rub2neurons

Meanwhile, back in the real world of blogging ...

2009-03-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Where to begin?

There is a hint in the rather surreal cartoon above. We lost our telephone wires in the big storm in January, and that took ten days to get restored. Then, because the repair was temporary, and the wires sagged lower than usual, a local farmer drove through them with a large and tall agricultural machine.

OK, so call the provider from a friend's phone and get it sorted, right? Um, no. Actually, this could have been funny.

Our provider is Alice, part of Tiscalli. They buy capacity from France Telecom and flog services on as an independent. You probably know the kind of thing. Part of their contract with France Telecom is that they take over the maintenance of the line, by, err, paying France Telecom to fix it when it goes wrong. But they have to call in FT. You can't do that; you can only deal with Alice.

Well, first the funny part (this all takes place in French of course):

"Hello Alice, there is a problem with the line - it's broken"

"OK, are you standing by your modem?"

"Err, not exactly, I'm 6 km away, calling from a friend's house, because our line is down"

"Yes, but I can't help you unless you are standing by your modem and reboot it and tell me which lights are on"

"No, I don't think you quite understand, I've seen the line, it's on the ground, and it is in two halves"

"Are you standing by your modem yet?"

"Just a sec, yes, OK, I'm standing by my modem". I think, dear reader, you will grasp that this lie was necessary to move on.

"Good, OK, switch it off and on and tell me what you see"

"I see an error light, because the line is on the ground and broken in two"

... Now I have to tell you that this pantomime went on for ten times longer than I depict it. In the end, after divine intervention, the baton was passed to someone in technical who, after more of the above (I swear it), did a remote test and declared "Oh, your line seems to be broken".

Hooray! They agreed that it would be fixed that week (this was Monday evening).

It was not. More calls. Apparently someone from Alice had been to inspect the site and had declared that the line was down and in two pieces (I though that we had told them that ...).

So what next?

Ah, well according to their service agreement with FT, the line would be fixed before the end of week 2.

Except it was not. (In brackets, hello, is this a first world country or what?)

Further calls to Alice became more and more weird. Their computers were down, our account was blocked, no sorry, it and a number of others were subject to some review which means that they could not be serviced for a while. How long? Well, a while. Etc etc etc.

Now you need to think about this for a bit (I know I have). Ninety nine times out of 100, Alice doesn't need to lift a finger. If a line goes wrong, it will affect FT customers too, so they will have to come in and fix it at their own expense.

But we fall into the 1% (or 0.1%) of cases where the line comes to us, alone. Or at least the last kilometer or two - a small section is shown below as it marches towards chez nous.

And I slowly began to realise that they weren't going to fix our line. Not now, not ever. They were simply, and cynically, waiting until we got so pissed off that we would leave them and rejoin FT, who could then fix the line at their own expense.

I have to say that the realisation stunned me, but I'm convinced I'm right. There is still a 1/2 kilometer of damage from the storm and it will cost hundreds to put right. Or about the revenue from 3 or 4 years of our contract with Alice.

We were in the shit and they were happy to leave us there. Call FT? Tried - "Sorry, you have to take that up with Alice".

So I got an extremely long ladder, put on a fluorescent jacket, climbed up the effing pole (we're talking 4-5 meters here), joined the two ends of the cable using household connectors, went back to the house, fired up the modem, and had working telephone and internet.

Since we still had no word from Alice a week later, we called out of sheer curiosity. Well, they said, the line is working so one of our technicians must have fixed it. Any details of the above on our computer file? Well, no, but clearly it had been fixed, so our problem was ...?

How about the 1/2 kilometer of line that is still trailing along the ground? You want it raised? Fine we'll raise it, but at your expense.

Well, thanks a bunch Alice, and may you all rot in hell, and with no internet to make your punishment even harsher.

So there we are.

I guess that we will simply have to change to FT and after a decent interval tell them that, surprise surprise, our line is on the ground and please come and fix it.

Footnote.

Blogging is a habit, I've realised, albeit a nice one. It has been really quite difficult to return to it after such a break. But I'm sure I'll get back into the swing of things. Anyway, lots of nice catching up on all your lovely blogs to look forward to.

Broken Britain

2009-02-15T12:48:00.000-08:00

A journalist's catchphrase, and not the economic crisis this time but a depressing if familiar story about teenage pregnancy.

The dad is 13-year-old Alfie Patten, and the mother is his 15-year-old 'girlfriend', Chantelle Stedman. Or alleged dad, since two other lads have now come forward saying that they too have had intercourse with Chantelle - who was just 14 when she became pregnant.

The part that depressed me most is not the particular case - it is unusual only in that Alfie is so young - but that lack of critical thinking in our politicians and those who craft our social policies.

Let me digress ever so slightly to mention Signal Detection Theory by Tanner and Swets, which was the product of research done at Bell Labs in the 50s. They looked at the problem of detecting a weak signal in the presence of noise and they reached an important conclusion. If you wanted to detect most of the signals, you would also generate a lot of false alarms. If you wanted to avoid false alarms, you would miss many signals. It's a law of nature and you can't avoid its consequences.

So consider social policy. If you will put up with a lot of discomfort (moral, social, financial) around teenage pregnancy, you would have few of them. If you protect those teenagers from the consequences of their pregnancies, you will have more of them.

If you are willing to allow unemployment to be unpleasant, you will have more people willing to work. If you cushion unemployment, you will end up with more people out of work.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't like people to suffer, not at all. But what I don't like is policies crafted without both sides of this equation being looked at. And it's not even that the policies we do have prevent suffering. Both families are completely dysfunctional. Alfie's dad seems to have had nine children, every one I believe by different partners. Chantelle's family seems to have condoned the two of them sleeping together. And now we have a new poor innocent entry into the dysfunctional stakes. This child is not going to have a good life. For a start, I wouldn't leave her alone in a room with her father for five minutes.

Matt Dunkley, director of children's services at East Sussex County Council, said: "Any birth to parents this young is a cause of great concern to us and in these circumstances we will always offer substantial support to the families involved". Well, that's nice of course, but let's just rephrase that as "We will make sure that the individuals concerned and shielded from the consequences of their behaviour".

There have been the usual bleatings about sex education. Frankly that has nothing to do with it. When I was that age we had virtually none, but we also had no intercourse and no pregnancy.

And shame, regret, remourse, guilt ....?

Not a dot as far as one can tell. It's a pity. I don't know where the idea has sprung from that guilt is a bad thing. It is the surest sign that you do actually have a superego and that you have a modicum of maturity.

Living on the edge

2009-02-07T01:37:00.000-08:00

Living on the edge ... something we all do every day it seems, whether we realise it or not.

We had a severe storm in SW France recently - high winds which did a lot of damage. Hundreds of thousands of homes were without (a) electricity and hence (b) water, since the pump stations could not function and (c) telephone, so no access to the god Google.

Everything stopped, and it made me wonder just how small the calamity would have to be to wipe much of mankind off the map.

How many days supply of food and water is there in a city like Paris? (Or London, New York or Calcutta). Two days? Three? Five? How long would it take for crazed millions to start pouring out of those cities and into the countryside?

And paradoxically, though I guess obviously, the less technology you have, the less you are affected.

For example, no electricity means no heat for most people, since the electronics and pumps in heating systems stop working. However, for us, heat means a wood-burning stove, so it was business as usual.

It's a bit limited, but we can use the top of the same stove as a cooking hob.

Water pressure started to drop almost immediately after the storm, as water towers began to empty. It wasn't long before we needed to collect and drink water from our "source", a spring that is in a cave directly under our house.

Therefore we were luckier than many. However, no running water means no flushing toilets, no baths and no showers, and it wasn't many days before I would have parted with a large denomination banknote in exchange for a soak and a hair-wash.

Anyway, services were restored in a few days, except for our comprehensively thrashed telephone line - got that back in 10 days. I like the pragmatism of the telephone engineers. There's about half a kilometer of line down (three or four separate trees came down on it), but they've repaired the break on the line as it lies there, forlornly, and will string it up later when they have more time.

So there you have it. Our predecessors, who have lived here since the 12th century, would have noticed little different after the storm, apart from a few trees down. For us modern types, life suddenly became a whole lot more challenging.

It does not bode well, methinks.

On a more cheerful note, no heat, light or computer = heading off to the Pyrenees for a few day's skiing. Nothing remarkable about that, except for the charming honesty of rural France. We stayed in a tiny hotel for two nights, car parked on the street outside with five pairs of skis on top (just held by those elastic things) and not a worry in the world that they might disappear.

Profiting from the misery of others

2009-01-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

George Soros

My wife was visiting friends in the UK recently. Mary, an active investor, asked how my investing was going (we've swapped info and opinion on stocks going back to before the dot com thing). My wife replied that these days I was mostly trading currencies. At which point Roger, the husband, launched into a tirade pretty well blaming me, and if not me, then others like me, for global financial misery, and damned me for profiting from the same.

Wow. Well I was quite flattered really. I was also surprised by his ignorance (I know the man has a PhD, but that doesn't mean he's stupid).

I wondered how many people think like him, so I decided to flesh the thing out a little in case (a) you think as he does or (b) you are vaguely interested.

The first thing to grasp is that you don't just buy or sell pounds. Currencies are always traded in pairs. If you "sell" the pound, you are buying dollars, or yen, or another currency.

But you have already done this when you go on holiday. If you go to the States, you may think you are exchanging your money, but you are actually selling pounds and buying dollars. And vice versa, if you have any dosh left at the end of your holiday.

In a way, all transactions are based on pairs. The shirt manufacturer is selling shirts and buying pounds, exactly the inverse of the M&S buyer, who is selling pounds and buying shirts.

Which brings me round to reciprocity. There are always two sides to the transaction. It's not as if you somehow sell your dollars into a big dollar warehouse somewhere. When you sell dollars (and buy pounds) someone around the globe has just bought your dollars and sold you their pounds.

So where do evil speculators come in? It's hard to see. From the above you will understand that I can't just "dump" pounds. Someone, somewhere, will be buying them with exactly the same enthusiasm as I am selling them. Reciprocity.

Sure, if there are lots of pounds because Gordon is running the printing presses day and night, or folks think that UK plc is stuffed, then someone won't want to give up their dollars for them quite so readily, and can only be persuaded to do so if you chuck in a few extra quid. And in this way the pound falls against the dollar.

Am I an evil speculator? Well I try and anticipate the direction of a move. If I believe that the pound will lose value against the dollar, I will sell pounds (and buy dollars) and later buy back those pounds using fewer dollars and keep the difference -- but only if I'm right. Otherwise, it is I, the evil speculator, who will have to buy back those pounds for more dollars than I originally got for them, and I lose! (And my opposite number wins). It's a zero sum game.

M&S does exactly the same thing. If the price of shirts moves against them, when they come to buy pounds by selling shirts, they will get fewer pounds than they may have parted with originally. They lose.

But can speculators move markets? Not really. About $4 trillion is traded daily around the globe. That's a lot of money. Consider that the war in Iraq has "only" cost half a trillion so far ... So no individual or organisation short of a government could swing a forex market. And even governments can't as John Major found to his cost: Black Wednesday, 1992.

They were frantically buying pounds and selling foreign exchange to prop up the "value" of the pound. George Soros was happily selling them pounds and buying their foreign exchange - he was simply the other side of the zero-sum game. The government got very cross with Soros, but in effect handed him a $1 billion profit. The overall loss to the UK was about $6 billion

If they were really smart they would have sold the pound too. History shows that they could then have bought it back later at a cheaper rate and the billions in profit would have come back to the hard-pressed UK taxpayer.

No, I'm not taking the piss, I mean it.

Men behaving fondly

2009-01-07T04:45:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year, well a bit past it, when we celebrate the seeing out of the old and in with the new. We went around to be with french friends. They do know how to party. It takes a lot to get me dancing, which is just as well.

As the last minutes ticked down to midnight there was a fair amount of joshing by the blokes, rubbing each others' faces and muttering about piqué from badly shaved cheeks. The clock struck and everyone kissed everyone. With 15 people I guess that makes it 210 embraces in all.

Now I know I have blogged about (the) french kissing elsewhere, nevertheless I must reiterate that

(a) I find kissing other men strange; however
(b) I find kissing other men strangely pleasant

It is so warm and affirming to have full contact rough cheek-to-cheek smacking kisses with your chums (none of your effete Parisian air-kissing mwahs down here in the Dordogne). And all without affectation or selfconsciousness.

We don't do this often, bloke to bloke (New Year's eve, winning or losing at rugby, funerals, close family etc) but it is a very good way of bonding and something that more reserved cultures have lost to their cost.

[Added later - good gried, that was a bit of a Freudian slip. I wrote "And all without affection or selfconsciousness". I meant of course affectation - affection is definitely allowed].

I mean, how likely is that?

2008-12-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

What with Christmas coming up, and trying to get bedrooms and bathrooms finished for the daughters, there has not been much time for blogging. So here is a pretty silly post.

This goes back to my undergraduate days (how nice to know I wasn't wasting my time, or those scraps of intelligence assigned to me).

It concerns two sentences that say the same thing, but both using completely different words. They are also both alliterative. Which prompts my "How likely is that?". Can anyone come up with two others??

Excuse the language; faint hearted readers may wish to look away.

"Fucked by the filthy finger of fate"
"Doodled by the dirty digit of destiny"

And you can look back now.

Two other snippets concern graffiti in the toilets at University College London. Someone wrote this:

"Being an anarchist means you can spel any way you like".
A day or two later someone, rather wittily in my opinion, added:
"OK, let's start with anarchshit then".

The other bit of graffiti that I thought was pretty good was a scribble above the toilet roll holder, with a sign pointing down. "Sociology degrees - please help yourself".

Well, I was a psychology postgraduate, so I was clearly prejudiced.

Anyway, have a really good break and a happy Christmas or whatever else you would like to celebrate.

Hawks and Doves

2008-12-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

This post is written with the previous post, on crime and punishment, in mind. There were many interesting comments which ranged from "and eye for an eye" through to education of the criminals, and then the need to understand bad behaviour with a view to preventing it in the first place.

This got me thinking. As a preamble, let me pose a question; one that exercises me from time to time. It is this: "Why do the wicked prosper?"

OK, maybe that's put a bit baldly, but in more general terms, why, when most of us are good and cooperative, do some people take advantage, hoodwink, steal, assault? Why do we find that a consistent fraction of the population are psychopathic; the real "undead" who walk among us?

[Psychopaths should not be confused with psychotics. The latter are insane, while the former lack any conscience and have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people for their own ends, and are the ones who can torture and kill without qualm. They constitute 1% or 2% of the population, and good at masking what they are.]

And to answer my own question, could it be that (just as virtue does) wickedness brings its own rewards?

Let's fast forward to Hawks and Doves, a simulation first devised by the biologist John Maynard-Smith in 1973, and which is based on Game Theory. Simple though the rules are, I think it has something to tell us about social conflict.

Though the simulation is called Hawks and Doves, you can't tell from looking at the participants what they are - just as in real life a thief or a psychopath looks like you or me. The name derives from their aggressive or non-aggressive behaviour.

How does it work. Well imagine a population of Doves. Maybe a bit like the 12 disciples, but multiplied up a bit. Every now and then two of these Doves will compete over a resource, but since they won't fight the chances of either winning is 50:50, and they never have to bear the cost of injury.

Now add to this mix a mutation. We have our first Hawk, someone who is quite prepared to fight over a resource. What happens? Well, sad but true, it's a bit of a no-brainer; the bugger wins all the time, since no Dove will actually fight. Plus he never bears the cost of injury. So he is very successful.

Now what, in biological terms, does this mean? It means that he reproduces like crazy and pretty soon we see a lot more Hawks in the population. That doesn't mean they take over the world though.

