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

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

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

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

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

The Cyberpunk movement, 15 years later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I so love The Onion . This photo

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

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This is a good one.

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

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

I so love the Guardian

McDonald's has been accused of extreme insensitivity after releasing a new sandwich called the "McAfrika" in Norway, one of the world's richest countries, at a time when 12 million people are facing starvation in southern Africa.

The launch of the new hamburger has infuriated the Norwegian equivalent of Christian Aid and the Norwegian Red Cross and generated a storm of bad publicity for the American fast-food giant.

The concoction of beef, cheese, tomatoes and salad in a pitta-style sandwich is said to be based upon an authentic African recipe and is being sold to Norwegian consumers for about £2.80.

This is one of the most absurd and patronising things I have heard recently. Does this mean that I should be outraged at any attempt to combine "African" and "food"? What on earth is wrong with using the word "Africa" to describe food cooked using something based on an African recipe? The only thing McDonald's are doing here are suggesting that African food might be good. There is a place called the "Kilamanjaro African Restaurant" just up the road from where I used to live in Sydney. Should I be morally outraged by this?

Of course the United States on its foundation was essentially a compromise between the plantation States of the South and the evolved puritan society in the north, which eventually industrialised. Obviously these two cultures weren't entirely compatible and eventually went to war with one another. Then, after the Civil War, the United States went through a few decades of mass immigration, in which it received lots of people from non-English speaking Europe. Germans, Italians, Irish, eastern European jewry, etc. Eventually, around 1920 the US closed its borders to further mass immigration. The people of the immigrant wave melded into American society, and by the end of the second world war, they were the dominant American culture. The demographics of the country had changed, but it retained its core values. These are the people of The Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy. In the late 1960s, the gates opened again, and mass immigration started again. This time people came from different places: Latin America, India, China, but in fact a huge preponderance of places. We seem to be where the previous wave was in perhaps 1900. America's demographics are swirling around again, and eventually a new culture will come out. This is what the demographic trend of population growth is about. Inevitably a less European America is coming out of this. However, I don't see any reason why this new America will even lost the core values of the country. These withstood the last demographic change. As far as I can see., America will always have democracy and free speech.

There's a good piece in MIT Tech Review (great magazine by the way) on digital special effects in Hollywood. The point is that digital technology is taking over the complete postproduction process - editing, colour correcting etc - not just "special effects". This of course leads to the question as to whether any of the process should remain analogue. Certainly it is easier to film in digital, then edit and do your postproduction in digital at least. (The per cinema costs to project in digital for now are too high, but it is actually cheaper to do everything else in digital). However, the resolution isn't yet high enough. The 1920x1080 of the best film cameras isn't up to scratch compared to 35mm film (which is equivalent to a resolution of about 3500x2000). Until it is we are likely to still be using the hybrid digital/analogue techniques described in the article.

Interesting piece in the Economist, about how the United States is the word's demographic outlier. Conventional wisdom is that in rich countries birth rates are falling, populations stabilising and perhaps ultimately falling, and populations are aging. The truth though is that this is happening in Europe but not in America. America has more immigrants, who are more likely to have larger families than the native born, and this is part of the story, but as well as this the issue is that Americans are simply having more children than Europeans. America's population is ageing, but this is because people are living longer rather than having anything to do with the birth rate. We have had various predictions over the years that America's importance will decline compared to more populous parts of the world, but this seems to suggest that this will not necessarily be so. For one thing, it is going to become clear over the next 20 years that the Chinese have economically crippled themselves with their misguided one child policy. Japan is a demographic basket place. The future of India looks interesting. The future of places like Indonesia and the Philippines could also be interesting if they can run their countries in a coherent manner.

The great demographic timebomb is of course the Middle East, which is full of countries with rapidly increasing populations and little semblance of their people ever becoming educated enough to be economically productive. We should be really depressed about this. (Okay, a lot of us are really depressed about this).

David Brooks is going on again about trends in malls and suburbia and the like. The trouble is, Joel Garreu figured out that most of this was coming nearly fifteen years ago.

To be truthful, also particularly Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms.

From Harry Knowles' review of xXx .

Imagine an Extreme Sports God that watched JACKASS and thought… I CAN BEAT THAT! Now, for my money, I want to see the XANDER ZONE show on TV for real. I want to see him punish Jack Valenti and the voting members of the MPAA. I want to see Xander unleashed on Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms. I want to watch Xander bring down Televangelists and revisit their hypocrisy a thousand fold upon them. The aggressive guerilla terrorist against the corporate asses that brought us the disasters at ENRON and well…

Oh yes. Me too. Particularly the bit about Jack Valenti.

Bruce Sterling over at Infinite Matrix points out that the crazier the country, the lower its level of telephone traffic with the outside world. Yes, indeed. However, the tariff maps are even more interesting. These scale the world map so that distances represent how much it costs to call the respective country from the United Kingdom or New York. The interesting thing of course is how similar the UK and US maps look to each other. If it costs $x to call a country from the UK, costs around the same amount to call it from the US. Distance isn't (largely) the issue. Politics is the issue.

