And we have a further article in Salon on the creative cities business. From the article

What that means for cities is that instead of "underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, recruiting call centers, and squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes," the leadership should instead develop an environment attractive to the creative class by cultivating the arts, music, night life and quaint historic districts -- in short, develop places that are fun and interesting rather than corporate and mall-like.

My personal opinion is not that it is about making cities less mall-like, but more about making the cities more like the right kind of mall. I'm sorry for being a little cryptic here. I have more thoughts on the subject - in fact I probably have a long book's worth of thoughts on the subject, and I shall get to them over time.
At least, however, they do attempt to answer the "Why do so many cool people come from Texas (in particular Austin) question, although I don't think they have got to the bottom of it yet.

Interesting piece in CNN on Daimler Benz's efforts at building a fuel cell powered car that has been driven across America. Besides observing that this is probably the only chance Americans ever get to see something as small as an A-series Mercedes, allow me to comment that this is a good thing. The sooner that we can get off oil and onto engines that run on something else, the better. Its not that we are running out of oil or that cars are too polluting (although a less polluting engine would definitely be a bonus), but that we need a fuel for which the lowest cost producer is not Saudi Arabia. (Given that I do not expect Saudi Arabia to ever be the lowest cost producer of anything other than oil, we simply need any new type of engine.

As a quick aside, a fuel cell is simply a battery that can be recharged by adding fuel to it, rather than by recharging it. Ideally you just open a valve on it, poor in some methanol, or whatever, and bingo, it is recharged. A car using this then uses the power to drive an electric motor. Besides powering cars, cheap and efficient fuel cells would be a boon for road warriors with lots of cellphones, PDAs, and laptops. Rather than carrying spare batteries, or desperately trying to find a power outlet in a Starbucks, you simply carry a bottle of fuel with one. Or, once these things are widespread, you buy a small bottle of the stuff from a news-stand, or grocery shop, or wherever.

My thoughts on digital projection of Star Wars Episode 2. In order to see the film in digital, I saw the film in a cinema I am not familiar with (the Ritzy in Brixton) The cinema had assigned seating and when asked where I wanted to sit, I specified "Two thirds of the way back", which is about my normal preference. Of course, this preference is for modern multiplexes where the screens are large and the seats generally close to them. When I got to the cinema I discovered I was in an old style long narrow theatre. Thus while I was in by no means in a bad seat, I was watching the film from a fair way back. At this distance it looked pretty good. I thought the colours were very "hard", and the film lacked warmth, even in scenes where it didn't have to: for instance the outdoor scenes on the grass in front of the waterfalls. (I am not sure how you descibe "warmth" technically, however. When fans of vinyl records have complained the digital CDs lack warmth, I have been sceptical, but I think I now do know what they mean). Given the special effects films are never very warm anyway, it possibly doesn't matter much here, but I think when a great cinematographer attempts to make a fully digital picture, the problems will show up much worse. I never got the "Wow, this is beautiful" feeling I sometimes get watching beautiful 35mm photography, or even better from 65mm photography.

At the distance I was watching from, there were reletively few of the pixelation artifacts or visible jagged edges that have been reported by other people, but they were visible occasionally. I saw enough to suggest they would be much worse from closer up. This is a serious problem. In short the picture was good but not great. 35mm film scales wonderfully. Because the potential quality of the picture is so high, it looks great on large screens, small screens, at the front, and at the back. The present manifestation of digital does not scale so well.

My key feeling, however, is that the 1280 x 1024 resolution being used in the present system is manifestly inadequate. The best picture from this is less good (by miles) than the best picture from 35mm. In fact, it is much less than the best picture resolution (1920x1080) that you can get in your home to watch High Definition TV. (There isn't much programming being broadcast for this yet, but it does exist in the US). I go to the cinema to see films sooner than I can see them at home, but also to see better pictures than I can see at home. If it is possible for me to see better pictures at home, then this is just about the only thing that could possibly kill my cinemagoing habit (and I see a lot of films). Home pictures are getting much better. Responding to this by making cinema pictures worse seems curious.

Another thing is that 1280x1024 is a terrible resolution choice for a widescreen movie. Ideally you want to have pixels that are approximately square in shape. 1280x1024 gives pixels with an aspect ratio of 1.06:1 on a television screen, 2.31:1 on a conventional (1.85:1) widescreen movie, and 2.94:1 on a very wide (2.35:1) movie such as Star Wars. (I can't really say Cinemascope here, because that is a film based process).

I am bothered by the possibility that people will say this present technology is good enough, and that therefore it will become the standard and we will be stuck with crappy pictures forever. I doubt this will happen, as technically there should be no problem with having different picture resolutions in different cinemas and converting between them on the fly, but the danger is that cinema chains may accept the present technology because they simply do not know better. This was a problem with sound for many decades - the mono academy sound format was bad but was used everywhere because it was a standard. (That said, the invention of digital seems to have aided the improvement in sound rather than hindered it. It could conceivably do the same for pictures, but that is a way off. One advantage of digital is that converting from one digital format to another is as simple as getting the right software. Not true for analogue).