As the proportion of Hawks increases so the probability of a Hawk meeting a Hawk becomes greater and greater. Now there will be a fight. Sure, each Hawk in a Hawk-Hawk conflict will win half the time on average, just as a Dove does in a Dove-Dove conflict. However the Hawk now has a cost that no Dove has: injury.

So there you have it, all the elements for a simulation (there is one other element, posturing, which carries a cost too, but it doesn't add much to this discussion).

- the reward value of the resource
- the cost of injury
- the proportion of Hawks and Doves and how this evolves

The mathematics behind the simulation is not complicated and for given costs and rewards, which you can manipulate, the population will stabilise at a given proportion of Hawks and Doves.

What I find thought provoking about the simulation is that wickedness does not need an explanation. Or rather, the explanation is that bad behaviour exists, not because baddies are ignorant or poorly educated, but because being bad is actually quite a successful strategy. In fact, the thing that holds the proportion of baddies down is simply the cost of injury (which you could treat symbolically as a fine or time in the stocks or behind bars).

But you always find baddies. Every time the simulation is run, the outcome is the same. Turning the other cheek, is, alas, not a philosophical gesture to a baddie, it is just an injury-free reward.

Are the rules too simple to apply to real life? Perhaps. Which is not to say that there are no lessons to be learnt. And complex behaviour can spring from very simple rules as John Horton Conway showed with his now famous Game of Life.

The following may or may not be true, but they follow from the above:

- badness is not an aberration; it exists because it is a viable strategy
- like the poor, it will always be with us
- but you can lessen its incidence by increasing the cost of injury or its symbolic equivalence

Crime and punishment

2008-11-30T07:34:00.000-08:00

I don't have much sympathy for Islamic Sharia law, but a recent case has me thinking again.

The setting is Iran, and it concerns a young woman who had spurned the approaches of a man. His response was to throw acid in her face which has left her disfigured and blind. You can read about it here.

Under the Sharia code of qias or equivalence the victim can ask that the guilty party be punished in a like manner. The court accepted her plea and the man has been sentenced to be blinded by acid, though I don't believe that the punishment has yet been carried out.

This seems barbaric, but then so was the attack, and it is far too common in the middle east and asia. The acid is usually battery acid, and thus very easy to get hold of, and it is not the sort of attack you can carry out without premeditation.

These are the kinds of injury that commonly occur. The photograph is of a different woman, injured by her husband after they were divorced.

Other recent attacks have been on schoolgirls in Afghanistan, whose only crime is that they want to go to school.

In the West we would argue that violence is an inappropriate response to violence, or that such punishment reduces the state to the level of the criminal. But should we be liberal and intellectual about such crimes? These men are absolute bastards. Is there an argument for an eye for an eye?

Warning! Falling pounds. Hard hats must be worn

2008-11-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

For anyone who lives in the UK or who still has pounds (me, alas), the money markets have an interesting message right now. The pound is shite. Gordon and his friends are busy screwing it, big time. Well, no surprise there. When you force the tax payer to become a shareholder in failing businesses, and buy up dodgy assets in the process of recapitalising careless banks, then something's gotta give. And it is the currency.

Now you may have a poor image of the forex market. But you have to respect its lack of sentiment. If you start printing money, and generally piss on the economy, the speculators (and the serious dealers too) will dump your currency like last night's bad curry. You don't have to like the markets to recognise they are always right. Seriously.

OK, so let's cut to the chase. This is what the pound looks like against the dollar. Down means the pound is falling relative to the dollar.

Those brave enough might like to click for a larger view.

Now on the face of it, this is quite a strange outcome. I mean, what with the USA being the home of subprime and all that, why is it our currency that's f*cked and not theirs? Well, right now folks want out of equities and pretty well every other damned thing, and want to hold cash. And the cash they want to hold is the good old greenback. So its price is high.

But hold on. That's not the whole story, and not enough of an excuse for Gordon. Look at how the pound is doing against the euro. Up, in this case, means the euro is doing well and the pound is doing badly.

And as you can see, the pound is pants against the euro.

When your government tells you they are doing what it takes, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Fairies at work

2008-11-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

Two wonderful "fairy rings" of mushrooms have appeared in our meadow. Here is a picture of one of them, with oval added by me to illustrate the regularity of the growth.

While they are a natural feature of mushroom growth, there is still uncertainty about exactly how they come about.

They bring with them a rich tapestry folk-lore. From Wiki:

A great deal of folklore surrounds fairy rings. Their names in European languages often allude to supernatural origins; they are known as ronds de sorciers ("sorcerers' rings") in France, and hexenringe ("witches' rings") in German. In German tradition, fairy rings were thought to mark the site of witches' dancing on Walpurgis Night, and Dutch superstition claimed that the circles show where the Devil set his milk churn.

In the Tyrol, folklore attributed fairy rings to the fiery tales of flying dragons; once a dragon had created such a circle, nothing but toadstools could grow there for seven years. European superstitions routinely warned against entering a fairy ring. French tradition reported that fairy rings were guarded by giant bug-eyed toads that cursed those who violated the circles. In other parts of Europe, entering a fairy ring would result in the loss of an eye.

Scandinavian and Celtic traditions claimed that fairy rings are the result of elves or fairies dancing. Such ideas dated to at least the mediæval period; The Middle English term elferingewort ("elf-ring"), meaning "a ring of daisies caused by elves' dancing" dates to the 12th century. In his History of the Goths (1628), Olaus Magnus makes this connection, saying that fairy rings are burned into the ground by the dancing of elves.]

British folklorist Thomas Keightley noted that in Scandinavia in the early 20th century, beliefs persisted that fairy cirlces (elfdans) arose from the dancing of elves. Keightley warned that while entering an elfdans might allow the interloper to see the elves—although this was not guaranteed—it would also put the intruder in thrall to their illusions.

Anyway, I have taken my life into my hands and entered the ring and harvested a goodly few mushrooms.

My family and friends regard me as slightly reckless because I do eat wild fungi, but actually I go for those that are easy to identify with a low probability of confusion. These are Field Blewits; very good to eat. They have a lilac-hued foot which is a pretty good clue.

I picked a small fraction of what is out there, but filled most of this bucket. These are for drying and storing so we can use them during the winter.

I often think about our ancestors at times like these. Things that are fun for us - roasting chestnuts, harvesting walnuts, drying mushrooms, even making wine - were probably a matter of considerable importance for them for survival.

After all, a whole winter to get through and no supermarket a few kilometers away.

Windowsill Toad

2008-10-30T00:54:00.001-07:00

Windowsill Toad. Sounds like it could be a popgroup, or a fairly secure password. But she is actually a toad (well, I don't know, but I feel she is a she):

Windowsill Toad gets her name from the following. Of an evening she climbs up about six of these steps to get to our kitchen window. There the light streams out and attracts insects. And she catches the insects.

She's big, but small compared to the steps. And toads don't jump. They do an exaggerated four legged crawl, Gollum-like.

I sometimes wonder if she is daunted by her task, which feels about as tough as salmon leaping upstream. If she is, she never shows it. You may feel a bit skeptical, but I kid you not, she is a character.

(If you haven't already done so, click the pic and you will be rewarded with a better view of her kindly face).

Afraid of the free market? Err ... why?

2008-10-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

Afraid of the free market? Personally, I'm afraid of the opposite.

I could leave it at that, but I think the concept of the free market is under a lot of pressure right now, pressure that may be undeserved. And maybe a bad time is a good time to scrutinise this.

And wow, is this a bad time. The world order is in an uncomfortable state ... I for one have considered that my money would actually be better off under the mattress.

You may have seen the posts of various bloggers who are concerned too, and who have picked different facets from the chaos (the greed/need contrast crops up more than once):

like this one from janelle where she highlights the case of a Belgian banker walking out of a disaster with millions of euros in his back pocket
or this one from family affairs who describes how the employees of the failed Lehman Brothers are nevertheless going to get their bonuses paid by Nomura
or this from bush mummy in which her friend Gav, surviving a cancer operation, hits out at inequity: "when I run the world we will swap nurses' and bankers' salaries over..."

You will have seen more of the same. No one, I suspect, has trouble identifying with their sentiments.

But when we look at the financial turmoil of the world right now are we really seeing the results of greed, unbridled capitalism and the failings of free markets?

I'm not so sure. And I (brave, stupid or both) intend to try and make my case here.

Let's take the case of senior executives leaving failing enterprises with fat severance cheques, lovely index-linked pensions and the like.

What are we seeing? We are seeing civil contracts being honoured. When they were hired, the shareholders represented by the boards were so keen to have these individuals that they gave them very attractive contracts, including severance terms should those contracts be prematurely terminated.

While that might stick in the craw, the fact is the world would be a whole lot worse off if people could, at their whim, fail to honour contracts. This would affect us all - buying and selling houses, making an insurance claim, replacing something under guarantee ...

If the other party could just say, "Sorry things have changed and I now have a poor opinion of you, so I'm not going to pay up" then we would really be in the shit.

Are they greedy? Well, maybe, but that's another matter. Keep the money, give it to charity, that's up to the executives concerned. But honouring contracts is central to civilised life.

How about swapping the salaries of bankers and nurses?

Well, that's an interesting idea and one that has already been tried (I'll come to that). The new state would not last long. Why? Because you would have the worst paid bankers in the world and the best paid nurses in the world. The bankers would go and do other things (the resulting shortage would have their salaries bid up in no time) while the nursing profession would be flooded by incomers (the resulting oversupply would have their salaries crash in no time).

I said it had been tried.

Time Out is a what's on magazine established by Tony Elliot in 1968, originally as a London Guide. In a fit of egalitarianism everyone was originally paid exactly the same wage. He said (it was his words I borrowed, above) "We had the worst paid journalists in London and the best paid cleaners". The journalists could not wait to leave, while the premises were besieged by frantic wannabe cleaners. It did not last long.

The only alternative is to have the state legislate that your salary shall be X while you, yes you over there, your salary shall be Y.

Thanks, but no thanks. Not a world I want. (It too has already been tried).

The fact is that in a free market people are paid what they are worth, no more and no less. No legislation is needed; it is automatically regulated by supply and demand. Bankers are paid outrageously precisely because (a) not many people have their skills and (b) not many people would like the demanding life style.

But, hey, there's no closed shop. If you want a banker's salary, don't bitch about it, go for it. And see if you like it.

One of my daughters is in the City. She's crammed all her life - GCSEs, slogging to get the A levels results that allowed her to be selected for Cambridge, four years at Cambridge slogging her guts out to get the first she needed to have a chance of getting a training contract by the right kind of corporate law firm, two more years at law college, another training year in the firm (she's at that stage now), nights and weekends mean nothing - the firm gets first call on those hours ... and then, in a year or two, yes, she will be on a six-figure salary. You want all that? Really? I don't.

Result - very little supply, unmet demand, huge salary. It's not rocket science.

Or you can be a nurse. A lot of people want to do it. A lot of people can do it. Therefore it does not pay very well.

So it's not unfairness, or greed, or altruism, or someone manipulating something. Nurses may be saints and bankers may be wankers. But there are, apparently, more saints than wankers. QED.

What about the free market and its failings?

Problem is, markets are seldom free. Consider oil and its yo yo pricing that has been a pain for all of us. The exact opposite to a free market. OPEC is a cartel, sets prices and production quotas and then polices its members to make sure they stick to it.

Another, exact opposite to a free market example: agricultural production, and the obscenity of groaning surpluses in one part of the world and starvation in another. Western governments guarantee prices so there is no market feedback to the producer. In a free market, a grain surplus would lead to falling prices which would have two positive effects - poor countries would benefit from the falling price and farmers would switch to other outputs so that the surplus would self-correct. We hit poor countries again by imposing quotas and otherwise making it difficult for them to sell to us (even though you and I may want their products).

Banks. The exact opposite to a free market. Heavily regulated, unable to set their own interest rates (base rates are set by central banks/governaments), operate on a fractional reserve system which has been passed into law by our governments - which means they actually can't pay us if there is a run on a bank; even in good times!

Don't get me wrong. Many banks have behaved like arses and exposed themselves to enormous risk.

So do we punish them by allowing them to fail?

Nope. We guarantee deposits and nationalise them to recapitalise them and punish our tax-payers twice. First, by making citizens shareholders (whether they will or whether they won't) of some pretty dodgy enterprises. Second by hitting the value of their savings by printing money to make up the loss of liquidity.

And by the way, where did all this risk arise? Well in the UK trillions are being lost in the housing market. The banks lend money against assets (land and buildings). When people default, the banks have found that they can no longer cover themselves because the asset value has fallen. This is why sub-prime is such a panic. The shortfall is huuuuuuge.

But the housing market has been, yep, the exact opposite to a free market. For years various governments pushed people into house ownership by giving them tax breaks on mortgages, but no tax breaks on rent payments. Then they choked off the supply of land by zoning restrictions. So on the one hand they stimulated demand and on the other hand they restricted supply, leading to decades of house price inflation. And everyone felt rich. Yippee.

Yes. I respect the self-correction of the free market, its flexibility, its responsiveness and the way it aligns the needs of buyers and sellers. There really is nothing like a free market. And what we see around us is nothing like a free market.

OK. That's my rant. I've put my tin hat on. Tell me where I'm wrong.

And the award goes on to ...

2008-10-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

The lovely pouting Karen has bestowed an award on me. She is naughty, but I like her. She is also very funny, so as I plough my way through the 31 questions, I shall have to pretend that I have not read hers (or could that be her's; she's a librarian you know, and could be awarding, or deducting, points).

Oh, and I need to remind you that these are to be one-word answers:

Voila!

1. Where is your cell phone? Wozzat?
2. Where is your significant other? Onmyback
3. Your hair color? Grecian
4. Your mother? Dead
5. Your father? Deader
6. Your favorite thing? Whoa!
7. Your dream last night? Freudian
8. Your dream/goal? Breathing
9. The room you're in? Roomy
10. Your hobby? Snapping
11. Your fear? Fear
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Here
13. Where were you last night? Abed
14. What you're not? Senile
15. One of your wish-list items? Nurse
16. Where you grew up? Calcutta
17. The last thing you did? Drink
18. What are you wearing? Stuff
19. Your TV? Wavy
20. Your pets? Hairy
21. Your computer? Digital
22. Your mood? Moody
23. Missing someone? Everyone
24. Your car? Carboniferous
25. Something you're not wearing? Contipad
26. Favorite store? BricoDepot
27. Your summer? ish
28. Love someone? Aaaah
29. Your favorite color? Blue
30. When is the last time you laughed? Today
31. Last time you cried? Sob

And since I frightened myself and everyone else with the exponential thingy, I'm not passing this on to anyone else, but you know who you are and I love you all.

Pressing the grapes, French style

2008-10-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

It's the time of year when the vine harvest happens. Naturally the French have a special word for this type of harvest, different from others, and it is "vendange".

We have a small vineyard. In a good year it produces maybe 800-1000 litres of wine. In a bad year, perhaps 250-400. This is not a great issue as it is not commercial and only for our own use. So far I have failed to average a litre a day so there is always a surplus. Which is a handy local currency for returning favours etc.

This has been an awful year. But with an interesting consequence, which I will get to.

This is the raw material; one of our vines on harvest day.

These are some neighbours helping to bring it in. Some we give wine to; others are already wine growers and we reciprocate by helping them harvest in turn.

This is a tombereau, or at least that's how it sounds when they say it. It belongs to a neighbour and I get the loan of it on harvest day. Not only does it hold the grapes you chuck in, but it also has an archimedes screw at the bottom. That means you can pump and slurry the grapes at the same time, and straight into a large barrel called a tonneau, where the primary fermentation takes place.

This is the tonneau (1000 litres capacity), with my bro in law Donald helping after the previous harvest.

Now it happens that this convenience comes at a small price, in that you can't get the last few litres out - the screw won't push them up the pipe and into the tonneau without more stuff behind to help with the pushing as it were.

With the harvest being so poor this year (very late frost and some poor hungry beasts having a bloody good autumn munch) I decided not to use the tombereau.

