a big way in around 1995, but they weren't the people back in the milk bars in 1979. Certainly plenty of people who were like me in 1979 have since become rich and have started hanging out with cool people because they are useful in such environments , but I am not sure that they are cool themselves. I haven't become cool myself. (I haven't become rich myself either, largely I think because I have not really been very focused my late 20s and early 30s - I have certainly had opportunities to that I have not taken).

So who is responsiible precisely for the retro nostalgia that leads to a cafe looking like this? I'm not sure.

Update: When I wrote about the differences between cafes in different parts of the world earlier this year, I made the observation that cafes in Britain generally follow the Starbucks model and have only counter service. Generally I find this fine, but when I am working on my computer in a large cafe containing a substantial number of people, it is less so. My laptop is too valuable for me to leave it alone on a table for even a short time while I go to the counter to get another cup of coffee. This is a circumstance when some table service would be a really good idea. It would reduce the nuisance factor for people like me, and it would also I think quite dramatically increase the amount of food and drink being sold to people using the WiFi service.

Repercussions

I am suffering from post-roast meat, post-Christmas pudding, post-port bloat. (With a head cold, which doesn't really help). More blogging when I return to earth.

Redirection

I have a piece denouncing the Universal Postal Union (actually a reworking of a post I wrote here a year ago) over at Samizdata.

Merry Christmas everyone

Blogging may or may not be sporadic or even non-existent over the next couple of days. But everyone have a good Christmas.

More thoughts on the computer

Okay, I will get off this soon, but getting a new computer is a big thing in a geek's life. When I was deciding what to buy, the choice ultimately came down to a machine from Dell, or a machine from Time Computers, a sort of British version of Dell - another company who make machines to order on a basic template and deliver them to your door if you order them. I ultimately decided on Dell because their Inspiron 8600 machine (a version of which I got) came with the highest resolution laptop screen I had seen, 1920x1200 WUXGA. The Time machines have good reviews, seem excellent value for money. They also seem to have read where the market is going. WiFi is virtually ubiquitous on their laptops, and they are telling customers that everybody is going to want or need it within a year or two so you should get it on a new laptop. Also they are onto the fact that in the last year or two the entire consumer electronics industry has turned into a collection of different devices that plug into the USB port of your computer, and their machines (for instance this one) have either four or five USB ports, and the USB ports are at various places on the computer, not just at the back. Time use AMD processors rather than Intel, but that really is not something I greatly care about one way or the other.

Dell have pretty much got it about WiFi (although their base models do not have it as standard) but not quite with the USB ports. The machine I got (quite a high end one) only has two of them, they are both at the back, and they are horizontal one above the other. These are slightly awkward to reach, and a cable plugged into one can make it awkward to get a cable in and out of the other. I have a four way USB hub, which I can plug in to use multiple devices at once, but this is awkward considering the other tangle of cables that you will sometimes have behind a computer. (The nature of a laptop is that you are unplugging and plugging in USB devices all the time, as you are constantly moving the computer around). My previous IBM Thinkpad also had only 2 USB ports (more understandable as it was designed before the USB hardware business really took off) but one of the two USB ports was on the left side rather than the back, which was much easier to reach in ordinary circumstances. Plus the one on the back was oriented vertically, which was easier to attach and detach things from than the horizontal orientation of the new machine. So this is a slight downside of the new machine. It isn't a problem in terms of functionality, but it is a little bit of a problem in terms of design and convenience.

The other thing I am struck by is that when I am using the computer at home, I have a slightly clunky USB external ADSL modem that I have to attach, drag after me when I want to use the computer in bed, and things like that. What would be really nice would be a laptop with a built in ADSL modem, so all I would have to do is plug a telephone cable into the back of the computer (perhaps with a filter needed). For a desktop machine, getting an internal ADSL modem on a PCI card is relatively easy, but such things do not seem to exist for laptops. (Or perhaps they do - but I have never seen a PCMCIA ADSL modem).

My first thought was that in a year or two laptops will come with internal ADSL modems as standard, but thinking about it some more this might not be so. Because, if you have WiFi, you don't really need it. What you really want is one of those all in one ADSL modem/router/wireless hub devices to plug into the phone line and then you use WiFi to connect the laptop to the internet. This has the added bonus that the modem/router/wireless hub device can be different for people using cable broadband rather than ADSL broadband. Perhaps this will be the standard way to connect laptops to the internet - even at home. This would have the added advantage of meaning that there is one fewer device to plug into the USB port at the back. I can actually do this now - I just need to buy the all in one wireless hub. But I may wait until I have a little more money.