I am not against digital projection in the long run. While film does give beautiful pictures, its problem is that it can be easily damaged and it deteriorates. I think it is a catastrophe that 100 years of cinema is sitting in studio vaults decaying, and films made and stored in digital will never do this. (The scale of his problem is just terrible. There are Academy award winning films from 25 years ago for which no clean prints exist). In addition, a badly scratched print with lots of splices in it can be really trying to watch. (This is especially a problem with repertory, where prints of great movies tend to be ten years old, have been screened vast numbers of times, and have been transported from cinema to cinema to cinema).With digital this will not be a problem. If the libraries of the studios are eventually all transferred to a high quality digital format, then cinemas may finally be able to show whatever they want whenever they want, and the cost of obtaining prints will be eliminated. Whether, with all their fears about piracy, studios will ever allow this to happen, is another question, but the potential is there.

One point to be taken from the transition from vinyl records to CDs is that when the CD was invented, it was a new form, and sound engineers weren't used to its characteristics, whereas they had decades of experience with records. On top of this, many early CDs were of recordings made for vinyl, and later transferred to CDs. It took a while for people to learn just what was the best way to record for CDs. When they did this, quality improved, and recordings were made in such a way that they avoided the weaknesses of the format. The same may happen for digital cinema. What George Lucas is doing is good in terms of getting the technology to work properly and training people to use it properly. However, we are not quite there yet.

My compliments to N.Z. Bear for his article in Salon. I remember the days of Atari and Apple and C64 owners having contempt for each other well. (I wasn't so much into the BBS scene however. I was in a regional Australian city where there wasn't very much of it, I suspect). Here we have something interesting, however: a non-professional journalist blogger puting something on his blog, getting a good reaction, and then selling it to a professional publication (although a net-connected one). This isn't entirely new: Dave Winer was writing for Wired in about 1994, but we are perhaps seeing the start of blogging as an entry to professional publication. It may not be so much whether people are noticing the bloggers (as Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds have been discussing), as whether people are noticing the people who are noticing the people who are noticing the people who are noticing the people who are noticing the bloggers. The presence of a chain might be enough. When I see someone who started as a blogger writing for the Washington Post or the New Yorker, then I will be impressed, and I think it will happen. (The New York Times has its head in the sand, obviously). More on this after my exam tomorrow.

Sorry if the broken HTML on this page confused anyone today. It was actually Blogger's fault. (Well, I made an error in my HTML, which somehow interacted with the HTML on Blogger's page so as to disable the 'edit' function. Before I could fix it, I had to "View source", and peer at the HTML for a while). By the way, I will be doing a site redisign in a couple of weeks, in order to add comments, and all the other things you want in a blog, plus to make this blog a little more distinctive.

There are also a few comments I have written on my slashdot homepage , if you really want to read my thoughts.

The references to this blog have now vanished from Google entirely, as the link to it is no longer on the front page of slashdot. I would have thought that Google would have at least some memory. A search for "Michael Jennings" on Google actually does turn up one or two references to me, although it is difficult to figure out which Michael Jennings is me if you don't know me well. A search on Google groups will find a lot of stuff of mine dating from the days when I posted to Usenet a lot.

Virginia Postrel, in discussing why bloggers aren't actually all that influential, has the following to say.

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn't anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey's book? Why hasn't it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn't Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven't Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn't even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.

When I think about it, Virginia is probably right, my reaction to reading this was to be quite surprised. Normally, I start to pay attention to a book when I see it referred to in several different places that I regularly read or see. The less related the several different places are to each other, the more likely I am to pick the book up. Now, I had seen the book reviewed by Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times , a had seen it discussed in a few blogs, I may or may not have seen the review in The Economist and I saw a prominent display of the book in the Islington Borders just as I was entering the men's bathroom (which means that a British publisher was pushing the book or someone on the staff of the bookshop liked it). This was enough to make me think that I should probably read it and that it was being discussed. (It could mean that my reading habits are more insular than I thought, but I rather doubt it). Whether it means that British people are more interested in reading a strongly pro-globalisation book by an American libertarian than are the Americans, I am not sure. What it might mean is simply that the pro-globalisers in Britain (who mostly read the financial press) are a long way from the sorts of "influential" people who write for the New Statesman or produce programming for the BBC. Typically, I think that such people have missed the point so completely that I don't pay them much attention. The difference might be that in the US, NPR and the Weekly Standard and the National Review aren't so far away that the pro-globalisation, pro-trade blogging types do not care what they think.