How, my wife enquired, would we crush the grapes then?

The way our forebears used to, naturally. By treading on them. And I did. Stripped down to my undies, up a small ladder, into the tonneau, and started treading. I have to leave a plastic chair in there so I can get out again!

Now I know the question you are asking. Did I wash my feet? Come on, give me a break, of course I didn't. (They never did in the old days, did they?)

Well the good news is the primary fermentation is coming on just fine. Every two or three days I pop into the tonneau and do my treading. Funny, no one else seems inclined. At the end I emerge, slightly light headed, and with very purple feet.

This evening I sampled my first glass. Still a bit sweet, so more fermenting time needed, but it tastes delicious. Strange, though, I have a feeling that there may not be a stampede for this vintage.

Which is fine by me.

Falling in love

2008-10-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

I have been inspired to write on this topic after reading a post by mud who is feeling a bit forlorn about the whole bizz.

The post attracted a bunch of comments, as you might expect. And quite a few of them were along the lines of "it just happens, and sometimes when you least expect it". That is endorsed by no less than Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones' Diary, which was, perhaps, a tad autobiograhical. I read an article by Fielding describing her long wait for the right man, whom she did eventually find, and thinking to herself afterwards "why was I so anxious?"

Anyway, that had me reflecting on love and thinking about how effing useless psychology is when it comes to these important things. We probably learn more from the language around love. For example we have

- "falling in love" which is suggestive of its involuntary and random nature (as when we fall over an obstacle)
- "love struck" much the same
- "love is blind" which is probably a reference to 'blind eye' but in effect says it is hard to predict
- "love sick" which captures its rather overwhelming visceral effects

The first three support the view that love "just happens", can't be hurried along, and can't be engineered.

So what, and perhaps more important, why is love?

We already like to have sex, a handy side effect of which is reproduction, so love doesn't seem to be a necessary condition for anything. But it's here. How come? Well it's a biological truism that we fall in love because those people who did, in the geological past, had better breeding success than those that did not.

Which is interesting.

Perhaps it has to do with what Desmond Morris called "pair bonding". Pair bonding keeps the breeding couple together for all those years it takes to get offspring from infancy to independence. Falling in love initiates the bond, which is then supported and maintained by lashings of sex over the years. Well, quite, but it's true you know. Nothing in the animal kingdom goes in for bonking as we do.

Anyway, none of this gets me nearer to mud and love, so I'll take my chances and move on to what I think it's all about:

attraction -> approach -> reciprocity -> sex -> love (then lots more sex, but we've been there already)

Or for the more romatically inclined, reverse the last two.

First, attraction. Now this is a real mystery. I think we all know that sudden jolt when you find someone attractive; but could we define what it is? Hard for any one of us I suspect but science does provide some clues.

What makes for a beautiful woman? Apparently an "average" woman. You doubt that? Well take some female faces and crank them through a computer to get the morph average. The result is surprisingly pleasing. This photograph is one I made earlier, morphing just 10 random female faces. It's fun to do, and you can make your own average here. BTW, all this works for male faces too.

Why? Most faces are slightly asymmetrical; the more symmetrical a face is, the more attractive it is judged. Apparently symmetrical faces are advertising hordings that say "I've got good genes, choose me". And the morphing process tends to balance out asymmetries.

Another thing that has men interested is the waist-to-hip ratio. You measure your waist at the narrowest point and your hips at the widest point and get the ratio waist/hips. A ratio of 0.7 seems to be rated universally as the most attractive which is interesting because that is the best predictor of fertility. Apparently Marilyn Monroe had it as does the skinnier Kate Moss.

And so amazingly does the classic Coke bottle; I did some consumer research that showed men find it attractive. Sad buggers.

There is much else; have a look at this article on attraction.

I personally think that attraction is a must. But I have a friend who has been married for 35 years and has grown-up children. He married because their families kind of expected them to. There was really no attraction or love, I don't think.

Next, check that it is reciprocated. It may not be, but that's not the end. I've known people become attracted later, as it were, a kind of catastrophe switch from non-attraction to attraction. I think that sex itself can cause this to happen, but don't do it just because I said so.

If the attraction is mutual you are kind of home and dry. If not, it's uphill work, and in the end unrewarding.

Well, I say home and dry, but that's not quite true. The suggestion is that the more alike the two of you are in background, social standing, education, economics and even genetics, the more likely the relationship is to succeed (boring, but there you go).

Based on my own experience I would say that if it turns out your love is not reciprocated, cut and run no matter how attractive you find them. You may be unhappy now, but boy are you going to be unhappy later if you don't.

Anyway, I think this is why people say well it just comes along, you don't know when, then bam etc etc. The whole attraction thing is very statistical (symmetry and various ratios notwithstanding).

So for two people to get the hots for each other at the same time is just improbable - though completely possible. It just takes time. If you think it is happening, then go for it, and be prepared to make the running.

Postscript: This post was much harder to write than I thought. And a whole lot less useful. But it's late and I'm off to bed.

On holiday with Stanley

2008-09-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

So here's a strange associative chain, and it actually did happen as I describe it.

Catching up on a few of my favourite, and not so favourite blogs (yes, I do read some such, driven by a kind of perverse fascination) I reached this conclusion: some very good blogs, by my definition, have no awards, or just a few. Some of those in the other category bristle with awards. Odd.

On this basis I clearly rate my own two blogs since they have, between them, the grand sum of zero awards. On the whole I'm content since I have no great desire to be told that I cheered someone up or made them smile or have become their best mate. (Please don't ruin my day by giving me one now).

Well this reciprocal festooning with awards leads to the first, rather uncharitable, association - mutual masturbation.

Now I have led a chaste life and have never indulged in same-sex mutual masturbation (you will notice that some qualification is needed). On the other hand I did go to a boarding school and was able to observe the impact of pubescence on certain individuals. And, yes, a certain amount of masturbation did take place. If any was of the mutual variety, then I am happy to say that I did not witness it. The solitary was handled quite well however, and before you say it, the pun was unintentional. (A psychologist writes: "puns are never unintentional". To which I respond "just who the eff asked you?").

Back to the point (yes, yes, still unintentional). Rather than masturbation being furtive and embarrassing, a system seems to have evolved such that after 'lights out' those who were thus inclined would engage in masturbatory races, the winner announcing the fact to the assembly. I must stress that this was still rather chaste - no sharing of beds or anything like that, and all under cover of darkness.

Now where was I during all of this? Fortunately I was a year younger than my contemporaries, the consequence of asynchronous educational systems in India and South Africa, and I was not early off the pubescent blocks. Thus I was able to lie in the darkness wondering quite what all the fuss was about.

Which association brings me to my friend Stanley Maloney. Stanley was not intellectually gifted, so he was a year older than most of us, and thus two years older than me. However what God had taken with one hand he had given with the other; Stanley was exceptionally well endowed, the lot topped with enviable quantities of pubic hair. It will not surprise you to learn that he was a frequent winner in those nocturnal races.

Stanley was a good chap to be friends with. He was very strong, and had a quick temper, and for some reason chose to be my protector. He wore a ring which took the form of a skull with two prominent ruby eyes. He told us that it was useful in fist fights. No one rushed to find out if this was true.

So to holiday. Stanley asked if I would like to spend the summer holiday with him. Well, yes, delighted. He lived on the South Coast, a wonderful stretch of South African coastline south of Durban, in a village called Amanzimtoti. My grandmother, who was in charge of me when I was not at school, agreed, and I was sent packing with a fiver.

If someone asked me to describe the holiday in one word, the word would be "formative". The list goes something like this:

- learnt to smoke (unlearnt it as soon as I left, mind)
- had my first french kiss. Boy was that a surprise. My first thought was to say "excuse me, but somehow your tongue has slipped and become lodged in my mouth", but her enthusiasm robbed me of the power of speech. Up to then my model for kissing was provided by Hollywood movies, where the hero and heroine would press their faces together and lips were definitely tightly sealed
- went to my first revivalist meeting, in a big tent. After a Church of England upbringing, this was, if you will pardon the expression, a revelation
- discovered that you could lick the sides of railway trucks transporting molasses and get a sweet taste for free
- was offered a shag in a small tent. It would have been my first - well, for God's sake, I was only 12. She was even younger than I was, poor soul. I fled
- bobbed about in the ocean on a tractor inner tube, in an area notorious for rip tides and shark attacks
- set out folding wooden chairs in the local movie house so we could watch the film for free. I can remember it still, called "Dive, dive, dive", about submarine warfare
- made lots of money, or it felt like it, by collecting discarded bottles and returning them for the deposit money
- taken by Stanley to the ring shop so I too could buy a skull with red eyes

One of my uncles arrived mid-way through the holiday to check up on me (he lived in Durban, so not a long drive). Years later he described his alarm and consternation at the circumstances in which he found me, and the total lack of supervision of our activities. Turns out I was staying with dysfunctional and impoverished white trash.

Ah, the innocence of youth. If the circumstances of the Maloney family were unfortunate, then I was unaware of it. On the contrary, I remember the holiday as blissful, at a time when a little bliss went a long way.

So Stanley, wherever you are, you did cheer me up and you did make me smile, and this is for you.

The lottery of life - you're a winner

2008-09-21T01:49:00.000-07:00

Here is something that I find really strange. Probably the strangest thing I can imagine. See what you think, and if I've got my logic wrong, let me know.

When I was a child I assumed that the three of us (my two sisters and me) were inevitably the children that my parents were going to have. I am the youngest. I often wished I was in fact the oldest. But I always thought it would be "me" whatever the birth order. It just felt inevitable; my parents would have a boy, and the boy would be me.

Of course I now know that isn't the case. If, in my family, a son had been the first born, he would have been the result of a completely different sperm and egg union, and therefore a completely different person complete with his own ego, self awareness and so on.

In fact if "my" particular egg cell and "my" particular sperm cell had not got together, I would never have existed. This I am taking as a given. I base it on evidence such as each of my sisters, each of whom is the result of a different egg and sperm cell, is clearly a person in their own right, and I have no access to their awareness or identity, or vice versa. Had my parents copulated an hour earlier or later even on the same occasion, a different brother or sister would have resulted (bar the absolutely cosmic coincidence of the same sperm cell winning the race anyway).

We get to some startling (at least startling to me) conclusions. Given an egg cell and 300 million sperm cells are present at each act of successful union, any one of 300 million completely different people could have resulted. Each of whom would have had their own ego and awareness.

But wait.

A woman releases something like 400 eggs during her lifetime. A man releases something like 20 thousand million (yup, twenty billion) sperm cells during his life time. So a couple, between them, represent the potential for 8 trillion different people or about as many stars as you would find in 80 galaxies. Every one of whom would have had their own mannerisms, own eye colour, own laugh, own consciousness and own identity, if only "their" union had taken place and therefore they had been born. Of course, the same 8 trillion : 1 are the odds against you or me being born.

So we are extraordinarily lucky, and unbelievably improbable winners in the lottery of life.

But it gets much spookier. If you followed and accept the logic so far, then the same odds applied to your parents. If either of them had not won that lottery too, you wouldn't be here either. Or if they had been born, but teamed up with different significant others, which is actually highly probable, then you wouldn't be here either. Remember, it is a specific pair of cells that gave rise to you; any other pairing doesn't count.

And the logic goes back and back - grandparents, great grandparents and so on.

And so on? Just exactly where do you call a halt? It seems to me that if two rather hairy primate ancestors had not had a quicky 5 million years ago I wouldn't be here either.

Why stop there? I may be able to convince myself that if the DNA in a dividing bacterium a billion years ago had arranged the split differently, I wouldn't be blogging now.

And my last question - where exactly are my poor, unrealised, less lucky, 8 trillion siblings? Who never existed before, had one brief chance of existence and lost, and will never exist in the future.

Peeking beneath the Diary skirts

2008-09-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

I am often asked: why the Diaries and where does the inspiration come from?

Well, to be more accurate, I am never asked, but I thought I'd attempt some kind of answer all the same.

My overarching ambition is to make sense of the universe. I know I won't, but the speculation is fun.

I think there are three big questions.

(1) Why is there anything at all? I don't think existence is inevitable, so why is it all here? And where did it come from? My own guess is that just as +1 and -1 add to nothing, so our universe has its negative mirror image which came into counterexistence just as ours did, so as to balance the books. And I suspect will both collapse back to zero together.

(2) Why is there consciousness? It is weird and not inevitable either, and not necessary for complicated life. For example, I don't really think that wasps are conscious, but they have pretty complicated lives. Nor is it confined to humans as anyone who has made eye contact with an animal will understand.

(3) Is there a God? I can answer this one at once. Of course not, at least not the God of the bible. If we can think it up, then it almost certainly does not exist. Haldane was right. The universe is not stranger than we know, it's stranger than we can know. Ergo, any God we can conceive of is plainly wrong.

I guess this is where the Diaries come from. What kind of entity might run the universe?

Well, problem the first is one that it is not of the universe. He (we'll stay with the masculine thingy) may have created the universe and everything in it, but (by all accounts) did not create himself at the same time. So he was "somewhere else" at the time the universe came into being. And when I say, came into being, I'm taking space and time too, not just matter. Now if he's not of this universe, that is, outside our spatial dimensions, and outside of our time, he's going to have a lot of problems interacting with it.

Let's get this straight; we're talking physics here. When the Red Sea parts, there's an awful lot of pressure on water molecules trying to establish their level again. If they don't then there is a counter force. Not a cosmic "Don't you dare, 'cos I say so". No, it takes the expenditure of energy, in this universe, to hold water back.

Then there's the whole problem of the consequences of intervention. I mean, you can pray that plate tectonics go on hold for a while, so you and your family don't get drowned in a tsunami. But think about the buckling of the Earth's mantle that happens elsewhere as a result, and the innocents who get killed there, so you do not.

No, there's not a sodding thing that God can do that won't have horrendous counterconsequences.

Which means that prayer must go unanswered (which, I suspect, is pretty well the experience of all of us).

Note that none of this is a disproof of God. He may well exist. I don't think so, but I'm not anti-religious. My father-in-law is a clergyman, so there. In fact, if you are determined to believe in an all-powerful entity you can't be proved wrong. The world and universe could easily have been created in the last millisecond, and we with all our memories with it (and the fossil record too etc etc).

But my goodness, why would anyone bother? And that is a good question. So we could praise Him? I think He should get a life.

The thing that always puzzles me is why people think that God is good. We might jolly well hope so, but where is the evidence? Take nature. I'm afraid the "All things bright and beautiful ..." model just doesn't hold water. The Victorian view of "Nature red in tooth and claw" has it about right. Fact is, it's pretty horrid. There is not a prey animal that dies of old age. Sooner or later it gets torn apart. There is not a predator that doesn't die of injury or starvation in it's turn.

Creationism? Intelligent design? Give me a break. For every intelligently designed butterfly there is an intelligently designed tape worm.

It is the appearance of design and order that has folk thinking about designers and, well, benign and wise fathers. Alas most people don't grasp how, with enough time, very improbable things can not only happen, but become inevitable.

Remember that thing about monkeys, typewriters, and the complete works of Shakespeare? Well, I've done the calculation. If we treat upper and lower case letters as different, we have 52 of those, plus some punctuation, let's call it 60 things for convenience.

OK, so how unlikely is it, selecting letters and punctuation at random, to come up with the four characters "The ". Well, the number is 60 raised to the power 4, which is just a whisker under 13 million to one or about the same as winning the UK National Lottery. Extend this to a five letter word plus space like "Hello " and the odds become 46 billion to one. So you can see that the complete works of Shakespeare are not going to pop out of the monkey factory overnight.

But factor in infinity. Prepare for strange things. For given infinity, not only has the complete works of Shakespeare actually been generated this way, it has been generated, wait for it, an infinite number of times.

As I understand it the universe is not actually infinite, but who knows? However, it has been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time yet. And that means that strange things can happen. For example, the dinosaurs vanished about 65 million years ago. If you had been around since then (not a long time in Earth terms) and bought a lottery ticket a week, as a lot of folk do, you would have won the lottery about 200 times by now.

Of course evolution is not random, though I'll skip the logic for that now. However, it is fed by small random mutations. That is where the argument about odds and time becomes important.

Anyway, after enough rambling to bore even me, my conclusions are these:

- We may have been created by God, but the chances are he is "hands off" and has to be.
- He is not hugely preoccupied by the thought of being praised by a bunch of naked apes who do, actually, not look at all like him.
- He is not hugely preoccupied by sin or virtue.
- Having created the universe and the laws that drive it, he just kind of lets it go, and maybe has a look now and then when bored out of his skull.
- He is more than a little paranoid, and often wonders about where the f*ck he comes from and wonders how many layers of deity exist above him and in what kind of infinite regress.

I'll leave you with this, which I think is fun, and should put us in our place:

From William Goodhart's play Generation:

The Soul of Man,
Despite his pride,
Is rather odd,
A toy balloon
Blown up by God,
Or, strictly speaking,
The air inside,
And that is leaking.

Supper

2008-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

I once had a book called "Food for Free". It is somewhere in our boxes, and I hope it will surface again one day. It lists things you can find and eat such as watercress, mushrooms and nuts. For free. An idea that I find attractive to this day.

You have to be careful though. For example you can get liver fluke from watercress if the stream flows through fields where sheep graze. And mushrooms scare a lot of people, for very good reasons. Some of them are absolutely lethal.

Here in France you can, in principle, take a fungus to your local pharmacy, and they will identify it for you and tell you if it is safe to eat. In principle. The last time I tried this the pharmacist turned to the only other customer in the shop and asked "Qu'en pensez-vous?" (What do you think?). Slightly defeated the purpose I decided, made my excuses and left.

That doesn't mean that I don't find and eat wild mushrooms. It just means that (a) I consult one (or more) of my four mushroom books and (b) I tend to go for things that are unmistakable.

Which leads me on to supper.

I was walking through the local woods when I found a beefsteak fungus. It is a bracket fungus and it looks like this:

It is called a beefsteak fungus because it looks remarkably like meat. When you cut it it even bleeds a bit. All this is rather disconcerting for a vegetarian, but anyway. I took one third of the fungus, thinking that I would in this manner not piss the fungus god too much, but on my way home I realised that, since the fungus is a parasite on the tree, I had probably displeased the tree god as well. Oh dear.

The photograph above is one I found on Google Images because I hadn't taken my camera with me. However the following is of the actual fungus and you can see (have a click) just how like meat it is.

That's a proper dinner plate, so you can see these things are big. I sliced it up ready to fry:

And fried it:

Delicious!

You will remember I like to go for fungi that are unmistakable? Well the clincher for beefsteak fungus is that it has a slight taste of lemon on the finish. Taste that, and you are home and dry.

In passing, another fungus that comes into the 'unmistakable' category is the unfortunately named "Trompette de la Mort" or Trumpet of Death. It is brown/grey/black and trumpet-shaped, so you can see the point. Still, I often feel that the poor thing could do with a better agent, since it too is delicious. Photo when Autumn arrives.

The story of my life in six words

2008-08-31T05:15:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in blogoland I came across the idea of writing your life story in just six words. I've done a Google to see where it may have come from, and in the process came across the following:

In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway bet ten dollars that he could write a complete story in just six words. He wrote: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." He won the bet.

I find this a very interesting exercise because it forces one to concentrate on the absolute nub of what your life seems to be/have been. I'm sorry to say that so far my six words only conujour up sadness. Self pity, or the reflection of childhood?

Anyway, if you will bear with some shameless (and therapeutic) self indulgence, here are three attempts.

"Tossed aside, but found a way."

"Conceived and deceived. Still no answers."

"Bad parents. Mad children. Stupid really."

I'd be very interested to read what you might come up with; and a few cheerful ones would be just great!

Added later:

I have been inspired by dot to be more positive. He is right. As I indicated in my response to his comment, my life is good, and I am happy. The past is the past. He challenged me to try my life story in six positive words, so here they are:

"Started badly; who cares? Finishing well".

Why did the chickens climb the stairs?

2008-08-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

No, not a joke or a riddle. A genuine question.

We have six new chicks, who have been with us from 3 weeks old. They are the replacements for several of our adult chickens who, for all sorts of reasons including hideous bad luck, have died. Some of you will have read about Blue Foot. Her demise was followed, not long after, by her friend Giselle who suffered from health complications too.

The newcomers are getting towards full size, but are still babies really, you can tell that from their tiny little serrated combs. They often seem to behave like one composite creature, perhaps the result of imprinting on each other?

They are surprisingly dear and entertaining.

Anyway, here are the stairs. There are 32 of them, in three flights, and I would have thought that each step would present a bit of a challenge.

Here is the view down the stairs, so we are talking "high" here. And trust me, chickens do not fly.

And here are the six babies who have twice now decided, for reasons I cannot fathom, that up the stairs they will go and then have a preen and a rest.

You've got to ask yourself "Who the heck had this strange idea?" and you also have to ask "And why did anyone listen to you?"

Small rhinoceros, tough hide.

2008-08-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

Cupidon was having a love-in with some small creature. Alas what he loves and what small creatures love are two different things.

At least this time our visitor came well defended and was none the worse for a few minutes of molestation. He / she was so shiny - I kept looking at the images close up to spot my reflection. I'm sure it must be there somewhere. (BTW this is worth clicking for a closer look - it's beautiful).

Anyway, having put up with the cat, and put up with being photographed, said rhino was set free and ambled off in no particular hurry.

An entirely different matter - I went outside the other night and pleasant surprise, there was a near full eclipse of the moon. My camera would be no use, but I tried using my wife's Cannon S5IS on full zoom, hand held, to see what I could get. It produced the following. OK, not great, but stunning given a hand-held exposure at night. That image stabilisation really does work.

Men, women and the hyperintelligent

2008-08-13T12:56:00.001-07:00

In a recent post I singled out some hyper-intelligent people. The common theme was their ability to take something we might all have encountered but then done something remarkable with it.

People. Well men actually, as mouse pointed out to me.

This had me thinking. Did my selection reveal an unwitting prejudice against women? Not as unlikely as you might think.

To give you a "for instance" read the following passage and reach your conclusions:

A father and his teenage son are out in the family car. There is an accident. The father, who was driving, is killed outright. The boy is badly injured, with broken ribs and a collapsed lung. He is in danger of dying. An ambulance reaches the scene and the boy is rushed to the A&E at the nearest hospital. Without delay he is prepared for surgery and wheeled into theatre. When the boy is placed on the operating table the surgeon, who was briefed and waiting, gasps and says "I can't operate on that boy, he is my son!"

What is going on? To find out, read the first comment following this post.

Anyway, back to the post in question. Mouse commented as follows:

"a lovely tribute to a great collection of clever guys...operative word is guys! although you did omit one of my favorite smart BOYS, operative word boys...leonardo!!

some women I would honor in such a list may include hildegard of bingen (who I have posted about on the mouse), marie curie, rachel carson, hypatia, and perhaps hannah arendt, maria montessori... just to name a few."

Well, I took this seriously and reflected. There are several possibilities, but the two stark ones are (a) I am actually prejudiced against women (b) I'm not, and the selection simply indicated that there are more smart men to choose from than women.

Professionally, I know that there are no significant differences in intelligence between men and women, though they differ in these two ways. Men have better spatial skills and women have better verbal skills.

But hyperintelligence? I wasn't convinced by the women in mouse's list. Granted, they are all hugely influential, but I thought might come into the Thomas Edison category of 'Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration'. The ones I know about, viz., Marie Curie, Rachel Carson and Maria Montessori seem to me to belong in that category. Their contributions reflect dedication, insight, persistence and hard work. But I don't see the kind of divine spark here that I see in say Newton or Einstein.

But reflecting further, I really don't see that in most men either - not in a Lord Kelvin say, or a Pauling, or even a Watson or Crick.

OK I thought, well maybe there are some incredibly bright men, and some incredibly bright women, and then a third category, the hyperintelligent, who just happen to have penises.

I think there may be something in this. For example, idiot savants are those people, who appear to be subnormal, who can do remarkable things, cognitively speaking. For example, they can tell you the day of the week corresponding to a random date you give them, or can learn a telephone directory by rote. And they are four to six times more likely to be male than female.

A famous contemporary savant is Stephen Wiltshire who couldn't talk and at the age of three was diagnosed as an autistic. He could draw, though, and thanks to those who recognised his talent and encouraged him, he slowly developed and finally, by the age of nine, learned to speak.

His particular talent is architectural drawing. He can look at a cityscape and then draw it. I don't mean an artist's impression. I mean draw it in detail, down to the number of windows in a office block. And without needing to look again.

He once drew the whole of central London after a helicopter trip above it. He did the same thing after a helicopter ride over Rome. His detailed drawing showed, inter alia, the exact number of columns in the Colosseum - not an easy thing to do, as this photograph shows.

Hyperintelligent people are not necessarily better than you and me in all sorts of ways. In fact, in terms of selective advantage and reproductive success, you are far better off with good social skills than an IQ of 145.

But they do seem to have these blinding insights into life, the universe and everything, that are denied to the rest of us, be we male or female.

[Postscript: baino, in a comment, reminded me about expectation effects, something I had meant to touch on here. For most of history, including modern times, women have not been expected to perform. We know from experimental evidence that this dampens aspiration and affects attainment.]

Who's been sleeping in my bed?

2008-08-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

Well Cupidon has, and here is the evidence - look at the size of the creature. His kitten days are well and truly over.

Thus far he has been unable to crack the mosquito net, but today he suceeded. Oh joy, oh rapture. It lends a certain currency to "Sleep tight, hope the fleas don't bite in the night."

I feel I should apologise for the sordid state of the unmade bed, but that would just draw your attention to it, so I won't (don't click for a larger view!!).

Clever? I'll give you clever!

2008-07-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

I wonder what the average IQ of the blogging community is? It's above the population mean and I'd guestimate it in the region of IQ 115-120. I base this on two observations. First the quality of the writing, though variable, is generally good, in some cases exceptional (you know who you are, I won't embarrass you). Second, to blog at all you have to master a computer, a keyboard, access the internet and get to grips with the actual mechanics of blogging.

So we're a clever community (cough). But some people are really clever. I'm going to give you a few examples of people so clever they make foxes look stupid. And there is a particular quality to their cleverness that I admire; it's that sort of "pulling a rabbit out of a hat" thing. I hope you'll see what I mean.

First off the blocks is Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855). When he was in elementary school aged 10 the teacher, probably wanting a bit of peace and quiet, set the class a problem. Take all the whole numbers from 1 to 100 and add them up (i.e. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 and so on up to 100). Since this involved 99 separate additions, he should have been able to count on 20 to 30 minutes of peace, but Gauss raised his hand almost immediately and said that the answer was 5,050.

It is the simplicity of his method that reflects his genius. He realised that the 100 numbers could be arranged in 50 pairs as follows: 1 and 100, 2 and 99, 3 and 98, 4 and 97 all the way down to 50 and 51. Since each of the pairs adds up to 101, then the answer will be 50 times that, viz., 5050. Now that's clever.

And how about Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727)? He was probably one of the cleverest people who has lived.

I mean, how many of us can do the calculus? Quite. Now imagine inventing the calculus just so you can get on with the problems that interest you. Well, that's what he did. And it's the breadth of his contributions that bowls me over - the law of gravity and the explication of planetary motion, mechanics, optics and as we have seen mathematics, including the "Principia Mathematica", his most important work.

I used to live in Cambridge, and it would give me goose bumps to walk around Trinity College, knowing I could reach out and touch him, but for a few hundred years.

I think what makes him really clever was how he dealt with apparently simple things (a bit like Gauss). For example we've all seen rainbows, or witnessed the colours scattered by a chandelier. But Newton did the experiments to show that all the colours were in white light. And he did it so simply.

He just closed the curtains in his room in Cambridge, allowed a chink of light through, split that into colours with a prism, arranged a second prism to collect the light again, and recombined it back into white light. Any one of us could have done that ... but it took a genius to actually do it, and realise the significance of what he was doing.

Next in my list of reasons to be amazed: We've all grown up with the idea that Earth is in the solar system, that it and the other planets revolve around the sun and so on. We also know there was a time when people didn't and thought everything revolved around the Earth instead - which, be honest, is the way it actually looks.

Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642), a towering genius, also used something simple to change the way we viewed the world and the solar system. He made observations of Venus using a very modest telescope and saw that it had phases, and specifically could appear as a crescent (just as the moon does when it is 'sunward' of us).

Now here's the clever bit. He was smart enough to understand that this could only happen if Venus was orbiting the Sun, and if the orbit of Venus was inside the Earth's. At a stroke he realised that Copernicus and his doctrine of heleocentrism was right.

Alas, the Inquisition forced him to recant this view, and he spent the last years of his life under house arrest.

Have a look at this amazing daytime image, which is undoctored - but you'll have to click to get a larger view to see the necessary detail. It shows Venus and the Moon in the same phase, and just before the moon overtook Venus in the sky and obscured it.

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) must get a mention. In him we see, once again, the propensity for the genius to look a little more deeply at exactly the same things you or I are seeing. We see that life is diverse; he sees that diversity resulting from natural selection. It's strange that this was so revolutionary, and caused so much controversy and anguish. After all, we have known for centuries that you can artificially select for different characteristics - look at dog breeding for example.

I've saved for last the most spooky example of genius, Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955). He tried to get a teaching post after he graduated and failed. He finally ended up working in the Berne (Switzerland) Patent Office where he was passed over for promotion and didn't even get a permanent post until 1903 when he was 24.

In 1905, while still at the patent office, he published four very important papers, including one on special relativity and one on mass - energy equivalence, the famous E = mc2 equation (that's c squared BTW, but can't type it)..

This is what happens during a nuclear explosion; such an explosion was not to be seen for a further 40 years. The same conversion of mass to energy is going on in the sun, and makes our lives possible. It will keep going for billions of years.

So my question is how does a humble patent clerk, who has no research grant, no access to laboratories or equipment, and no means to do experiments, arrive at something so earth shattering and actually be right? All at the age of 26? Is that mind boggling or what?

PS: To understand just how dramatic this mass / energy equivalence is, be aware that in the Hiroshima explosion, the mass being converted into energy was the equivalent of a paper clip.

PPS: Newton, who, let's face it, was right about lots of things, said that the world, and I quote "would not end before 2060". If you are young enough, be afraid, be very afraid.

Lost and found

2008-07-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

Seven or eight hundred years ago, someone lost this rather handsome silver coin. Today I found it. The reason I found it has something to do with why I have had less time of late to visit my favourite blogs. I am into drains. Not literally, that would be hideous. But by necessity.

We are doing up this magnificent wreck. It was the equerry (hope that's spelt correctly, anyway, stable block) for the long-gone chateau that used to stand just a few meters away. You need superlatives to describe this building.

- It is very old, 12th century
- Very big, 35 meters by 11 meters by 10 meters high, and that's just the vaulted bit, there's another 190 square meters on the side
- And very lovely

But as I have discovered with restoration, you pay by the square meter (wonder why it took me so long to understand that?). Thus there is an interesting inverse relationship between the health of the building and the health of our bank balance.

Before and after (well, in progress)

I have had to learn quite a lot along the way. And two of the things I have had to learn are plumbing and drainage. This is thanks to my English so-called plumber who is an arse. Yes, Derek, you. I know more about drainage after an afternoon with Google than you ever will.

When we use English tradespeople it is not because of language or nationality issues. It's just so hard to get hold of French artisans, who are generally very good.