And if I am willing to spend a little more money, I can actually solve the issue of the number and location of USB ports as well. My laptop does have a single PCMCIA slot on the left side. It is easy to get a PCMCIA card containing two (or three) USB ports. With one of these, I would have a larger number of USB ports in total and some of them will be on the side of the machine rather than the back, which would make things significantly more convenient. But this would mean that my PCMCIA slot would be full, and I couldn't use it for anything else. That said, I am not sure what other things I am likely to use it for. The most common use for them seems to be for a WiFi card, but I got one of those built in with the laptop. (Okay, it's techically an internal mini-PCI card). Still, this is another way in which the new machine is slightly inferior to the old Thinkpad, which has two slots, neither of which I have admittedly ever used for anything.

So, no big deal. A couple of minor shortcomings, both of which are fixable by spending a little money. When I have some income, I might solve the problems this way.

One thing that Dell have got right is the tracking devices. There seem to be two general ways for moving the cursor on laptops. One is a touchpad below the keyboard, and the other is a pointstick, a little moving thing that exists between the b, g, and h keys. Some people like one, and some like the other. (I like the pointstick, perhaps out of habit because it is what the Thinkpad has). Rather than choosing one or the other, Dell have given me both of them. This is excellent, because it means that everyone can keep using what they prefer.

So a couple of little niggles. But on the whole I am very happy with the new machine .

Update: Perry de Havilland (who is a hard core gamer) also tells me that if I had paid the extra £60 to get the ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 Pro graphics card instead of the nVidia GeForce 5200 Go AGP 4x, that would have been cool. Oh well.

Further Update: Just looking at the after Christmas sale catalogue fromMaplin Electronics, I see that they have an all in one ADSL modem/router/wireless hub for £69.99. That is by far the best price I have seen. They also have a Bluetooth adaptor that plugs into a USB port, so this is something that can actually be added without using up my one PCMCIA slot. This is an external solution, though, which may be a bit of a nuisance. (Of course, at the moment I have no use for Bluetooth anyway).

I have a cold

This is seriously going to affect my alcoholic beverage drinking over the next few days, which is something of a shame. On the other hand, pseudoephedrine is a fine thing.

Redirection

I have a piece on forthcoming space probes and landers travelling to Mars and Saturn over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have an overview of the England cricket team's tour of Sri Lanka over at ubersportingpundit.

A music post - what a novelty

I was reading an article in one of the papers (The Times, I think) recently discussing cover versions of songs. In particular, it said that most cover versions are cover versions of great songs, and that the remakes are often just carbon copies or pale imitations of the originals. What had clearly inspired the article was Westlife's cover version of Barry Manilow's "Mandy", which is one of those similar and fairly bland remakes. The article went on to suggest that there are one or two instances where a cover version is recorded quite differently from the original and is better. An example given was Joe Cocker's cover of the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends". The writer suggested that the Beatles' version was uninteresting, but Cocker's slow, more emotional version was quite moving. I don't think that at all - I think it is just horribly overblown. Also, Sinead O'Connor's version of Prince's "Nothing Compares to You" was listed as a beautiful remake. I agree with that one - it is an utterly beautiful song and O'Connor's interpretation is just about perfect - but it is one of those instances where the original was completely obscure. There are a lot of such cases with Prince songs: at one time there were an enormous number of successful songs which were remakes of obscure songs written by Prince and originally recorded either by him or his proteges.

While my all time favourite cover version is actually is a Prince song, it is actually the precise reverse of this. "When Doves Cry" was probably Prince's biggest ever hit, but I didn't care for it. A lot of people did, but I found it a bit of a dirge. I like Prince's music, and I did at the time, but I didn't really care for this song. However, the version of the song sung by Quindon Tarver and a boys choir on the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann's film of Romeo and Juliet is in my opinion just amazing, mainly because Tarver's singing is so extraordinary. I think it is utterly beautiful. However, it was not released as a single, and was not even included in the original soundtrack CD of the film. (Tarver's performance of "Everybody's Free", which is almost as good, is on the CD though). When the film and the CD were unexpectedly large hits, a second CD was released, which did have the song. I don't have the second CD, and I really must get it. The use of music in that film is outstanding, but presumably its relatively limited budget meant that there were fairly serious restrictions in what Luhrmann was able to do in terms of releasing it on CD. It may be simply that the fee that needed to be paid to Prince was too large to affort it for the first CD. Once the film was a hit, these issues went away. (The other thing that happened was that Luhrmann and his friends put out a CD called "Something for Everybody", which included the full version of "When Doves Cry" as well as the intriguing mix of "Everybody's Free" and a spoken rendition of a comic article in the form of a mock graduation speech written by Chicago Tribune journalist Mary Schmich, which evolved together into a (hit) song called "Everybody's Free (To wear sunscreen)").