I see that large numbers of New Yorkers want to rebuilt large towers at least as tall as the buildings destroyed on the WTC site. I sympathise - I think my preferred solution emotionally is a single, 220 storey tower in the shape of an upraised middle finger - but it won't happen. Firstly, although the people of New York might like to see such a skyline, it would be very difficult to find tenants for it, particularly on the higher floors. And, sadly, the Osama bin Ladens of the world would see it as a personal challenge to try and knock it down again, and it isn't worth that. (Osama bin Laden seems to have been driven to knock down the first one for in some ways curiously obsessive and personal reasons as well. In any event, the desire for enormous office buildings seems to have shifted away from the US and to Asia, from Malaysia to Hong Kong to Shanghai to Taipei, a couple of decades ago. New Civil Engineer ran a nice article on these Asian buildings a couple of months ago - another free but irritating registration required). It seems to me that the best approach to rebuilding on the WTC site is to see how to use the site to improve how well New York operates as a city. That largely means infrastructure improvement. There are various proposals to rebuild the 1 and 9 subway lines, as well as the PATH service from New Jersey in order to provide better interchange services and greater capacity in lower Manhatten. Plus there is an interesting proposal to extend the Long Island Railroad to a new terminus downtown - something that would not have been otherwise possible because there was nowhere to build turnaround facilities in Lower Manhattan. (There was an article on these proposals and others in the New Yorker last week - not on the web, sadly). I think these sort of opportunities to improve the infrastructure to something better than existed before is a more subtle, useful way of saying "up yours" to the terrorists. It means that in the long term, development of downtown Manhattan, in general, can grow to something more complex, and something greater than it otherwise could have, because we push the factors that limit development further into the distance.

What precisely is it with Taiwan's China Airlines anyway? It's not a very big airline (a fleet of 56 aircraft) yet it manages fatal crash after fatal crash. Nine fatal accidents since 1970 and four since 1994. Taiwan is a rich country: the airline has a fleet of fairly modern Boeing and Airbus aircraft (22 years is middle aged for a 747: there are plenty of aircraft this age in the fleets of almost any airline you care to mention, including those with perfect safety records) and should have plenty of money to spend on maintenance and crew training. Yet somehow the airline manages to have more fatal crashes than American and European airlines ten times its size or more. Australia's Qantas is more than 80 years old, and is about double the size of CAL today, and has not had a single fatal accident in its history.

When you come out of the Finsbury Park railway station in North London, if you turn in one direction you find a large shop selling memorabilia from the Arsenal football club. (The stadium where Arsenal play is close by). If you turn the other way, you quite quickly come across the Finsbury Park mosque, infamous for the extremism of the Islam preached in it, and for some of the people who have stayed there from time to time - certainly shoe bomber Richard Reid, and likely a number of the September 11 terrorists. A couple of month ago I visited in order to see precisely where the enemies of civilisation hang out, and I was somewhat struck by the juxtaposition of the two things. Non - locals appear to come to this part of London for two reasons - Arsenal and extreme Islam. Perhaps impolitely, I was struck by the peculiar question as to whether the two went together - whether, in their travels, fundamentalist muslims were in fact tempted by western decadent behaviour such as supporting Arsenal. From this article in the New York Times (free but irritating registration required) I now discover that Osama bin Laden himself has purchased Arsenal memorabilia in that shop, and has attended a number of matches at Highbury. I am not sure what to make of this.

Well, I am the number one Michael Jennings on google . Amazing what a good link will do. (A previous website of mine that I had when I was a graduate student was the number 1 Michael Jennings on Altavista in about 1994. In fact I think I was the only Michael Jennings on the web in 1994. But that was a different life). Yes, I need to write something soon. I am busy studying for the Level 2 CFA exam I am sitting next Saturday, so life is hectic. Website content will no doubt look up after that.

Well it seems my dastardly plan to get the URL of this weblog on the front page of slashdot has succeeded . If you have come from there and want to e-mail me, the address is mjj12@btopenworld.com .

Here is a review of the Game On exhibition that is on at the Barbican centre in London, and which will tour Japan and the US in 2003. I wrote this to submit to slashdot , and they may or may not publish it, but I may as well post it on my own site as well.

On Friday I attended the Game On exhibition about the history of computer games, at the Barbican Centre gallery. (Admission charge, 11 pounds ($16)). This is on in London from 16 May to 15 September, before moving to The Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from October 2002 to February 2003 and touring to be announced venues is Europe, America and Japan in 2003.

The exhibition starts off well as you walk into it. The first thing you see is a PDP-1, with a description of the development of SpaceWar in 1962. Sadly, the PDP-1 is not actually operating, but there is a later (1977) coin operated version of Space War that you can play. From there, we jump straight to the 1970s, where we have a couple of instances of "Computer Space", the very first coin operated game, from 1971, which had a truly cool cabinet and was produced by Nolan Bushnell, who had then not yet founded Atari, but was otherwise unmemorable, (although this photo does seem to indicate that the sixties were not yet over). We then have working versions (of both cocktail and upgright versions) of many coin operated games from the 1970s.