Anyway, back to drains. We are having a septic system installed. I'm not attempting this bit myself; it's too big and too regulated. We had this monster 24 ton digger on site to dig three very big holes - one for the septic tank, one for the soak away, and one for a rain water storage tank I'm installing.

I went along the soil pile beside one of the trenches with my metal detector, getting lots of junk signals when 'ping'. It only took a minute's scrabbling to find the coin. I love these old finds. I'm not a detectorist as such. I'm only interested in unearthing some of the history of the property, and it's the intrinsic value that appeals.

Anyway, hope to be done in another year's time - you can laugh at my optimism; I know I will.

I think I may just pinch myself. No, I'm not dreaming.

2008-07-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote about knives recently. 'When I was a lad' we all had them, but didn't do bad things with them. That sort of smug twaddle.

There was an interesting following discussion about knife crime and based on my own experience it seems to me that owning or carrying knives is not the problem whatever the government thinks. I carry a knife with me all the time. It's invaluable.

Which leads me into a tiny digression. We had our village fête last weekend, and while I was waiting to be served some food I realised that the lady behind the counter was searching for a knife to cut the baguette with. I produced my knife which she accepted gratefully, cut up the baguette and handed it back. No shock horror at a strange man producing a knife and no shock horror of the "How do I know you haven't been slicing peanuts or kiwi fruit with that" variety.

Which leads me to digression number two. Oh dear. The last one. Anyway, I was serving behind the bar at this fête. Although our village is tiny, just a hamlet, the fête is a famous commemoration of the Resistance. It attracts a couple of thousand people every year, which is extraordinary. I was serving from 7 pm to about 1:30 am, one of six volunteers, so you can see that drink was flowing, yet I did not see one drunk / disorderly person all evening. The French, around here anyway, don't seem to drink, fight and projectile vomit the way the Brits do.

OK, back to the point. It is this quote from The Telegraph, in an article on knife crime: "The first responsibility when a child is in trouble or at risk of getting into trouble rests with the parents. We must hold parents responsible." Gordon Brown himself, no less.

So the thing that had me pinching myself was what that quote implies. Is is really the case that parents are *not* responsible for the mayhem that their children create? Good grief, when did we lose this particular plot? It explains a lot. Such as why some parents don't know where their children are or who they are with. Given that they are clearly already neglectful, their attitude might change if they were at least handed the bill for restorative justice.

I sometimes wonder if the great and the good, that is those who engineer society on our behalf, were ever boys (well, of course I accept that some of them were very pleased not to be). Boys, and especially adolescent boys, are really quite intrinsically dangerous. They need a lot of socialisation, and some of it heavy handed. They are not hugely influenced by discussions about why their behaviour is wrong (duh, is that actually news to them?) or how to meet the obligations of a contract put together by a well-meaning but criminally optimistic social worker.

"Boys will be boys". Indeed, and some of them are little shits too.

PS - I've noticed that the media tend to refer to "children in trouble" or "at risk". Be more accurate to call them "troublesome children". God, I'm in a real grump tonight.

Let's play tag - or exponential bliss

2008-07-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

This is a post about tagging and very large numbers, and how the two come together.

Let me introduce the topic this way (you may already know it): A wise man is offered a reward for something or other by a ruler. He appears to ask a very modest amount, namely, that he be given an amount of wheat calculated as follows: one grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, two grains on the next, four on the next, eight on the next and so on.

It doesn't sound like a lot, but the total number of grains is one less than 2 to the power 64; a very big number. In fact it is the wheat yield of the entire earth, assuming we grew nothing but wheat, for the next 80 years. That's the nature of exponential growth.

Move on to tagging. This particular tag has you identify five blogs that you like, each of whom thus tagged must come up with another five and so on. I was tagged in this way, recently, by three utterly delightful people whose blogs I enjoy greatly: millennium housewife, ngorobobhillhouse and the times of miranda.

However I do not take this as evidence that my blog is irresistible. Rather, I think we have a slight chessboard and wheat situation developing here. If 2 to the power something is big, then 5 to the power something is even bigger. Just how big? Well have a look at this series:

The first person tags 5
Each of them tags five, so that's 5 x 5 or 25. (Actually, strictly speaking it is 25 plus the original 5, giving 30. We should accumulate as we go, but it doesn't really change the logic).
In the next it is 125 (5 x 5 x 5) ...

OK, starting from 1 again, and taking it up to 15 successive taggings we have this series:

1. 5
2. 25
3. 125
4. 625
5. 3,125
6. 15,625
7. 78,125
8. 390,625
9. 1,953,125
10. 9,765,625
11. 48,828,125
12. 244,140,625
13. 1,220,703,125
14. 6,103,515,625 (this is about the population of Earth)
15. 30,517,578,125
16. eek, my head hurts

I'm still very happy to nominate blogs that I like; but I think I'm not going to tell them they've been tagged; not enough untagged blogs left on the planet!

baino's banter
the gold puppy
not enough mud
jolly good yarn girl
working mum on the verge
little brown blog

Yes, I can count, since you ask.

PS - you can still tag me!

PPS - another fun example of exponential growth. This is physically impossible, but suppose you could fold a piece of paper in half, then in half again, and so on, for 32 times. How thick would it be? Answer - so thick that it reach the orbit of the moon. No kidding.

Is this a good day to die?

2008-07-10T00:41:00.000-07:00

You can tell the sort of mood I'm in; no actually I'm not depressed, just reflective. And my reflections take me down this path, wondering if I'm lucky or unlucky. I feel that the universe has had a number of attempts at ending my existence (unlucky) but I've survived them (lucky). I wonder if you have ever had similar thoughts?

Here is the chronology:

2 years: my devoted but demented mother used to rub Vicks on my chest when I was little. She sometimes gave me a little to taste (why mum?). When I was left alone with the jar, I ate the entire contents. Severity unknown, but I turned blue so that suggests thoracic or cardiac distress.

4 years: I am reminded by my daughter (see comment 2) of the following. On board ship, passage from India, I was sucking on a boiled sweet. For some reason I inhaled it and it completely blocked my trachea. So I probably had 30 seconds of consciousness ahead of me and 3 minutes to live. I remember running somewhere, anywhere, and ran slap bang into my mother's legs. In a rare display of comprehension and intelligence she grabbed me by the ankles and shook. The sweet popped out. Oh, the freedom to breathe; I remember it still. Threat level, severe.

14 years: Forgot this one, first time through. There was a cobra at the side of the path; I didn't see it and walked past. It struck out at me; its head hit the ground with an audible thud just behind my ankle. The venom is a neurotoxin, and a full dose will kill about 75% of its victims. It gave me a bit of an adrenalin high, but I always liked snakes and still do. Threat level, moderate.

18 years: was doing geological exploration. I and four others were invited down a small platinum mine. It was about 4pm. We were told to get out before 5 because some blasting was scheduled and we would be asphyxiated if we didn't. We descended in a tiny cage, three in it, and two standing on top (yes, Health and Safety was but a gleam in its mother's eye in those days). We had a poke around and got back into or onto the cage to go back up, just before 5pm. Our cage went up about a foot and stopped. Then the cable slowly unwound. I was in the cage and the unwinding meant that we were now below the tunnel level and could not open the cage door anymore. Hmmm. I looked down. The beam from my miner's helmet reflected back at me, from just a few feet down. Fuck. The mine was flooded below our level, and we were still unwinding. And we began to smell cordite. Double fuck. Then we realised why we had stopped. The mine had it's own generator, and it had shut down at 5pm, no one remembering, apparently, that we were still down there. Triple fuck. But, hooray, at 5 past, someone did remember we were down there and they re-started the generator. Threat level, severe.

18 years: Same job actually, front wheel detached from my vehicle which turned over. No seat belts in those days, several bad injuries. Threat level, moderate.

22 years: Another rollover, not driving this time, various injuries including fractured skull, broken femur, and a lost eye. But not me. Threat level, moderate.

23 years: Kidney operation to correct a narrowing of the ureter. Operated on by two arseholes. Yes, really, I kid you not. One was struck off the register for drinking on the job (almost certainly the case with me), the other later committed suicide just before his nieces blew the whistle on his pedophilia. Anyway, to cut the long hacking short, they managed to put a scalpel up through my diaphragm so my lung collapsed - but didn't notice, of course. Luckily some random doctor walking through recovery saw how blue I was and did the necessary. But I lost the kidney. Threat level, severe.

49 years: Flying incident. My flying buddy checked the fuel and declared it OK. I should have but didn't. One tank gave out, switched over, then the other went dry. It goes very quiet when you run out of fuel at 3,000 feet. The nearest airfield was withing gliding distance; so glided in and did a good landing. Threat level, moderate.

52 years: More flying. Landed on an airstrip having descended through cloud at freezing temperatures. I had picked up ice under the wings, but my pre-takeoff inspection did not show this. Now you may not know it, but tiny amounts of freezing, even frost itself, will completely change the aerodynamics of an aircraft. Started the takeoff roll, and the effing thing would not lift. Planes are not like cars. At a certain point, and I was beyond it, you have to commit to takeoff. You really can't stop in the distance anymore. So faster and faster, less and less airfield, the sheep in front of me shitting themselves more and more (as I nearly was) when I dragged the bloody thing into the air. I didn't hit any sheep, but I reckon I sheared a few. It stayed about 10 feet up and just wouldn't go higher until there was enough airspeed to shed the ice. Threat level, bloody awful.

57 years: Took the train from London to Cambridge, well it should have been Cambridge, but it didn't get further than Potters Bar. Yes, *the* Potters Bar, the rail accident that killed 7 and injured 80. I walked away. Threat level, severe.

I think that's about it. Have a good day.

Guess who's come to visit?

2008-07-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

There are some insects that I really enjoy and the hummingbird hawk moth is near the top of the list. When you see them close up, they are more like an animated stuffed toy. In a classic case of parallel evolution they, like hummingbirds, can hover, or fly backward or sideways. They feed without touching down.

They do dart around though, so it's not easy to see quite how they do it. Today I thought sod it. You can't get cheaper than digital when it comes to banging off hundreds of shots. So with the sun out and hawk moths much in evidence around the lavender, I put my Canon into manual and click-click mode and banged away hoping that some images would be in focus.

Well, as luck and repetition would have it, some were, including quite a few shots of lavender without moths - well I said they were quick.

The proboscis is surprisingly long. Maybe this keeps them out of harm's way while they feed. I've got a shot of one curling it up between feeds. I hope you enjoy the images as much as I do. As per, click on an image for a larger view.

A gathering

2008-07-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

My niece died recently - unexpectedly but of natural causes. She had lived in a commune in the Black Mountains in France, and though she had moved out to take a job in Toulouse, she went back most weekends.

It was on one of these weekend visits that she died. Her two sons, now 17 and 20 had been in part raised in the commune, and the older still lives there. The community and the boys organised the funeral.

I don't really want to write about the funeral. Like most it had both tragic and uplifting elements. But I would like to write a bit about the community, which I found very interesting.

I knew that Jane lived in some sort of community, but that's about it. In the absence of other information, I assumed a gathering of hippie dropouts. I'm afraid I haven't seen her for years, which is a point of sadness, and so had no detailed knowledge of her circumstances.

In the event I have come away deeply impressed by a very nice group of people, and reminded that simple things can be very satisfying.

Turns out that the original group all met through Shintaido, "an avant-guarde martial art with the emphasis of self-development and life expression". One of them found the property - an abandoned school with with lots of land and surrounding woods - and they moved in. It's quite a big group now; I was told there are 40 children, most of them educated there. Though it's a closely knit community, it's not communal living. They have houses or apartments created out of the school buildings.

The exception to this was the older boys (up to about 20 years or so). They had a kind of lodge in part of the old farm house. In this they had bedrooms, a communal kitchen with a long wooden table, and even a little movie theatre complete with video projector. They had done most of the construction work themselves with adult supervision and expertise as needed. The passing on of artisan skills seems to be an explicit part of the lifestyle.

I noted bucket and mop and also a vacuum cleaner, and the place was spotless. The lads were charming and polite. In case you think I stumbled into some sort of alternative universe there was much evidence of computer games with large screens everywhere.

I travelled down with my sister (Jane's mother), and my two daughters. The community said they could put us up, but I had no clear idea about the arrangements. In the event we were accommodated in the old school building in basic, but perfectly adequate rooms. The toilet was one of those old French ones, where you have a well-founded fear of putting a foot wrong. And not the kind of place you would want to read the Sunday papers in.

We arrived fairly late, and while we had a bit of food for the journey, we did not have enough for self-catering. No problem. Some boxes of pasta were produced, and this, when cooked, sprinkled with olive oil and some grated Parmesan cheese, with a bit of lettuce and pate on the side, made for a simple, but delicious meal. And, I should add, washed down with my own rough, but very ready wine.

Later we repaired to an inglenook fireplace, where we sat and chatted, drinking ash tea (more on this later) and the local firewater. I was told what this was made from, but the memory is a shade hazy.

The next day I met a few more of the people and tried to find out what people in the community did. It seems a few commute to outside day jobs, but many seem to earn their living applying artisan skills. They like traditional ways of doing things - I really have the impression that this is a bit of a national characteristic - and what I saw was impressive.

Here, for example are two end pieces, to hold up a very thick and heavy table.

Plus some other pieces - not sure what to make of the fire-breathing angel! (Well worth a click for a larger view).

They build with wood too, and use one of those sawing pits to slice along logs. You may know the kind of thing. Someone stands on top holding one end of a long saw, the other is in the pit holding the other end. They push and pull between them. Hard work, but a good alternative to a saw mill.

Jane shared the responsibilities of a small flock of sheep with two other 'shepherdesses who live at the commune; it was clear that she was well known and liked there. Her ashes were scattered in the woods on their property, just a short walk away. All the adults attended, and her friends left touching mementos at the base of a tree, flowers mostly, but a shepherd's staff, some bread in the shape of a heart, and a soft toy. I really can't imagin anything nicer or more appropriate.

------------------------

I mentioned ash tea, made from the leaves of the Ash tree. Identify it here. I haven't had this before, but we all found it delicious and refreshing. Very simple. Just gather some sprigs or small branches with ash leaves, hang with the leaves pointing downward until they are dry, then crush and use as you would tea. Probably best drunk without milk or sugar. I was told it help me live a long time. Recommended anyway.

We were also served a fermented drink made from ash leaves. Very nice indeed. I was going to post the recipe, but I find that my daughter has dissappeared to Paris with it, so that will have to wait.

First sexual experience

2008-06-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

After my last post on sexology, I received a number of very interesting comments. Laurie initiated the discussion and it went on from there.

This was the first time (and perhaps the last) that I inspired someone to blog out how it was for them. But from her and others it soon emerged that innocence about, and ignorance of, sexual detail was fairly widespread, and had not been confined just to my adolescence as I had believed.

I thought it would be interesting to explore first sexual experiences to see what triumphs and disasters people had to recount.

Then I remembered that my daughter reads this blog and I changed my mind. Children! Even grown up ones.

Sexologist: a tough job, but someone's got to do it

2008-06-24T02:01:00.000-07:00

I grew up in what can only be described as the black hole of sexual knowledge. I've got that wrong. I mean that I was outside the black hole and all the sexual knowledge in the universe had been sucked into it.

Yes, folks, I'm talking about the 50s. Actually it was probably a bit patchy before then, but compared to the halcyon times to follow, it was a sparse period indeed.

I received absolutely no sexual information from my parents, and I think that was true for most of my contemporaries. However, between us we gleaned and we pooled what little information there was. The outcome was not a happy one. There was talk of having to put excretory organs together, of weeing, of tadpoles escaping and goodness knows what else.

Interestingly enough, these new and rather disgusting theories did not displace the prevailing theory, that one prayed for babies. In fact one of the polls we took on a regular basis was who would use which method. Most of us decided that we would pray for babies when it was time, and looked askance at those who professed otherwise.

The mother of a friend must have had an eroded cervix, because we were assured by him that after his parents had "done it" there was blood on a towel. We were horrified, and I don't think any of us looked at our obviously brutish fathers in quite the same way again. Though of course almost all of us were convinced that none of our parents were doing it any more. I mean, why bother after the birth of the last sibling? I think we felt very sorry for any child whose parents were sufficiently depraved to continue such practices after the necessity had passed.

Literature was of little help either. There were only three sources that I knew of.

The first was the problem page of my mother's magazine, which may have been called "Woman". Since both the problems and the advice were veiled, they tantalised rather than informed. "The best thing would be to hold your breath and cross your legs. If you need more help, please write again enclosing a self-addressed envelope". Or "If you find that you cannot help yourself, you might try wearing gloves before you go to sleep". What on earth was that about?

The second was an infamous book called "What Every Young Boy Should Know". Despite the title, it was a deeply unhelpful book and scarred most of us for life. I think it was published late 19th century but was still doing the rounds when I was a lad. To cut a long story short, we were to avoid, at all costs, a self-stimulating activity that would lead to a "spasm of the nerves" which would surely result in imbecility, madness or even death. From the same source I learnt that a drop of semen was worth a pint of blood. No wonder I'm so anaemic.

The last was "Ideal Marriage" by van de Velde. This wasn't such a bad book in fact, just constrained by the times. In those days books couldn't extol the "joy of sex" directly; they were required to take the form of text books of the medical genre. It thus featured some details you would rather not know, but also an intriguing illustration of a woman with three pairs of breasts. Apparently we have a "milk line" as other mammals do (such as cats and dogs) and while more than one pair along the line is unusual, it is not impossible.

By the time I got to university and was doing psychology I was able to buy such books openly (I have to admit buying van de Velde mail order when I was 17 - far too embarrassed to do so across the counter).

And thus a new world opened to me, the world of sexology. First, an important aside, the phenomenon of self-selection. Why are people drawn to (that is self select) certain professions? To be a surgeon, minister, psychologist, whatever? And what the heck are the self-selection dynamics for sexologists?

Consider for example Havelock Ellis, one of the first well known sexologists, who was breaking the mold back in the late 19th century. Difficult times. A bookseller was prosecuted in 1897 simply for stocking a book he had co-authored on homosexuality.

In many ways Ellis seemed more like a candidate for treatment than one to administer it. He married Edith Lees, a writer, in 1891. He was 32 and still a virgin. She was a professed and openly practising lesbian. After their honeymoon, he went back to his bachelor pad, and she stayed where she was. He was also impotent his whole life, but that changed when he was 60 when he discovered that he was sexually aroused by the sight of a woman urinating. There was a possible link with his childhood. His devoted, yet clearly insane mother, used to slap him playfully in the face with his wet nappies.

Slightly predating Ellis was Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist. He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). This documented different forms of sexual perversion that he had encountered. I read parts of this as a student, and the juiciest bits were in Latin. This was not so in the first edition, but its fame was so widespread that "ordinary people" began to buy it. It was to protect them (and me, alas) that the Latin was instituted.

Although it may not sound like a fun book, and to be honest it wasn't, a lot of people benefited. If you were a shoe fetishist in the 19th century, you probably thought you were the only one on the planet. It was of genuine benefit to people like that to realise they were not alone.

Enter Kinsey. Alfred Kinsey is generally regarded as the father of sexology, and immortalised in the Kinsey Reports starting with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. According to some authorities these are still the bestselling scientific books of all time. Curiously enough, before sex, his scientific interest had been focused on the Gall Wasp.

These studies were statistical - and we were to learn, as never before, who did what to whom and how often.

Less well known was that Kinsey (it has been rumoured) participated in unusual sexual practices, including bisexual experiences and masochism. He encouraged group sex involving his graduate students, wife and staff. Kinsey filmed these sexual acts in the attic of his home as part of his "research".

Masters (him) and Johnson (her) took this a stage further. Questionnaires and statistics were one thing. Actual hands on (ahem) laboratory research another. Between 1960 and 1990 they delved into the Human Sexual Response, which was also the title of the book they coauthored and published in 1966. They had a busy life and documented something like 10,000 episodes of what were euphemistically described as "complete cycles of sexual response". Nice work if you can get it.

But, as with all the others, good things came from it. They established inter alia that older people did have sex, that there was no difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasm, that there were clear stages to sexual arousal and probably did more than anyone else to establish workable sexual therapies.

So there you have it. In one lifetime (mine) we have gone from woeful ignorance to more sexual information than you can shake a stick at. In fact there is probably more sexual knowledge in one issue of Cosmo than in my university library when I was an undergraduate.

Has it helped? Without doubt. Has it done harm? Without doubt.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I never did become a sexologist. It was all just prurient curiosity. My speciality was visual perception. Ho hum.

Weeds update, and a chance to gripe

2008-06-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

Following mouse's suggestion I have been back to the Globe Thistle (thank you for the ID blossomcottage) to check progress. They are looking splendid, some half covered, a few fully covered with dainty white flowers. Here are two views (as usual you can click for a bigger image).

In common with some other parts of the globe, we started with a very cold and wet spring / early summer. However, the clouds have parted the last two days and the furnace is still functioning.

The pool has turned a very interesting bottle green colour. I have had to ditch whatever green credentials I can claim and am dosing it up with various noxious substances.

Which brings me to my gripe.

The government knows how much money I have and they tax me accordingly. I have some savings, and those are "after tax" savings, i.e. from earnings that were fully taxed at the time.

OK, so I've taken some of those savings and built a swimming pool. The stuff I bought I paid purchase tax on. The water I filled it with I bought from the water company. What little energy the pool uses, I have paid for too. I hope and believe that various enterprises and their employees have benefited from my spending.

And now I'm taxed extra because I have a pool. A pool can be seen as a luxury, though I don't think that I've suddenly become richer. Poorer actually. I cannot think of a single way in which my pool is a drain on the resources of the local or larger community. So what is the possible justification for yet another tax?

Gripe gripe gripe gripe gripe.
Sigh.
Smile. (I made that last one up).

In paradise, even the weeds are lovely

2008-06-13T10:36:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure what these are going to turn out to be - they are clearly some kind of thistle, but look like they want to be cotton ball type things. (Those who read this blog do already know that my botanical knowledge is pathetic at best. But I know what I like looking at).

This poor little chap was rescued from Cupidon this evening; I locked Cupi up and returned in 30 seconds to find that Min had it now! There are times I could throttle my normally beloved cats.

I scouted around looking for distressed looking parent birds, but could find none. Leaving it outside at the moment is just writing a death warrant. I'll see how it does tonight and see if it will take some food tomorrow. It's not that far from being independent. If I can keep it alive for a couple of days it should be OK. Here's hoping.

Next morning update: The fledgeling died in the night, but peacefully. It was still comfortably and neatly reposed. No signs of struggle, flapping or derangement.

The land that crime forgot

2008-06-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I took my wife to the airport and was gone about 4 hours. I'm doing some work on the house so there's lots of stuff lying around. Stuff that any casual visitor would see. I'm a "drop and go" type; I like to pick up on a job when I get back, so I don't want to have to put things away.

I'm so used to doing this, and not having it nicked, that I tend not to give it a second thought. This evening, just for fun, I made an inventory of what was lying around, available for stealing (and is still out there now, as I write this):

new block and tackle
2 nice aluminium ladders
workmate (folding table)
2 extension cords
socket spanner set
chain saw
2 laser levels
laser range finder
jigsaw
cordless drill
electric drill
various hand tools
car battery charger
mini-digger with key in ignition (not a fast getaway I must admit)
2 Kubota compact tractors with keys in ignitions
John Deere mid-size utility tractor, key in ignition
cement mixer
nice two axle trailer to take it away on
steel wheelbarrow
garden shredder
tank of diesel fuel and pump

And my experience is nothing unusual. Two farmers near me have well-equipped workshop sheds - without doors.

I don't know why folks around here (rural Dordogne) don't thieve, but I am truly grateful. It makes life feel completely different.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

2008-06-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

There is a golden rule which says that when the State does something to improve your lot, protect you from yourself, make sure that your children come to no harm, prevent you from getting fat (and so on and so on) the actual results will not only be unexpected, but perversely, may result in the opposite.

I'll kick off with an agricultural example from rural France. I think you will recognise that the agricultural lobby, in the West anyway, has done very well since WWII. They have enjoyed subsidies, protective tariffs, guaranteed prices, and compensation when things go wrong with their businesses.

There is one extraordinary bit of protective legislation that I know about, since it directly affected us (though we have been able to resolve it). It is an ideal illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Because farming operates on an annual cycle, farmers, reasonably enough, want as much notice as possible of changes that will affect them - like the reallocation of land they might be renting.

Now this can be safely left to the free market. People with land to let, but who are unreasonable about time frames, will find it more difficult to let that land, and will find that they can charge less for it. In like vein, farmers who are prepared to take land for one, two or three years will find more land available to them than those who are looking to tie someone into a 20 year contract.

However, in France, the State likes to protect agriculture, and this is how they have "helped" farmers in their struggle with unreasonable landlords.

First, land is now let for a minimum nine year period. That is hefty enough. However, at the end of that nine year period, the renting farmer has the option, by right, to extend the contract for a further nine years, for nine years after that, and so on to perpetuity. Which is pretty scary for the landlord.

It makes no difference if the land is sold in the meantime. For a start, the farmer is protected for the nine years anyway. At the end of the nine years you, the new owner, can petition to get the land back, but if you're a townie say, you can kiss your chances goodbye. Even if you wanted to farm it, it would likely go to a tribunal that could easily rule against you. So you can end up owning, and paying taxes on, as asset that you have no reasonable chance of ever getting back.

OK, let's get to the unintended (but by now quite predictable) consequence. Farmers are kicking and screaming because they can't find land to rent. Oh, the land is there alright, and there are people who would love to rent it out. But because some functionaire can't trust two adults to work out a reasonable contract between them no one dares to let their land.

Another. What turned the British into a nation of home owners, rather than tenants (which many were happy to be)? And in the process turned them into one of the most indebted nations on earth who measure their happiness almost entirely in terms of house prices?

The desire to "protect" tenants against landlords.

This took many forms, almost all of which deterred people from letting property and so ultimately hurting the rented sector. When rents are controlled, the sector gets less profitable and shrinks. When you cannot terminate rental agreements, the sector is less attractive and shrinks. When tenants can be more easily removed from furnished properties than unfurnished ones, the unfurnished sector shrinks so you can only rent something with the cheapest and most hideous furniture imaginable (I did). All the above happened in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

I know there are unreasonable landlords, but the free market will punish them. They will find it harder to get tenants and will have to charge less for their rentals. As it happened the government played right into their hands by (unintentionally!!) shrinking the sector so that the remaining landlords had people grovelling to get a place, any place.

I confine myself to one more example, road straightening to reduce accidents. Well, you guessed it. Drivers increase their speeds which increases the accident rate, and increases the chance of fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians.

There are many other examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences, but rather than bore you I will invite you to look out for them, and maybe post them in comment form. The key characteristic almost without fail is the state doing something to protect someone, but hurting them by so doing.

Blue Foot: in memory

2008-06-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

Blue Foot died today, aged just under three years. She was a chicken. Those who keep chickens will understand why we are sad.

She was so-called because her left leg was yellow, but her right leg was a slate blue colour. I got to know her well because she had a morbid fear of heights. I'm talking here of anything over five centimetres. Really. She would stand on the edge of the dog's basket, or a flower bed, and not know how to proceed. I would have to rescue her. We formed quite a relationship and she would indulge me by sitting on my lap and having a snooze.

Her fear was well-founded. When she and her five sisters arrived as young hens, the French peasant delivering them said we should clip their wings. French peasants are almost always right about these country things. Not on this occasion. He clipped their right wings quite radically. The result was that they were very unbalanced trying to flutter down from any height; Blue Foot seemed to lose her confidence more than the others, and was never the same.

Chickens are very individual. Blue Foot was a high status hen, probably at the top of the original six. But she was gentle and did not bully (as some will). Chickens have friendships. Giselle was her special friend and where one was, the other would usually be close.

Anyway, something went wrong. I found her on the floor of the chicken house one night. I left her there till morning so that she would not be disorientated. In the morning I could see from her posture and her immobility that she was injured, possibly a broken pelvis.

Now some chickens will attack a sick or injured fellow. A relatively new chicken, the inappropriately named White Angel, was indeed having a go. We took Blue Foot inside and considered our options. We know from experience that French vets won't treat chickens, at least not individually. This makes sense. The replacement cost of a chicken is a fraction of the cost of veterinarian treatment, so they just don't do it. Luckily our vet friend The Builder (I will call him that to protect the innocent) helped out and left me with a syringe and antibiotic. She stayed indoors until she was almost fully recovered. She rejoined the flock and all seemed fine, but may have fallen a second time, for after a couple of days she had a serious relapse with similar symptoms.

This was really touch-and-go. But, with with The Builder's help and several weeks of tlc she once again staged a recovery and was returned to the flock. After these absences, she and Giselle would invariably team up again. In the photo Blue Foot is on the left, Giselle on the right. This was taken just a few weeks ago during her recovery phase.

After about three weeks of normal behaviour she showed signs of weakness, but with no discernible cause. We had her back inside, but there was a steady decline. It became clear that she was likely to die this time; she soon was not able to eat, and after a while, not drink either. I would have euthanased her, but couldn't think of a non-violent way of doing this, and I didn't want her last seconds to be violent. The Builder I know would have been able to dispatch her without pain, but he was away. She was mostly unconscious during her last two days; I don't think she was suffering.

So this morning she finally stopped breathing and is buried under one of our apple trees.

This is written as a short tribute to her. I rather like the idea that, aided by industrious search robots, her name will live for some considerable time.

The hyper guide to inflation

2008-06-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

Inflation. Like the poor, always with us. Just one of those things? Well, no.

Chances are you haven't given it much thought. Prices go up a bit (apparently about 2.5% a year if the Bank of England are to be believed), you get paid a bit more, blahdy blah. Dull? No, absolutely not. Read on to the end to see that a crime is being committed.

So what causes it? Greedy merchants? Unproductive industries? BoE getting interest rates wrong?

Nope. It's much, much simpler. The government is increasing the money supply, in effect by printing more money. Can such a simple thing can be true? And if so, why is it allowed to happen?

Can it be true?

In econo-speak, the marginal utility of an additional "something" declines as the supply increases. One glass of water is great, but the 15th is not. Amazingly the same is true for money - you actually can have too much of it. Try this thought experiment. Those friendly martians call again and leave a mountain of fivers on each street corner. Try buying something, anything, the next day. I think you'll find that a can of baked beans will have greater buying power than a shedload of money.

The current best example is Zimbabwe which is in the throes of hyperinflation (about 150,000%), not seen since the days of the Weimar Republic.

Zimbabwe has had to introduce a new bank note: Z$10 million. Bear in mind that back in August 2006 they slashed off three zeros anyway, so this is really a 10 billion dollar note. It is the equivalent of about $4 at the black market exchange rate. (In 1980 a Zim dollar was worth more than a US dollar).

(Text added 5 June 2008 - after a comment by absolute vanilla I looked up the latest conversion rate. I was WAY out of date. Today Z$10 million will get you, not US $4, but 2 cents).

The government seeks to blame everyone but themselves. In February 2007 they declared inflation "illegal". Anyone raising prices or wages would be arrested and punished. But the actual cause is the simple one, the government is printing money on a vast scale.

On 1 March 2008, it was reported by The Sunday Times that the Munich company Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) was receiving more than €500,000 (£382,000) a week for delivering bank notes at the astonishing rate of Z$170 trillion a week. Which looks like this: Z$170,000,000,000,000. Or this much a day: Z$24,000,000,000,000. Which is why prices keep doubling every few days.

Why does Mugabe do this?

Let's start with Zimbabwe, but the logic holds for all governments where there is inflation. The Zimbabwean government prints money to pay its bills. The process, though mad, works, and it works on the marginal utility basis.

Say Mugabe wants a new Merc, or needs to pay the army before they go apeshit. He prints a couple of trillion. Because those notes are not "in" the economy yet, they have the same worth as other dollars up to and at the point at which they are spent. However, after they are spent they cause the money supply to increase, and the value falls proportionately. So he gets a free lunch, but no one else does. And then he goes and does it again.

It's weird. He's like a kid who has a fiver and a colour photocopier, who actually thinks that he can generate value that way. The only difference is we can make the kid stop.

Why do other governments do this?

Governments have no money of their own. They get it three ways. They take ours by tax, they borrow someone else's or they print it. Excessive taxation turns voters against them, debt needs to be serviced, but hey, printing money is like fat-free cake.

Remember marginal utility? When the government has a pet project, or stupidly commits to bailing out a failing bank no matter what, it can finance it by printing money. It has full value up to the moment the government spends it; then, after it is spent (i.e. enters the economy), it dilutes all money pro rata. Note that the government gets the full value benefit, we get the devalued currency.

Now most governments don't go crazy like Mugabe. They do it at 2.5% like in the UK. It's pretty clever really. It transfers 2.5% of everyone's wealth to the government, every year, without anyone noticing. Much like a "victimless" crime.

Postscript 1: Wars are followed by periods of high inflation. This is one of the ways governments pay for them, i.e. with devalued currencies. The cost of the war in Iraq is now about half a trillion dollars, or getting on for 10% of the entire cost of WWII. I don't know what the UK's share of this is, but its citizens had better brace themselves for some upcoming inflation (see Postscript 2).

Postscript 2: The markets know about devalued currencies long before the rest of us, sometimes before the government I suspect. Have a look at this chart for the Euro/Pound pair. It shows that for the last several years it used to cost about 67p to buy a Euro.

From the middle of last year that changed and it now costs up to 80p to buy the same Euro. Which means the Pound has fallen some 20% against the Euro. (See Postscript 1).

Click image to enlarge it.

Spring is sprung (update 2)

2008-05-31T04:38:00.000-07:00

I just can't resist photographing the flowers at the moment. They are so profuse. (Click for a bigger view).

Love in the Mist

Comfrey

Wild poppies

Hot dogs (Misty and Bailey), still with too much winter wool. It may surprise you to learn that it gets freaking cold here in SW France

Spring is sprung (update)

2008-05-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

Couldn't resist these lovely spring scenes. Click a photo if you want a bigger view.

Daisies in our meadow

More wild flowers

And more

This is a wild orchid of some kind

Spring is sprung

2008-05-28T12:53:00.001-07:00

In our stables, in a hole in the wall:

"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe ..."

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

2008-05-27T01:51:00.000-07:00

I think that sociologists have denied us something important: the "golden age". If you remember times when things were better you are accused of indulging in golden age thinking; that it was never thus, or if it was, there was a significant downside that you are ignoring.

So if you reflect on a green and pleasant land, when there was no point talking about organic, because everything was, and when there was no rural crime to speak of, then you will be told that actually people lived in grinding poverty and you are better off now. Plus you will be made to feel unsophisticated and foolish (which perhaps one is).

I want to talk knives. Though I live in France, I like to follow events in the UK, and knife crime among youths seems to be a hot topic.

Well, here's something from my golden age. "When I was a boy" (hem) most of had knives. A dagger in a sheath was part of the Boy Scout uniform. We used to take knives to school. I know, because we played the following interesting game.

There was a Stander and a Thrower and of course spectators. Stander stood with his feet together and Thrower threw a knive into the ground to the left or right of his feet. If the knive was more than a hand-width from Stander's foot, Stander won. If the knife was less than a hand-width, Stander moved his foot to touch the knife, which was then removed and the procedure repeated. If Thrower managed his end of it well, Stander would eventually be so spread-eagled that he would topple over. At that point Thrower won.

I guess Health and Safety had not been invented yet, because we were allowed to get on with this game during playtime. I can remember one boy getting a knife in the foot, but it seemed a rarity.

One more thing. In my Golden Age when knife-carrying was commonplace we never threatened another boy with a knife or used it in anger. I feel this came from us. It would have been, somehow, utterly disgraceful.

Postscript: I am indebted to Brother Tobias for reminding me that the game is played reciprocally, where the two face each other and take turns throwing the knife.

Band-aid, band-aid, band-aid

2008-05-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

Foreign aid. An apparently sound idea with disastrous consequences, as per usual. The definition of foreign aid?

"The process by which money is taken from poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries".

Yeh, call me a cynic, but I believe more and more that it's so, so true.

Well, that's one aspect of it, namely the diverting of funds to improper uses and the corruption that both gives rise to it, and feeds off it. Mobutu, who was president of Zaire, had a fortune estimated to be $5 billion - though "only" a few million of these were ever tracked down, so perhaps there was some exaggeration.

What's worse, though, is the way aid destroys local economies.

Where you see starvation, you naturally want to do something about it. But what happens in a place where food is limited? Prices rocket, right? Is that good or bad? Now before you say "bad", think about what happens when food is expensive. Farmers and distributors see a way of making a fast buck and start providing food. More see what is happening and jump on the bandwagon. The supply is established and prices start to drop as suppliers compete.

However, the response of the West is to ship in food and distribute it for free. We've all seen the kids scrabbling for it - distressing, but at the same time gratifying. Except we don't think of what that dumping of free food does for the local economy. Anyone with a small surplus to sell is wiped out. Anyone thinking of taking the risk / expense of planting and harvesting food stops, because there is no point.

It's rather as if a friendly Martian touched down on Main Street, Peoria Illinois, and started handing out free washing machines. Many people would be delighted, but don't be surprised when in a year's time, and the Martians are gone, that the suppliers of washing machines have been wiped out.

OK, we have the vagaries of the weather to deal with, war and all that. I accept that the picture is complex, but I deny that it is complicated. You have only to ask which countries are complete basket cases, and which received most foreign aid to see a correlation.

Make sure you understand causation first. For example, it does not rain so that plants can grow; plants grow because it rains. I suggest we start thinking about aid the same way. Do we provide aid because countries are poor? Or are countries poor because we provide aid?

Postscript:
After I wrote this I came across an item where the international aid group, Care, is getting concerned about the same thing, here.

Some pictures I took

2008-05-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

A non-grumpy post! I've enjoyed photography since I was about 12 and managed to get my hands on a Pentax when I was 16. Lasted me until I was 40! It's all digital now, of course. I use a Canon EOS 350D. These are some of my pictures, taken around the Dordogne where I live (if you click them you get an enlarged view, I think)

A spring flower of some description, Dear God, my ignorance!

I'm not sure what this is, some kind of thistle I guess

Min, when she was younger

This leads down to a water source under our house

And this is the water source - the steps date to 12th c, but the source is likely to be prehistoric

Sunset over our place

The dogs are good with our chickens. Wonder how that works?

Visitor no. 1

Recent visitor no. 2. Looks like a weasel I think. One of the cats "treed" him

One of our mares having a roll

Cupidon stopping Min in her tracks using the little known foot-in-the-face trick

But her revenge was terrible

Another lovely something

Pressing the flesh, French style

2008-05-20T01:24:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell: This is in praise of the French, who have an endearing habit of touching each other, unlike the tight-arsed Brits.

Given that we are monkeys (or Naked Apes to use Desmond Morris's term) don't you find it odd that we don't touch or groom each other more often?

And when we do, it is usually in a carefully constrained context: hairdresser, the handshake, a touch on the shoulder or elbow, massage - no, not that kind, and so on.

During my student days I came across a very interesting social psychology experiment. The experimenter would leave a coin in a call box and wait until someone came to place a call. Of course they all did what you or I would do; they pocketed it. When they had finished their call, he would approach them and say "I think I may have left a coin there - you didn't see it, did you?". As the question was asked he would either touch them lightly on the elbow, or not. That's all.

So what happened? Turns out that most of those he touched produced the coin willingly; most of those not touched said, in effect, "Sorry, but no". That simple light touch on the elbow turned the interaction into something special where the person did not want to deceive. And get this: when they were told that they had been part of an experiment and asked about their experience of it, none of them could recall being touched!

Cue the delightful French, who unlike the English, still understand the importance of contact. I claim no authority for all French, and all of France, but here in the Dordogne we do press the flesh as follows:

I shake hands with my male friends every single day
This courtesy extends to, for example, artisans. If I have someone working on the house we will shake hands every single morning when he arrives
I shake hands with strangers who turn up
I shake hands with women that I do not know well
I kiss women that I do know well. In the Dordogne it is once on each cheek. None of your "air kissing". This is proper close friendly contact. (The Parisian woman who lives near here kisses four times - e.g. left, right, left, right; a Belgian does it three. So you do need to know who you are dealing with!)
All children (the term enfant seems to cover birth up to about 14), boys or girls, will expect to kiss you if they know you, and manners dictate that they will kiss a stranger during introductions
One may, or may not, kiss on parting. It is a matter of context and somehow you learn it
I kiss men at moments of great passion (e.g. we win the rugby) or New Year's eve
You do not kiss women when first introduced. However, this can be relaxed in certain contexts, such as a group setting where all the others are on kissing terms
You progress to kissing by some invisible criterion that I generally get right
And very important, at least in this locale, having greeted someone and shaken hands or kissed as case may be, you do not repeat same later in the day. If you try they will remind you that "je t'ai déjà vu".

There are times when the contrast could not be more marked. In my English Pub I would be lucky to get a greeting at all from the landlord, or perhaps "Evening, what will it be?".

At Chez Edith I will be kissed by Barbara the landlady, kissed by each of her two daughters, kissed by Marie behind the bar, kissed by Isabel in the kitchen when she passes through, will shake hands with Stefan the landlord; and that's before further greetings with other clients. And Barbara will definitely kiss you goodbye on your way out.

The effect? Well naturally I can't prove anything, but I do find the French very warm and friendly, great chatterboxes, and always willing to find the time to cement social relationships.

They still have something the English have lost, and the willingness to reach out to each other, physically, is part of it. Long may it last.

Milton Frieman on the free market and pencils

2008-05-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

I wrote about pencils, and whether they were sexy or not, here. A little while ago I stumbled across this short video by Milton Friedman, discussing the same theme. It runs for 2 mins 10 sec. I think he tells the story rather well.

Friedman is perhaps best known for his book "Free to Choose" - and also for acting as a part-time advisor to Maggie Thatcher - for which he is famous or infamous depending on your point of view. He had an interesting life.

His parents were Jewish immigrants in America and worked in a sweat shop. Despite this he writes in defense of sweat shops, showing how, for those who have nothing (perhaps not even the right language), they present you with the first rung of a ladder that you can climb. And present an alternative to exclusion; the fate of many people who are, instead, on benefits.

The trouble with women

2008-05-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

I pass on the following bit of pre-Cosmopolitan trivia. It was volunteered by a sexologist of the early 60s, haven't a clue who, so I regret it must go unattributed. Though could have been Oswald Schwartz now that I think about it. Anyway, who cares? Here is a paraphrase which may cast some light on sexual politics.

"The trouble with women is that they have an inexhaustible capacity for enjoying sex but practically no need to actually have it".

Why I am not a happy tax-paying bunny

2008-05-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

You've probably come across the three certainties:

(1) death
(2) taxes and
(3) you will one day have to speak in public

Let's forget about death and public speaking. Let's talk tax. (No, don't head for the exit; like the pencils this will be more interesting than you think).

Tax, for me, is one of those things that I have changed my mind about. I used to feel quite good about tax. I mean, the concept seems both simple and fair; you take something off people who have more than enough and you give it to people who don't have enough. Plus you do good works with what is left; build schools, hospitals, roads, old folks homes and that kind of thing.

Put like that, it's a no-brainer.

Now I'm not so sure for these reasons:

The amount we are taxed has grown steadily
So the resource the government has is now enormous
It spends it unwisely
It's big enough to distort the direction of society and the economy
Last, we are all, rich or poor, less prosperous than we would be or should be

So what's the problem?

Robbery was robbery even in Robbin Hood's day. The fact that your taxes may be given to the poor (or fund the war in Iraq) doesn't change the logic. Try withholding tax and you will find that strong men, armed if necessary, will take your money off you. OK, maybe that, though true, is going too far. Maybe tax is a social obligation; the state does need some revenue. I'll look at that later.

But let's move on. There's a bigger problem. Each pound, yen or dollar can only be spent once. That means that either you spend it, or the government spends it on your behalf.

Surely the only justification for taking it off you is that the government is going to spend it more wisely than you would? And pigs might fly. Did you know, for example, that in the USA 40% of tax dollars go to military spending and 4% of tax dollars go to schooling? Do you think that if tax payers were spending that money themselves they would apportion it thus? I personally wouldn't.

But if spending money unwisely is a problem, then that problem is compounded when the sum of money is astronomical. In the UK tax revenues are about £400 billion - maybe much more. Is that a lot of money? Difficult to grasp big numbers. If it were in £10 notes, it would weigh 20,000 tons. As a stack of notes it would reach 5,000 kilometers into space. So, yes, quite a lot of money, originally belonging to you and me.

You probably think of tax as income tax. But that's just the start:

You pay tax on your income (BTW did you know that this was a "temporary" tax, introduced in 1799 to pay for the Napoleonic wars? Read about it here )
Your employer paid National Insurance for the privilege of employing you - but since this will be passed on in the form of more costly goods and services you might as well have been taxed directly
Your company paid corporation tax on any profits. Once again you will pay for it in the form of more costly goods and services
You will pay council tax
Anything you spend will be taxed a further 17.5% VAT in the UK, more in France
If you save or invest, you will pay tax on any interest or capital gains
Anything left? Fancy improving your house? You will be taxed for your efforts
Then road tax, 75% of the cost or petrol at the pump, various stealth taxes ...
Your pension will be taxed
Finally death, followed by inheritance tax for the scroungers who survive you

I reckon that in the end you may get to keep no more than £3 in every £10 that you earned. That's an awful lot of prosperity to divert from private to public use.

But the government needs some money, surely?

Of course. The fundamental job of government is to make laws and see that they are enforced. Otherwise it would be plain old "might is right". So we need a police force and armed forces large enough to be credible, but which should not be used outside of its borders (I suggest). And really, that's about it. Some taxes must be raised to pay for that. But only a fraction of what is raised and spent today.

So where did it start to unravel?

There was a big spurt in the immediate aftermath of WWII. This is when government went beyond law making and keeping into actually doing things.

For example, you can pass a law making education compulsory. You do not have to run the schools. You can pass a law requiring citizens to have compulsory health insurance (like 3rd party car insurance). You do not have to run the hospitals. You can require that citizens put money aside to cover periods of unemployment. You do not have to run a Department of Work and Pensions.

Look at it this way. The government has views about us eating fruit and veg; imagine now that they find it necessary to run the greengrocers. Stupid, right? Well so is the rest.

The other post-war thing has been a push to state sponsored altruism. This is very blunt, very inefficient and very remote.

It's easy to be on the side of the angels. I think that most of us are instinctively altruistic and like to help. I want people to be healthy, have enough to live on, be well educated, be free from fear of physical or emotional abuse and so on. Yet after more than half a century of relatively left-wing politics (by both Labour and Conservative parties) we still have a nation whose health is suspect, whose schools are a disgrace, where poverty in sink estates remains uneradicated, and where authorities fail to recognise that children are at risk in high profile case after high profile case.

Big tends to be bad

Government policy is dreamt up by a bunch of liberal arts graduates (yeh, yeh, I know), unrestrained by market forces or other reality testing, is prone to the Law of Unintended Consequences, backed up by stunning amounts of money, and can't go broke. Wow. If that lot's not a recipe for disaster I don't know what is.

A couple of examples.

The first has to do with government diverting transport from canal and rail to roads - not because of market forces, but because of centrally conceived policies. With all the fuss about privatising / nationalising rail, it is easy to forget that Britain's very comprehensive early rail network was the result of private enterprise.

Here's a lake I fish in in Scotland. In the background is a lovely granite railway bridge. Of course the rail is gone, but this was the Castle Douglas to Gatehouse line. Both of those are tiny places by the way, but you could travel from one to the other by train. A Great Uncle of mine would hitch a ride and be dropped off at this very lake, in the middle of a wilderness, by the train driver; and picked up again at the end of the day.

Rail was nationalised after the war and went downhill from there. Dr Beeching, in the 1960s, recommended the closing of 2,000 stations (!) with the loss of 70,000 jobs, and it was the post 1964 Labour Government that actually made most of the closures.

Naturally, what rail could no longer do, the highway lobby was happy to pick up.

The second has to do with the most recent episode of Foot and Mouth.

Foot and Mouth is a relatively mild disease in most farm animals. They have flu-like symptoms and recover in a couple of weeks. Kenneth Clarke is the only politician I have ever heard be brave enough to say it should have been left to run its course. And if it had been up to the farmers, it's hard to see how they could have done anything else.

But wait! In steps the government to "save" the meat export industry, worth £300 million. Not quite. The net worth is about zero, since we also import that amount. And it "saved" it using £8 billion of our money, caused the farming community a great deal of distress, and also caused a great deal of animal suffering. That's right - it spent nearly 30 times (!!) as much of our money than the value of the industry it was saving.

And the last one: the government's decision to "save" Northern Rock could cost, it is estimated, every tax payer in the land £3,500. Err, thanks guys.

Is this a left / right issue?

Yes and no. "No" in that right-of-centre governments have got just as big as left-of-centre governments. "Yes" in that left wing governments do have explicit social agendas and right wing governments don't. Here are some definitions that highlight the differences:

The left:

is in favour of intentional political, economic and social change.
prioritises social equality.
therefore believes it is necessary and right to "tax and spend"

The right:

does not pursue intentional change
prioritises individual responsibility and the maintenance of natural and inherent inequalities between people
therefore should in principle have less need to "tax and spend"

However this simple formulation seems to have gone wrong somewhere, because in Britain we have big government whether it is left or right.

What would be better?

Philosophically I am inclined to leave money in the hands of those who earn it on the grounds that they know better than the government how to spend it, not the other way around. However some state revenues are necessary as they always have been.

I quite like the idea of VAT since it taxes consumption and is hard to evade. And no other taxes at all. If that was pegged at between 5% and 10% it would generate 50 billion to 100 billion which sounds like plenty - if the state sticks to what it should be doing and stopped running everyones' lives. And still leave enough for a genuine safety net.

Why pencils are sexy

2008-05-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

Are pencils sexy? Or is the title of this post a blatant attempt to exploit sex to get readers?

Well actually, I think that pencils are just a teensy bit sexy because (a) they are without doubt phallic, to a Freudian, and (b) they can tell us a great deal about why free markets work - no, don't go away, this is much more interesting than sex.

OK, so here's a simple question. When did you last have difficulty buying a pencil? You can't remember, can you? What's more, you almost certainly were able to buy the the style, colour and hardness that you wanted. And at a price that didn't make your eyes water.

The pencil example was used during a course I took in economics, before I decided on psychology (and you thought I was making that phallic bit up, shame on you). The example was to illustrate the power of free markets in providing the things that we want at a price we can afford.

Consider. The pencil consists of wood, paint, a ferrule (that's the metal bit), an eraser (not a rubber which, I understand, means something quite different in the States) and the core which is a mixture of graphite and clay. A pencil manufacturer needs to be able to bring together those resources.

But there is an almost infinite chain of knock-on effects. The wood comes from trees which need to be planted. At maturity they need to be felled. To do that you need axes or more likely chain-saws. So there is a pull-through to metal smelters and engineering works to provide those things. But ore needed to be mined first, and machine tools designed and built. Ore bodies need to be prospected and then developed. And in each of these industries we need the right number of people with the right kinds of skills.

I could make exactly the same point about the paint that covers the pencil, or the ferrule, or the eraser, or the graphite core, the system of distribution and so on.

How on earth do all these things come together, in the right quantities, to allow the right number of pencils to be made? You may well ask. In fact I hope you did. As I trailed earlier, it's down to free markets and the pricing mechanism. Every time one of the elements gets out of kilter the price mechanism will correct it. Too much wood? Price goes down because the pencil makers don't need it. Resources move out of wood into something else. Can't get the metal to make ferrules for love or money? Well I don't know if love will talk, but money will. When entrepreneurs see the price of metal being bid up, and supernormal profits being made, they will get into metal, the supply will increase, and the price will move back into the normal range.

Blahdy blahdy blah. What stops this being dull? I'll tell you, using two real examples.

Number one. I used to be an academic at University College London. We had a Russian visit our department. This was in the pre-Glasnost era, late 70s. I was showing him around and he wanted my contact details. He took out his wallet and withdrew from it a carefully folded piece of paper. It already had stuff written on it, right to the edges. He found a blank space, the size of a postage stamp, and wrote my details there. Paper, it turned out, was something he did not have a lot of. Well it was either going to be that, or a glut, spin a coin. At that time the Soviets used to plan, five years at a time, what they would need. Paper would be part of that plan, but from the above you know that means factories, wood, plantations, felling facilities, distribution etc etc ALL of which have to be planned correctly - and since prices would all be fixed, no price mechanism to tell you when you got it wrong. Which means you would get it wrong.

Number two. I had a rant about why Britain's National Health Service, far from being a jewel in its crown, was in fact an expensive mistake. If you followed the above you will understand why something as simple as a lead pencil can't be delivered by a central committee. In the UK they are smart enough to know that. They let pencils arrive courtesy of the free market. But what they do try and deliver by a central committee is a £100 billion health system. Hmmmm.

This is not good news, because we live in an age where governments everywhere are getting very fond of doing everything. Dear oh dear.

Postscript

Adam Smith explained all this much better than I can, and he did it over 200 years ago. He really was a genius, but denigrated by the modern left. His present-day supporters are often branded as neo-conservative loonies. Ah well, pass the Valium.

How to cure your spider phobia

2008-04-30T03:02:00.000-07:00

This is a bit of a departure from my usual rants. I came across a post where a spider met its end because it frightened a child. Actually this is an almost foolproof method for ensuring the child will develop a spider phobia (logic: if an adult finds it necessary to kill this thing it must be a threat).

I grew up with a very bad spider phobia which I can attribute to two such formative experiences. I also had the bad luck to grow up in a country with big spiders. Every time I walked into a room the hairs on the back of my neck would rise up in case there was a spider by the light switch or above my head (there seldom was, but that's no help to a phobic).

This persisted through to adulthood. Then something happened that changed it all, for ever.

I parked my car in the garage and saw a big spider (yes, size of your hand African spider) dart behind some timber. I knew this was going to cause me real phobia problems just going into the garage again. I could see it behind the timber, so I got a high pressure hose and washed it out into the open to kill it. But when I saw it, all bedraggled and wet, legs curled up defensively, I couldn't suppress a spark of empathy. I was hurting it, not because of anything it had done to me, but because I had a problem.

Instead of killing it, I found myself coaxing her (yes, it was a her now, not an it) into a small aquarium - with the aid of a very long stick it must be said. The top was sealed with cling film, with air holes punched through it of course.

Two things followed from this.

The first and most obvious was that I could bring myself to look at the spider in safety. Initially in small doses, then in more detail. She was actually rather beautiful. The closest I can get from an image search is that she was probably a Baboon Spider. Her abdomen was covered in grey and beige fur, as were her legs, but banded with yellow underneath. I think this was warning signal because the bands became visible if she reared up.

Second, I had to feed her of course, usually grasshoppers shoved through the holes in the clingfilm. I don't know how much spiders drink, but from time to time I would "mist" her with a hand plant spray. This had an extraordinary effect on her. She would begin an elaborate cleaning routine, much like a cat. With the underside of her foremost legs she would comb her whole body, systematically. Then she would pass those parts of her legs through her jaws to clean them, then continue with the combing. That really was fascinating to watch.

I never did have the courage to handle her. I wanted to, but unlike the fat and lazy kind of tarantula she was very alert and quite fast. I just didn't know if she would be alarmed enough to bite. Venom was not the problem, but she had some pretty significant mouth parts.

Then the final chapter. One morning she was gone. In the clingfilm was a gaping hole. Ooops. The Houdini trick. I wasn't counting on that. I looked for her, but no luck. Well done me, I thought. Had a big spider in the garage. Now I have a big spider in the house. But the fear was gone!

I had a feeling I would find her that night once all the lights were out. Sure enough, after lights-out I had a look with a torch and found her on the pantry wall. I put a glass jar over her, slid some card behind that, took her outside, and released her.

She did me proud and in a significant way changed my life because my spider phobia had gone and has never returned. I hope I was a good host. I now go out of my way to be ultra-nice to spiders (aah, so that's why you don't vacuum up cobwebs says the wife); trying to make up for those I killed in my other life.

A psychologist writes:

"This is an instance of 'flooding'. The client is subjected to so much of the threatening stimulus that their fear response is extinguished. This contrasts with their usual behaviour, which is avoidance. When you avoid the threatening stimulus, you feel relief. That simply reinforces the avoidance and so perpetuates the phobia.

This was backed up by desensitisation. In effect you approach the threat from a distance (sometimes first imagining it before you even have to see it, let alone touch it). As you learn to manage each stage, i.e. without excessive fear, you move to the next. "

But central to defeating a phobia is to live through exposure to the threat. Sure, you feel your heart is going to burst out of your chest - but guess what? It won't. And when your panic has run its course and the dog turd / spider / snake / you name it is still there, it's like "What else is left?" That works, avoidance doesn't.

And it is so nice not to experience that horrible lurch in the stomach any more. And so nice not to have to kill innocent spiders.

Compassion Wars

2008-04-29T13:58:00.001-07:00

Compassion wars. You'll see the signs everywhere, once you know what to look for. They do a lot of harm. And they are very pervasive influences on political attitudes and public policy.

We need to start with an example, so I'll take my life in my hands and nominate disabled parking. Now I have no problem with disabled parking being conveniently placed. If you're not very mobile, then being able to park near the supermarket or terminal building is handy.

I do have a problem with the number of places allocated. I don't think I have ever seen every place occupied, not even close. At my local airport there are something like 20 places and I have never seen more than two occupied.

Let's try another.

Five hundred people in the UK die each year in fires. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but given the population of the UK, the death rate from fire is less than one person in 100,000 each year. Two thousand people in 100,000 die each year anyway, so you are (how can I put this delicately?) 2,000 times more likely to just die of, err, death, than you are to die in a fire.

So why is it that we have to deal with those accursed fire doors that "must be kept shut" but which naturally we all prop open? Especially when 70% of fatalities occur in homes where no such fire doors exist. Mind you, small mercies.

A few more:

Hot taps with notices "warning: hot water" placed above them (I should bloody well hope so, I'd be fairly hacked off if it weren't true)

Horse chestnut trees uprooted, .e.g. by Norwich City Council, to avoid conker horrors

Winter Festivals replacing Christmas
Speedtrap policemen wearing hi-viz flourescent jackets

So what are compassion wars?

Compassion wars are fought to establish who cares. The winner, obviously enough, is the person who cares the most. Not, please note, the person who is more effective. If I care more about poor people than you do, then I win! Never mind that you might be more effective at doing something about it than I am. As you might expect, the favoured battle ground for compassion wars is The Committee.

Risky Shift

It used to be thought that people on their own might come up with extreme ideas, while those in groups would be more moderate. It turns out that the opposite is true. There is a kind of escalation within groups as members up the ante. This phenomenon is known as Risky Shift. Actually it can work both ways - you can have a committee arguing down risk - such as felling trees to avoid the horrors of conkers. So after discussion, a group's actions will turn out to be a more extreme version of any individual's preferred action.

Back to parking

So the committee allocating disabled parking goes something like this.

"Our survey shows we'll need 5 disabled places".
"Yes, but at peak times ... perhaps 10? That's not a lot to ask".
"Well I'm not endorsing any recommendation that has disabled people being unable to park".
"You're right. Fifteen, at a minimum, surely".
"I cannot believe this equivocation over a few places. I suggest 20, and let's be done with it".

"All agreed? Good. Twenty it is then. Now about this conker problem ..."

A fly on the wall reports ...

The following was passed on to me by someone, who must alas remain anonymous, working for the States of Jersey. A committee was convened to look at the issue of free bus travel for disabled people. It was agreed and accepted.

Then someone, probably someone who was very compassionate, said "Old people are disabled in their way aren't they? I think they should have free bus travel too". Now it is characteristic of compassion wars that no one likes to lose. So naturally no one challenged this bit of twaddle. It too was agreed and accepted.

Time passed. The calculations were done. The committee met again. They were shown the cost of their generosity. Turns out there are an awful lot of old people on Jersey. The solids floated gently towards the ceiling where they hit the fan.

Postscript (you couldn't make it up)

A recent study has found that the traditional game of conkers has been banned from a number of school playgrounds. This and other such pastimes, like British bulldog, rounders and even football, have been judged by some schools to be too dangerous for children to participate in.

The research was carried out by Sarah Thompson of Keele University, who analysed the playground activities of 1,000 children in schools in Staffordshire, Shropshire and Lancashire. She found that schools were keen to avoid parents seeking compensation for children's injuries and were confused about health and safety regulations.

Ironically, as she reports, "It seemed that many of the children's attempts to play were extinguished by the same supervising adults who complained that children 'did not play'."Admirers of the shiny brown conker may be surprised to find that Miss Thompson heard it described by some schools as an "offensive weapon"...

The NHS - another bad idea

2008-04-21T05:35:00.000-07:00

(In a nutshell: Britain's National Health Service has been hailed as "'one of the greatest achievements in history". I disagree. It has been an expensive example of the failings of centralised command and control)

On July 1st 1998 the BBC celebrated 50 years of the NHS by screening a special report entitled The NHS: 'One of the greatest achievements in history'. You can read about it here. The central idea of the NHS is that health care is free at the point of delivery and is available to all. It is so seductive that no political party has dared to privatise health and each election campaign includes extravagant promises about how this party or that will defend the NHS against the others who are certain to destroy it.

The NHS is definitely one of those ideas where I have done the 180 degree thing. When I first went to the UK as a postgraduate student in 1970 I was very taken with it. Now I am quite sure the concept is deeply flawed.

Actually, it's not complicated. Nothing is free, including the NHS. The government taxes citizens to pay for it. That tax is simply a proxy for health insurance. In effect the government is saying "We don't trust you to look after your own health provision, so we will make you do so on a compulsory basis". OK, so far, so good. Just two problems (a) there are specialised and efficient insurance companies who would be happy to do this - and do it better and more cheaply than the government, so why is the government doing it? and (b) for some completely unfathomable reason the government also decided to become the actual provider of health care.

This last is really bizarre. Take a different example to understand why. Road tax goes towards improving existing roads and building new ones. The government collects the taxes, puts the work out to tender and then issues contracts. Firms who specialise in civil engineering then do the work. Civil servants check that the work is done satisfactorily, then pay the bills. Now imagine we have the NRS (read National Road Service). All the road builders, everywhere in the country, would be on the government payroll; it would be administering their index-linked pensions; it would own all the equipment, suitably enlivened with NRS logos; it would similarly have depots everywhere for stockpiling materials which it would have sourced and bought; and all the above would be looked after by a large number of civil service managers.

So why is the NHS entrusted to government - which experience shows is notoriously profligate and incompetent?

How good is the NHS?

OK. The NHS may not be perfect, but it's surely benefited many, many people in the last 60 years? Well, let's find out.

A place to start is by looking at this graph (National Statistics Online). