Michael Jennings

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.

The mystery deepens. I am now in Brussels. Here in Brussels, Kissing Jessica Stein is called Kissing Jessica Stein. What this says about the Belgians relative to the Dutch, I don't know. Actually whatever it says it probably actually says it about the French relative to the Dutch, as the movie industry divides the world up into "territories" for distribution and marketing purposes, and these don't necessarily correspond with actual countries. In movie distribution terms, "France" includes the French speaking parts of Belgium, and the French speaking part of Switzerland for that matter. Just as Britain includes Ireland, and Germany includes Austria. And for that matter the United States includes Canada.

I'm presently in Amsterdam. A fine place to be. (Although the PC in this internet cafe has a USB port, I forgot to bring my USB cable with me, so I am unable to attempt to upload any pictures from my digital camera). A weird thing that I saw. The film "Kissing Jessica Stein", which comes from the surprisingly large genre of "New York single young Jewish woman movies", (and which is an okay movie but a little soft in the middle) is being released in the Netherlands under the title "Kissing Jessica". The publicity material is entirely in English, and the poster is exactly the same as the American or British one except that the name "Stein" is missing. Movie distributors are the sorts of people who will do anything (including completely misrepresent what a film is about) if they think there is a chance of making more money, but the fact that they felt the need to downplay Jessica's Jewishness bothers me somewhat. Some of the hardliners in the blogosphere might see this as evidence of rising European antisemitism. I don't know. It is a little bothersome, however.

Here we have the back of the mansion at Bletchley Park. This is the original country house that the first of the codebreakers moved into. Station X was technically only the radio room under the water tank that MI6 used for its agents in the fields. Later in the war, this was moved elswhere due to fears that the Germans would detect the radio communications and attack Bletchley Park, and damage or destroy the codebreaking operations.



The world's first computer was built in this building. Look around, ye mighty, and despair.

This afternoon, I visited the museum at Bletchley Park, just outside Milton Keynes north of London. This is where Alan Turing and an assortment of mathematicians, crossword experts and linguists managed to break many of the German codes during the second world war, thus shortening the war possibly by years. I will get to what I saw in a while, but first I shall digress a little.

There is an article on Spiked (via Arts and Letters Daily about the British Museum's lack of resources, particularly for new acquisitions. I quote

In my view, the current financial restrictions are symptomatic of a broader problem: there is waning enthusiasm for the traditional functions of museums. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has plenty of money to give out, but collecting and interpreting the artefacts of human history is just not where it's at. The museums that get money today are those that play to the new government agenda of social inclusion: running projects to improve self-esteem or reduce prejudice, or using new technologies to increase community participation. There is little support for the idea that objects and knowledge have a value in and of themselves.

This does appear to be about right. The control of money to be spent on museums in recent years has tended to get under the control of publicists and public relations consultants and advertising agents and media studies graduates and management consultants and all sorts of awful people of this ilk. Many new museums seem to have lots of flashing lights and machines that make weird noises and works of art with meaningless symbolism aimed at superficial politically correct points, but there is nothing with any depth to them. You go there and you see lots of school children pushing buttons, but you don't learn anything.

As an example, the Science Museum in London is a wonderful museum. Here you can see a great many of Britain's extraordinary achievements in Science and Technology. Here is Stephenson's Rocket in the middle of the floor. There is a working reconstruction of Babbage's Difference Engine, so you can see how this curious 19th century wrong alley in the history of computing could have
played itself out. Here we learn about electromagnetism: there we learn about light. The museum is organised into sections depending on the general area of science you are dealing with, but it is cluttered enough that wandering around you can hit on something unexpected and wonderful. Good museums have this quality about them. The British Museum has this quality. Tate Britain has this quality.

However, at the back of the museum is the new (well, newish - it was built in the last five years) Wellcome Wing. This consists of lots of flashing lights, buttons to push which cause sentences like "In the future, we max choose the eye colours of our childrem" to flash on the wall, but there is an amazing lack of any substance at all. It's really dreadful. I don't know who was responsible, but they deserve to be have something awful done to them.

Now what is interesting about Bletchley Park is the fact that it has had almost complete neglect from everyone in authority with an agenda. Bletchley Park is a museum on the site of and commemorating events of immense importance. Here is where Alan Turing broke the codes that maybe won the second world war. If he didn't actually win the second world war, he certainly shortened it by years. Even more importantly than that, here is where the computer was invented. The most important invention of the twentieth century was invented here. And yet, somehow the geeks who did this have or had so little honour amongst the people in charge of their own country that the fact that they did it was not even made public until the 1970s. They have so little honour that a group of people trying to raise money for a statue of Turing a couple of years ago had great difficulty doing so. (And of course, the way Turing was treated after the war is a scandal of great magnitude). They have so little honour in fact that now that Bletchley Park, where all this occurred, is a museum, the museum itself receives no public money at all. The trust in charge of it a couple of years ago applied for some money from the profits of the British national lottery that are supposedly reserved for "good causes" but was refused. Organisations such as the National Trust and English Heritage have nothing to do with it either, because it is too far removed from the sorts of things they normally look after.

What we do have, however, is a museum that is run be volunteers, and was put together by people who really do care about it. There are rooms and rooms full of Enigma machines, descriptions of how German and Japanese codes worked in great detail, discussions of how you can reduce the difficulty of breaking cryptographic systems, descriptions of the battles which were won because of intercepted communications. You enter the place and you are greeted warmly and repeatedly by people manning the exhibits who want to talk to you about it for hours. You go on the guided tour and the guide explains to you how Turing was one of the great men of the 20th century and gives the impression that he takes it as a personal affront that not everyone feels that way. Although a lot of the equipment actually used to break codes (including Colossus, the world's first computer) were destroyed by the ultra-secretive British after the war, a lot of them have been reconstructed to working order. (Because of the momentousness of what was achieved at Bletchley Park, it is clearly possible to draw on some impressive expertise for some of this, even if the museum doesn't have any money). There are various interesting bits and pieces related to code making.

In the war, Bletchley Park started out as a country house, and huts were built around it to house more and more people as the scale of the operation grew. At its peak, there were 12000 people working there. Thus, if people or organisations with an enthusiasm for world war II related issues of any kind, or geeky pursuits of any kind wish to set up their own museums or exhibits, there is plenty of space to house them. Lots of geeky or technical people come through to look at the code breaking stuff, and by the way, here is all this other geeky stuff to look at too.

Thus we have exhibits of 1940s era toys, an exhibition of Churchill Memorabilia, a model railway exhibit, a museum on the history of computing - some minicomputer stuff - plus lots of 1970s vintage micros I hadn't seen for a while. A collection of WWII uniforms. A cinema full of lots of classic projectors and film sound systems. Lots of interesting stuff, but nothing really extraordinary. However, what is extraordinary is that the (largely amateur) people who have put together their "history of computers" exhibit can put it in a location where you can say that "By the way, the first computer in the world was built in the next room". This stuff is really good. The people who built it know about it and care about it. In aggregate, it is the sort of museum where you are constantly finding, weird, wonderful and hugely educational stuff as you walk through it.

It may not always remain like this. Until a couple of years ago, interest was such that Bletchley Park was only open to the public every second Sunday. Since then, it has increased to every Sunday, and then to every Saturday and Sunday, and it is now open on weekdays in the afternoons (for just one tour a day, and just for the codebreaking exhibits). Clearly this is a response to the wartime activities at Bletchley Park having been publicised in recent years, by Simon Singh, by Neal Stephenson, by Robert Harris, and by the movie of his book, but it is clear that slowly Britain has woken up to the importance of what happened there. Eventually the government will notice and the museum will find it has more funding and it will become a serious national museum, I suspect. Hopefully the trust that runs it will then be strong enough to prevent the place being trivialised, taken over by public relations consultants, and becoming uninteresting. They might, I think. There is a lot of enthusiasm there, and a lot of substance there, which won't go away easily.

American Prospect's blog and the Star Tribune via Instapundit discuss the fact that the US Senate has passed a law allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs imported from Canada, where they are cheaper. However, the Bush administration will not carry out this plan

because it would endanger public health.... Opponents argue that such drugs could be tampered with, thus posing serious health risks. Senators added a provision to the bill that requires the secretary of health and human services (HHS) to certify that drug re-importation poses "no additional risk to the public's health and safety" and will result in a "significant reduction" in cost U.S. consumers.

Arguing that imported products are of lower quality or do not satisfy local safety regulations or something like that and therefore should not be allowed is of course one of the oldest tricks in the "I'm not a protectionist but..." book of tricks. But what is curious is how similar these "Opponents of..." sound just like politicians who have been bought by the music industry in my native Australia. Several years ago the Australian government passed a law making parallel imports of CDs legal: it is fine for people to buy CDs legally in any foreign country, import them into Australia, and then resell them. Previously only importers authorised by the copyright holder could do this. The record companies just hate this, and their cosy monopoly profits have been eroded. Rather than attempt to defend their distribution monopoly directly, their principal tactic in opposing this has been to insist that it will lead to enormous numbers of pirate CDs being imported into the country.

As far as prescription drugs are concerned, I do not know why the drugs companies, who I really have very little against, want to copy the tactics of organisations as morally bankrupt as the record companies. There actually are serious issues at stake here. If you have countries with radically different intellectual property laws, then it may be justified in prohibiting parallel imports from them. In the case of drugs, countries in the third world are going to be declaring emergencies and manufacturing drugs cheaply under compulsory licenses. It isn't appropriate to allow parallel imports of these drugs into the developed world. However, there is no good justification at all for banning parallel imports from Canada, Japan or Germany. If the drug companies try to do this and so manage to weaken their moral position, they are going to find it much harder to walk the tightrope they need to with respect to Brazil, South Africa and India.

An odd thought. from time to time (such as this afternoon) I sit in Starbucks with my laptop and work on the book I am writing. Starbucks are good, as there are usually power 0utlets in their stores where I can plug in my laptop and recharge its battery while I am working. (I am not sure if it is company policy to provide these, but I suspect so). I buy a coffee, sit down, plug in my laptop and work for two or three hours. In this time, I do not normally get up and have another coffee. This is not because I am cheap - although I am - but is simply because I do not wish to leave my laptop unattended while I get up and buy a coffee. Picking up the laptop, walking to the counter, buying a coffee and then sitting it back down again is simply too much hassle, and if I do this I face the risk of losing the table next to the power outlet to someone else.

Every now and then, a staff member comes along and takes away the empty cups. What I would like is for this person to ask me if I want another coffee, take my money, and then bring me another coffee. Yes, I know that I am asking for waiter service, and Starbucks is a company that minimises staff costs by not providing waiter service. However, what is needed is a sort of limited waiter service which only applies to people having a second or third coffee, or even only applies to people using laptops. What we need is an arrangement where people walk in, buy their first coffee, sit down, and then are waited on from time to time after that. I think the additional staff costs of this would be fairly minimal, and they would certainly sell more coffee to people like me. They have already gone out of their way to be laptop friendly with the power outlets (and the 802.11 wireless networks in some places) and surely this is just a small way to take it further.

I suspect the problem would be that if you offer some table service, then customers would rapidly expect you to offer full table service to everyone and nobody would ever come to the counter. Still, it's a thought.

Why am I linking to the National Post of Canada so much lately.(Well, this is twice). But anyway, here is another "Buffy is such a wonderful television program" article. These are a bit passe at this point, but they are true. (Buffy is wonderful). Really perceptive people at least figured out that Buffy was something special by the time of the "Angel goes bad" story arc in season 2 in 1997. Really, really perceptive people figured it in season one. There weren't many of them, but at least I was watching the program.

We have John Underkoffler, formerly of the MIT Media Lab interviewed in Salon, about the vision of the future in Minority Report. In particular

Of all the technological advancements showcased in the film, how much of this stuff actually exists or is in the early stages of development?

Underkoffler: I would say a surprisingly large fraction. Almost an astoundingly large fraction. The mag-lev cars, for example. Although we don't have mag-lev technology that works on vertical surfaces, mag-lev technology has been around for many decades, spearheaded by professor Eric Laithwaite, who died not too long ago. And, of course, in Japan and Europe you have mag-lev trains. The nonlethal weapons are all variants or extrapolations of currently existing or under-development technology. It would be hard to identify anything that had no grounding in reality. I think that was very much by design.

I think by this he means that they took things that currently exist and then extrapolated them a little bit. There is nothing really out there, and this is why the film looks so pedestrian. That is what happens when you create a thinktank. The results are boring, even if it is a think tank of smart people like the Media Lab or GBN , both of which contain people I respect. To get something really out there, you need creative, obsessive, and somewhat antisocial people on their own. Like Philip K Dick. Or even Ridley Scott. I just don't think that Spielberg and the people around him have the sensibility of Dick, at all. Oddly, I think that Cruise's previous film Vanilla Sky had a much more Dickian sensibility than did Minority Report: besides the fact that Dick's favourite two questions (What is real? and What is human?) are central to that film, there's a scene in the middle of it which is lifted right out of A Scanner Darkly. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's Abre Les Ojos. Amenabar seems fond of stuff with a Dickian bent: I think it is there in The Others too, although that is in a genre somewhat removed from Dick. I wouldn't mind seeing Amenabar tackling something from Dick directly. That could be very interesting.

Paul Palubicki (pointed out by asparagirl ) thinks that our enemies in this war are a bunch of "half-retarded conspiracy theorists" and we need to mock them a lot more. Mark Steyn in the National post is doing quite a good job of it. (Well he starts off making fun of the media and the FBI, but really gets going by the end of the article).