This effect has grown even more dramatic since 1998, which is the last date for these maps, unfortunately. Traditionally, international phone calls were governed by the "settlements" system, in which two countries did a bilateral deal by which a certain (usually outrageous) amount of money was payable per minute for international calls. At the end of an accounting period, the total amount of calls was calculated, a net settlement charge was calculated, and the country that had originated more calls paid that amount to the country that had originated fewer calls. The actual telcos in each country could then charge their customers whatever they liked: normally the settlement charge, plus their costs, plus a fat margin for themselves.

This worked okay (except for the fact that customers were screwed) in the days of monopolies and outrageous telecommunications pricing, but once deregulation and competition started occurring, there were problems. Essentially, in the United States, carriers competed amongst themselves for international traffic, and this massively reduced their costs and their margins. However, the settlement price placed a floor under what they could charge, and this floor came to constitute pretty much all of the price of calls. This money was then given to the foreign carrier in its entirety. This money did not reflect the foreign carrier's costs in any way.

Therefore, it you set up a phone service in a foreign country where the settlement costs were high, and could get people in rich countries to call you, then phone carriers in the US were obligated to pay you money. Therefore, lots of phone sex services and premium services set up in foreign countries. (Particularly the Carribean, which had the added advantage of having phone numbers that did not look like international numbers to US callers). The US and European telephone carriers were obliged to collect the money for these services, and US and European customers had little recourse to any legal remedy to anything resulting from the calls. (t home, the only relevant laws were those dealing with international phone calls, rather than premium services).

Eventually the US decided that it had had enough of this, and simply placed a cap on settlement charges paid by US carriers. Ultimately either the foreign countries agreed to heed this or they were unable to connect their phone systems to the US. Various other countries followed the US lead. The international sex lines business declined in size.

The second thing that happened was that more countries deregulated and abondoned the settlements system entirely. In a lot of instances, local telephone companies were compelled (either by law or by competition) to charge the same termination fees to international carriers as to domestic long distance carriers. This dramatically reduced the cost of international calls. (At least, it did for business customers and domestic customers who pay attention. Many telcos are still happy to pay the dramatically reduced termination charges, but still charge high rates to domestic customers who still believe that international calls should be 'expensive'. There are alternatives for customers who understand the situation, however).

Countries now can be divided into those that have deregulated and those that are clinging to the remnants of the settlements system. We now have a situation where international calls can be divided into two categories. If you are calling from a deregulated country to another deregulated country, the call should not cost much more than a domestic call. If, however, one or both of the counrties in question is not deregulated, calls are much more expensive, although not as expensive as they once were. Distance has little to do with it. On the map, the deregulated countries exist in a small ring near the centre. Everyone else is a lot further away. (This has become much more dramatic since 1998).

There is a hilarious article on Salon discussing all the extraordinary domain names that were registered during the dot com boom and which are now becoming available again. IHateAndrewSalkeldTheFatUglyGreasyStarTrekLovingWanker.com anyone?

When going through the channel tunnel the other day, I started thinking about infrastructure. Europe in the last few decades has gone on a binge of large scale infrastructure projects. In particular, lots of what engineers call 'fixed links', which is a fancy word for 'bridges and tunnels'. We have the channel tunnel, the bridge and tunnel project connecting Denmark and Sweden (The Ostend fixed link, I think it is called), a large number of projects for tunnels through the Alps, the proposed Messina bridge connecting Italy and Sicily. Plus we have various fast rail projects. While may of these will not make back the money invested in them in strict accounting terms, none of them seem especially extravagant projects. (Well, maybe the Messina Bridge). All of them are used or will be used by very large amounts of people. This compares with the United States, where there are no major projects of this type being built, and there haven't been for quite a while. Major infrastructure projects in the US these days seem to be about increasing the capacity of their urban infrastructure (eg the Big Dig in Boston). The conclusion is the fairly obvious one that the US basically built its infrastructure between 1880 and 1950, and there isn't much left to do. (That said, there are no bridges and tunnels in the US as big as the biggest ones in Europe. This may be simply that the US is much less densely populated and they haven't built cities near the trickiest bits of terrain, or perhaps they are just lucky. Once you have the Messina bridge and the Swiss tunnels, there are few obvious places left in Europe for big bridges or tunnels (except for the Straits of Gibraltar, but nobody would actually want that in the present world). There are still lots of places to build fast train lines in Europe, but we will wait and see how much gets done.
(Clearly Brussels - Antwerp - Rotterdam - Amsterdam is needed however, from what I saw on the weekend).

When a country rises economically, it seems that one thing it does is build key infrastructure links. These consist of transport systems in cities, and motorways, railways bridges and tunnels. There then comes a point where the key links are built, and you expand them in response to growth in towns and cities, but it largely becomes a maintenance exercise rather than a building
exercise. London had its rail system by about 1900, and New York had its by about 1920. Japan built its infrastructure largely in the 1960s and 1970s. Singapore and Hong Kong are presently in the position where there's is half built, but it will be more or less done within ten years in both places. China is undergoing a massive and frantic rush of building railways, roads, bridges and tunnels, and will undoubtedly be going for decades yet.

Japan seems disfunctional, as it has all the infrastructure it needs but is completely unable to stop. It has gone from building an adequate network, to building everything that could reasonably be needed and now on to building things that nobody could possibly need.

Today I saw the Belgian police conducting a road block in the business section of town. They looked serious: they were touting machine guns and had one of those spiked things you throw across the road when you want to puncture the tyres of passing cars. And they were doing this outside an office building called the World Trade Center.