What brought these thoughts up for me, however, was the new Christmas number one. In Britain, the number one single at Christmas is a huge deal. Sometimes it will be a song with a festive theme, and sometimes just an ordinary song. A Christmas number one will sell a number of times as many copies as a number one at any other time, and there is a huge amount of publicity. One of the storylines in the recently released film Love Actually is about this. An effort was made to promote the song in that movie, "Christmas is all Around", as a real Christmas number one, but it didn't really work. And there have been lots of cyncial pre-Christmas records released for this purpose. In this era of Pop Idol, a group of people from that show released a version of John Lennon's "Merry Xmas (War is Over)", which was just one of those bland uninteresting clone type covers. Favourite for much of the week was another of these: "Christmas Time (Don't let the Bells End)" by The Darkness.

However, there was an interesting outside chance, which was a single of a cover version of "Mad World", originally performed by Tears for Fears, but in this case covered by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules. I am not quite sure how this came to be released now, because the song was recorded for the soundtrack of the movie Donnie Darko, which was released in Britain more than a year ago, and in the US more than two years ago. This film uses music as well as Romeo and Juliet and I commented on this when I saw it. This particular cover is I think better than the original - it is beautiful, slow and haunting and works perfectly with the dreamy quality of the film. (This is one case where the original is none the less very good). And, somehow it got released just before Christmas in the UK this year, and it came through as an outsider and actually succeeded in being the Christmas number one. People went past all the cynically made stuff and actually bought the CD of the best song.

Of course, there is another thing that Donnie Darko has in common with Romeo and Juliet, which is that it was relatively low budget and the filmmakers were quite restricted in what music they could put on the soundtrack CD. While the film includes wonderful stuff from Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, and original Tears for Fears recordings (as well as the cover version), the CD is the orchestral score along with the cover of "Mad World". It's a terrific CD, but it is an incomplete record of the music in the film. I would like to hope that the success of this cover of "Mad World" would allow director Richard Kelly to go back and release another CD with the rest of the music as happened for Romeo and Juliet, but this is not likely. The fees from the music are likely high, and (unlike Romeo and Juliet, which was a mainstream hit) Donnie Darko is still only an interesting cult film. Although, one reason why the song has risen in prominence may be that the film has been a substantially bigger hit on DVD than it was in the cinema.

The dream of every blogger

Long have I hoped for the day when the Almighty Glenn would link to one of my posts. I am resigned to the fact that he will never link to this blog, but as he reads Samizdata, I had been sort of expecting he would link to one of my posts there eventually. And finally, today it has happened. It is a slightly snide remark about my dress sense, but an Instapundit link it is.

Update: The consensus in the comments and around the internet seems to be that I am a hobbit. Unfortunately I am six feet tall and I weigh almost 200 pounds, so that would make me a large hobbit.

Redirection

I have a photo and some observations about a Virginia Postrel moment at a social gathering over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a piece on why it is bad that aviation rights between nations are decided by bilateral treaties over at Samizdata.

What is heaven like?

I'm sitting in my local pub with a pint of ale, working on my laptop and writing some blog postings. They (including this one) will have to be posted later, as there is no network here, unfortunately.

I think I have in fact realised what in my world, heaven would be like. A nice English pub. Real ale on tap. (Perhaps a Bavarian weissbier or a dark Belgian Trappist beer or two for variety as well). Good food. And free WiFi.

I am thinking that yes, heaven would definitely have free WiFi. Or perhaps it would have that CDMA2000 1X based cellular data service that Glenn Reynolds was talking about yesteday. That would be even cooler.

Redirection

I have a piece on the privacy implications of using electronic tags to charge for tolls over at White Rose.