Most of the classics are there, from a 1972 version of Pong (or Ping, as it was known in the UK due to the world "Pong" denoting a bad smell in British English). Space Invaders, Mr and Ms Pacman, Asteroids, Tempest, Defender, Missile Command, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Centipede etc. There is a very brief description of the Mame project, and a projection TV system running Mame with a choice of about 20 classic games. Unfortunately, the significance of the project from a preservation point of view is not adequately described, nor are the various issues that go with it. (I asked an attendant whether they legally owned copies of the 20 individual ROMs, and he had no idea what I was talking about). As we go on, a lack of explanation of the things on show turns out to be the major weakness of the exhibition. There are quite a few very significant things in the history of gaming in the exhibition, but in a lot of instances it isn't adequately explained just why they are significant, or even in some cases what they are.

From there, we go to a room containing "Ten playable consoles", showing a few of the things we might have had in our homes: working axamples of both dedicated game consoles and early microcomputers: the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, Sinclair Spectum, Nintendo Famicon, Spectravision, Commodore 64 (why not the Vic-20?) up to an early Amiga. This room also contains brief potted histories of the gaming activities of Atari, Commodore, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, with one or two pieces of classic hardware to look. Plus there is a little potted history of the IBM-PC (with an AT in a display case to look at). There is no mention of the Apple 2, somewhat curiously. No, it wasn't perhaps principally a gaming machine, but it was the first machine providing high resolution colour graphics that people could have in their homes. It was the first non-arcade machine I personally played games on, and I think this is true of a lot of people. (I cite the results of the "most nostalgic item" poll on Slashdot last week).

Up to this point, the exhibition has been largely chronological. From this point on, it drops the chronological aspects and becomes more theme based. This works with variable success. (Some themes work better than others). Some things that are historically quite closely related to each other are not close to one another in the exhibition due to the way they are categorised. A strictly chonological exhibition may have worked better.

Firstly we have a couple of rooms full of about 50 (mostly console) games that you can play. These are supposedly divided up into "Games of Action", "Games of Simulation", and "Games of Reflection and Thought", supposedly, but the distinctions are not very clear. Largely though it's just a room with lots of games in it. In one corner I found the Infocom game of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which was the only text based game in the whole exhibition. (No Star Trek, no ADVENT, no ZORK). This was a shame, as the culture of text games would have amongst other things helped bridge the gap between Space War and the 1970s arcade games and would have fit in well in the early history of games section).

After this, we had a section devoted to the making and marketing of 5 famous games (or families of games), Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Pokemon. This section is good. We have original character concept drawings, storyboards and design diagrams from Yoshitaka Amano, James Kenny and other original designers of a number of these games, plus both artwork (both for marketing designs and simply for the sake of art) from many of the game designers. Most notably, we have a series of paintings from Ocean Quigley of Sims fame, showing his visions of various Sim Cities and Sim Worlds. This is really cool.

Upstairs, we find a display comparing games culture between "Europe and the USA" and "Japan". The "Europe and the USA" section is unimpressive, containing a few sports based games and a few military based games, without really explaining what these have to do with Europe and the USA. (A discussion of how military simulators and games have influenced each other is the best). The "Japan" half is much better, talking about the influence of manga and anime, the inluence of the Pachinko culture, the Japanese love of simulations games ("Go by Train", and "Bass Fishing"), plus a really good demonstration of how the game "Renegade" was modified from its Japanese version (which was set in a violent schoolyard) to its US version (which dealt with violence in a perhaps politically less sensitive gang dominated urban jungle).

The section devoted to "Character Design" gives us a brief overview of the development of Mario and Sonic, and we then get to a section on "Childrens Games". The most interesting part of this is a display of handheld games, in particular early single game handheld versions of Donkey Kong, and Scramble and a few others like this. (These were quite important to me, as I remember playing many of these in the early 1980s), as well as the usual Game Boys and the like. (I am not sure what makes these "Childrens Games" any more than a lot of the other games in the exhibition, however).

We then have brief sections on game sound and movie related games. Nothing too exciting here, although lots of movie posters for masterpieces like "Super Mario Brothers" plus a couple of non-working arcade machines with movie related themes. (Tron, most notably. A bit shame this one isn't working. Also a shame they didn't devote more time to the movie, given the movie was about game culture. At least the are showing the film as part of the film season associated with the exhibition).

A section on multi-player games is much too small, unfortunately. There are a small number of networked PCs playing a small number of games. (Red Ace Squadron and Worms Word Party when I was there), plus a sign saying that a changing program of games will be shown over the course of the exhibition. This was a little disappointing, as quite frankly this is a small part of a bigger story: the development and evolution of Doom and Quake into things like Counter-Strike is an interesting story, and one that is not covered in this exhibition. (Perhaps they thought that if they had lots of people playing death matches, this would make the exhibition less family friendly). One of the following sections of the exhibition is devoted to the use of gaming technologies for urban planning, and demonstrates the produce V/Spacelab, which is a planning tool used in real urban design, that was developed from the Quake 3 engine. This is really interesting, and one of the best things in the exhibition, but it the obvious connection with the multiplayer game section is missed.

Finally, we have a section on "Future Technology" which talks about where we are going from here. A little bit on games with evolving characters, and voice and body based user interfaces. I would have liked to have seen something on cell phone based games (Japanese i-mode perhaps) as I think this is going to be a big deal.

On the way out, there is a theatrette showing documentaries on the history of games. I sat an watched the documentary "Thumb Candy" from Britain's Channel 4 hosted by Iain Lee, which gave a much clearer history of games than did the exhibition, but this is at the very end of the exhibition when most people are tired, so I was the only person in the theatrette.

As well as all this, the exhibition includes a number of generally small, "contemporary commissions" , mostly concept art on games based subjects. None of this tells you very much about computer games, but I did have the opportunity to place a game of Space Invaders where I got to shoot down the words from quotations from Focault while listening to the sounds of short wave numbers stations. If nothing else, this reminds me that I am in in Europe.

I was accosted by a reporter for the Russian language programs of the BBC World Service, who saw me taking notes for this review in front of the PDP-1, and after I told him a little about the history of Space War and the like, he recorded an audio interview with about my impressions of the exhibition. Thus, the people of Moscow may be hearing my thoughts translated into Russian.

The exhibition bookshop has a book devoted to the exhibition for sale for 20 pounds, plus copies of virtually every book devoted to computer games that the organisers could lay their hands on, a bit of manga and books devoted to manga, one or two tangentially related board games (Harry Potter, anyone?) a little bit of cyberpunkish sf (The Difference Engine, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), and, perplexingly, a large number of copies of Naomi Klein's "No Logo".

There is also a program of films and lectures/discussions taking place to go with the exhibition. The films are "Tron", "The Driver",
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (huh?) , "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", "Resident Evil", "Existenz", "Ghost in the Shell", and "The Matrix", some of which are clearly worth seeing.

What's good? There is some very cool stuff on display. They have a PDP-1. They have lots of old arcade machines. You can play most of the games. Most of the stories in the histories of gaming are here if you look carefully. The final section on the use of the Quake 3 engine in urban design was great. There haven't really been any major museum exhibits on computer games before, and this is a good effort.

What's bad? There is a lack of coverage of text based games, and anything PC like prior to Windows 95. There is a lack of coverage of PC gaming. Many of the items on display aren't adequately explained. The organisation into categories doesn't really work.

Is it worth spending my money on? Yes.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10.

I read in the Economist about East Timor's impending independence, and about how everyone wishes the new country well. The Economist tends to do this whenever a new country comes into being for some reason, and this seems a bog standard article.

Oddly enough, and in what will not ultimately prove to be as big a digression as it appears, I was reading "The Salmon of Doubt" last week, the final book from the late, and greatly missed Douglas Adams. This book consists of about ten chapters of an unfinished novel, as well as various other bits and pieces of his writing, either unpublished or unpublished in book form. One of them is an interview from a British magazine.

What is the most remote or bizarre place you have ended up?

Easter Island is, of course, the most remote place on earth, famous for being farther from anywhere than anywhere else is. Which is why it is odd that I ended up there completely by accident. I learned a very important lesson from this, which was -- read your ticket

When were you there and why?

I was flying from Santiago to Sydney and was a bit tired, having spent the previous two weeks looking for fur seals, and didn't wake up to what the plane's itinerary was until the pilot mentioned that we were just coming in for our one-hour stopover on Easter Island.

There was a little fleet of minibuses at the airport, which whisk you away for a quick peek at the nearest statue while the plane refuels. It was incredibly frustrating because if I had been paying attention the day before, I could have easily changed my ticket and stayed over for a couple of days

What was amusing to me was that I had a very similar experience myself once. I was flying back from Nairobi to London on Sudan Airways in March 1993. (Why was I flying Sudan Airways? Because it was cheap, because I was a poor student, and because I wasn't aware just how dicey the civil war in the Sudan actually was. This particular flight would be hijacked a couple of years later). On the plane, I was reading a copy of the Economist. (I was one of those sad students who reads the Economist religiously. I got over it, although I still browse the magazine from time to time, and it does admittedly make good aeroplane reading). I read an article about the imminent independence of Eritrea - an article that read very similarly to the article about East Timor above. The plane I was in started to descend. As we descended further I saw a relatively small city outside the window. Eventually we landed. On a building, I saw "Welcome to Eritrea". Unlike Douglas Adams, reading the ticket wouldn't have helped me, as Sudan airways hadn't advanced so far as to puting all the stops on the ticket. However, this did qualify as a really obscure and potentially interesting place where I accidentally found myself for an hour. I certainly would have liked to have got off the plane for a couple of days to explore the place, but I didn't have the opportunity.

Eritrea was in some ways a similar case to East Timor. You had a small area with the misfortune to be right next to a larger country, despite a very different history. You had the small area incorporated into the larger country through actions of dubious legality. You had a struggle lasting decades during which time the rest of the world didn't recognise the struggle. You had the rebels eventually winning, and the small country achieving independence and recognition. And you had seemingly honourable people taking over the new country and promising to learn from past failures.

While things looked very promising for Eritrea in 1992, Eritrea has since fought another war with Ethiopia, which has retarded its development immeasurably. While there is no reason that things must go this way in East Timor too, it is a relatively depressing thought.

Dr Frank talks about all the wonderful questions his wife was asked on an immigration form by the American INS. (Were you involved in the Nazi government of Germany or Austria, are you a communist, is the purpose of your visit to commit an immoral act? Do you intend to work as a prostitute? That kind of thing). Silly as they sound, these are standard questions that any alien who wishes to visit the US has to answer when applying for any kind of visa. My experiences of entering the US have involved answering these silly questions and then being quite genuinely welcomed to the US by remarkably friendly immigration officials. Entering most other countries I have visited has involved filling out forms with much less information (if any) and then having officials be gratuitously rude to me. I can forgive the Americans the form. (An Austrian once recounted to me his story of being asked the "Are you a Nazi?" question and was quite surprised to discover that I had been asked it too: he had assumed it was just for Austrians and Germans).

A lawyer once told me that these questions were asked because it was easy to have someone deported for making a false declaration, whereas it was quite hard to have someone deported for some of the actions asked about on the form (eg prostitution).

There is a piece by James Fallows in the Atlantic on the US military's Joint Strike Fighter program, giving the history of the race off for the contract between (mainly) Boeing and Lockheed. The point of all this is that the military has traditionally decided what it wants in its hardware, and then has got contractors to build what it wants to exact specifications, almost from scratch, regardless of the cost. This sometimes gets you exactly what you want, and what noboldy else has, but also sometimes ends up with you paying $500 for a toilet seat. In the rest of the economy, generally you are trying to get as much as you can for a given amount of money, and therefore you try to use mass-produced, off the shelf components as much as you can, and you compromise on functionality if you can't afford everything on your wish list.

The JSF is something new, an attempt to take market discipline to an enormous military contract. Fallows wonders if it will work. The winner of the contract was Lockheed, a company that exists to be a defence contractor, and a company with quite frankly an appalling record of cost overruns. This was against Boeing, a company that is at least somewhat used to market discipline, due to its main business being commercial airliners. The decision was made on the basis of Lockheed having a technically better aircraft - having a better solution the short-takeoff vertical landing requirements of the Marines. This is a traditional non-market-based, military decision. This is perhaps a bad sign. Whether Lockheed is the actual company to make the first seriously cost-controlled fighter jet program work remains to be seen.

One of the greatest successes of the old style, define what you want to do and the invent the technology regardless of the costs approach was probably NASA in the 1960s. None of the technology to put a man on the moon existed, so everything was invented at enormous cost. The normal economy wouldn't have invented most of the technology needed for decades, but willpower and resource allocation let it happen. (NASA is a civilian agency, but it has traditionally used the military approach and it is a customer of the same aerospace companies). However, the approach failed in the 1980s and 1990s. Nasa built a collossal white elephant (the Space Shuttle) and then couldn't cope with the resources and the willpower not being there any more. A lot of the technology needed for what NASA wanted to do existed in the civilian economy by this time, but they did not do a good job of adopting technology. NASA adoped an approach called "Better, cheaper, faster" for its space probes in the 1990s, the idea being that rather than deciding what we want to do, inventing the technology and then figuring out what it will cost, we figure out how much money we have, and what technology exists, and then we decide what we can do. This seems good in principle, but as it ended up, generally this meant that such things as proper testing have been cut out and Mars probes have failed. I don't think there is anything wrong with this approach in principle, but NASA's culture didn't seem to be able to cope well with it. I don't know if Lockheed's can cope any better. I hope it can.

Interesting article in the Washington Monthly on the rise of "creative" cities - that is those cities that have the things that young innovative people want to live near, cities that contain amongst other things "a thriving music scene, ethnic and cultural diversity, fabulous outdoor recreation, and great nightlife". (However, there is obviously more to it than that, and the principle thing of course is simply that we are dealing with cities containing lots of other young creative types). Interestingly, of the large cities mentioned, three of the top ten are in Texas: Austin, Houston, and Dallas at 2, 7, and 10. This gets me back to the the question of "Why do so many cool people come from Texas?" that I have addressed previously. We can also make the observation that a city which is famous for its lack of coherent planning (or some would say planning controls of any kind) is attractive to live in. The question of precisely which cities become attractive to live in for these young creative types and why is an interesting one. There is a book to be written on the subject, I suspect.

The list of smaller cities attractive to creative individuals features an impressive number of Southern and Western cities, but interestingly enough we have Allentown, Pennsylvania at number 4, the city most of us know from Billy Joel's

Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line

Other than the fact that cities with lots of layers built over the top of one another are fascinating (especially if a layer or two are industrial), and probably that proximity to Philadelphia and New York is a good thing, what do we make of this? Joel Garreau's Edge City actually referred in passing to Allentown, along the lines of "Unemployment was dropping to 3 percent just as Billy Joel was writing the song". By the way, Edge City is easily the best book I have ever read on why American cities have developed the way they have, and is quite informative about why the American economy is the way it is in general. The book is now 12 years old, but exceptionally worth a read.

It's also interesting to read Sterling's thoughts on Indian movies, in particular:

But! As a necessary consequence of globalization, Bollywood is finding a growing audience inside the USA. I'm one of them. Nothing odd about that -- it's like my wife's fondness for Hong Kong costume dramas, or my daughter's ferocious need for anime cartoons. The question is: as we globalize, is India Westernizing, or is America Indianizing?

(The answer is both , and the consequence of this is that we end up with two cultures that remain distinct from each other, each of which is more complicated than what existed before). This makes me wonder certain things. Firstly, where can I get a wife who loves Hong Kong costume dramas and a daughter who has a ferocious need for anime? (Applications are of course welcome). Secondly, why do so many cool people like Sterling come from Austin, Texas. (A long and involved discussion as to why the
very Americans that European left-wing elites consider to be cowboys and rednecks are in fact much more sophisticated and better educated than the European left-wing elites are should be taken as read here) . Thirdly, and only somewhat related to this, I went to see Monsoon Wedding last week. This contains a lovely portrait of middle class life in Delhi, but is a very conventional film: basically Father of the Bride or (even more
closely) Betsy's Wedding in an Indian setting.

What is interesting of course is that this is the most successful Indian film with English speaking audiences in North America and Europe. It has a certain "We will make a very conventional non-Hollywood movie and put it in art-house cinemas and people who think that Hollywood movies are beneath them will go to see it" quality about it, but it still isn't bad. I still think it is a sign of what is coming, but not perhaps as direct a sign as I had hoped from reading the reviews and feeling the buzz.

To be truthful, given the nature of Indian cinema, I was expecting something a little lusher. Not lusher, necessarily, in terms of the performances or the setting, but lusher in terms of art direction and cinematography. The fact that most of the movie was super 16 Steadicam took me a little by surprise. Super 16 Steadicam worked fine - and gave a little more intimacy to the characters I think, but still, I was expecting something a little more of a genre film. Something a little closer to a musical perhaps, given the nature of a lot of Bollywood's output. That's not to say that Monsoon Wedding is entirely not a musical, but it is largely not a musical. And, amongst other things, Bollywood is about musicals.

Despite this film being not quite what I expected, Indian popular culture is clearly rumbling towards us, and this film is none the less part of it. Indian cinema , and Indian pop culture more generally but mostly Indian cinema, is coming into the western mainstream. "Which country in the world makes the most movies per year?" (India) has long been a Trivial Pursuit question, but it has been little more than that. This was popular culture that until recently fell into the category of There were some things that westerners are not meant to see . Maybe, or perhaps even probably, you can blame this on India's four decades of deliberate economic isolationism. The film output of India has been more or less completely divorced from the rest of the world. The films have not generally been seen outside India, or even in English dubbed or subtitled versions, but this seems suddenly changing. Maybe it is the DVD, and the format's near mandatory subtitles, or the end of Indian "self-reliance", of maybe, just, as Sterling says, just the inevitable spread of globalisation (although I think that's more a way of restating the question than an answer). In any event, things related even tangentially or directly to Bollywood seem to be everywhere. Bookshops suddenly contain novels set in the Indian film industry. A stage musical called "Bombay Dreams", a co-production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and A R Rahman, and set in the Bombay film industry, is playing in the West End stage in London. The British part of the Indian diaspora is suddenly making
movies about the cross cultural Indian/British experience, and they are outgrossing "The Scorpion King" at the UK Box office.

This feels like the way in which we were deluged from a variety of directions by greater Chinese cinema a decade or so ago. Admittedly, Hong Kong film was never quite as isolated from the west as was Indian film, which is fitting, as Hong Kong was (pretty much as its raison detre) never tried anything like self-reliance, and Hong Kong films always found their way into the west in a way that Indian film never did. Film geeks in video stores have at least since the advent of VHS spent far too much time talking about badly subtitled Hong Kong gangster films. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige were suddenly arthouse darlings. A generation of Hong Kong stars suddenly gained at least some recognition in the west (Jackie Chan of course, but also people like Maggie Cheung, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh). Taiwan had produced a few films familiar in the arthouse world, but suddenly there was Ang Lee, an interesting cross cultural Taiwanese/American cross cultural film. Somehow everything seemed to merge together and take over Hollywood. John Woo was making films in Hollywood. Jackie Chan was making hit Hollywood buddy movies. Michaelle Yeoh was the most kick-ass Bond girl in history. Every film being made in Hollywood suddenly had huge Hong Kong influences. Quentin Tarantino had a big yen for all this. The Matrix ripped off everything in sight. More films were made containing Hong Kong action stars in movies that ripped off the Matrix. Ang Lee managed to move with extraordinary adeptness from straight Taiwanese projects (Eat Drink Man Woman most
notably) to Jane Austen to the American Civil War. The language of Hollywood cinema suddenly had Hong Kong's syntax running through the middle of it. Then finally came Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: filmed in mainland China
with Mandarin dialogue, directed by the Lee, the great Taiwanese cross-cultural director, using the conventions of mostly Hong Kong action and starring two great stars of Hong Kong Cinema (Maggie Cheung and Chow Yun Fat) and a mainland Chinese actress discovered by Zhang Yimou. (If there is going to be a break-out star come from all this, maybe it will be Zhang Ziyi. Maggie Cheung speaks much better English, but is probably too old). This film did of course gross an enormous amount of money worldwide and in America, and also received a pile of Oscar nominations. The mixing of Chinese cinema and Hollywood was complete, or at least mature. Hong Kong people and their style of film-making had infiltrated Hollywood.

With India this is a way off I think, but I think it is ultimately coming. And who knows. If we are lucky this will revitalise the musical.
This might be confusing for audiences of those countries that could never cope with the concept of the musical anyway (the Sound of Music was apparently released in South Korea with the songs cut out), but possibly Bollywood has spread the concept further into this part of the world. Maybe not quite to somewhere as traditionally culturally isolated as South Korea, and maybe not to Japan, but certainly everywhere else.

The musical hasn't ever entirely died, even if it seems impossible to actually call a musical a musical. As an example, get the DVD of
My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and count how many times members of the cast burst into song. The film was never promoted as a musical, but it is one.

Of course, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet has moments in which it seems about to veer this way, although given that the main actors were restricted to Shakespearean dialogue, the music could never take over the music. However, in my mind, the choir singing Prince's "When Doves Cry" in this movie was a sublime movie moment. Plus we have had Moulin Rouge, and Evita, and for what it's worth Woody Allen did one too.

As for Sterling's description of Bollywood as being run by gangsters, I think most industries are at some point run by gangsters. Whether Hollywood is run by gangsters or not depends on how you define the term. However, Jet Li and Jackie Chan (and John Woo, and ....) seem to have no trouble working in Hollywood today, whether or not they have past connections with the triads. The point I think is that Hollywood and Wall Street have lawyers and money men who are more than capable of, at a minimum, doing deals with
unsavory people in Hong Kong (and, I suspect, Bombay). Hollywood has more money, and when it comes down to it this is sufficient to draw the talent out of these places and into the more conventional world of Los Angeles. If Wall Street and Hollywood could run the mob out of Vegas, then they can deal with Bollywood.

So here is my prediction, I suppose. Devdas will gain a bigger audience in the west than any Bollywood movie before it, although it will not quite yet be Crouching Tiger. In six or seven years time, directors and stars presently working in Bombay will be making and starring in Hollywood movies. Some time in the next 10 years, a movie made in Hindi will gross more than $100m at the American Box office, and a movie made in Hindi (not necessarily the same one) will be nominated for the Academy award for best picture. Some
time in the next five years, a film directed by someone who made his or her name working in the Indian film industry, will make $50m at the American box office. This might be an American film directed by an Indian, or an Indian film aimed at international audiences. That is, it will either be the Indian Broken Arrow or the Indian Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or the Indian not quite either. But I think we shall see it.

The transcript of Bruce Sterling's speech at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference is really worth a read. There is some good stuff on Bollywood and intellectual property, but the best bit is at the end, on the motivations of the Bush administration, and this is worth reading on its own. This is the bit that starts with

So. After having expressed my partial sympathy for Mr. Eisner's point of view, I'd like to add to your cognitive dissonance by saying some warm and supportive things about the Bush Administration. Because, like a lot of CFP people, I too have been hanging out in Washington with spooks, lately. I've been covering the war. I saw the Pentagon. I saw Ground Zero. By my nature, I'm a whimsical, paradoxical sort of fellow. Those two sights didn't make me a happier guy.

and goes through to the end.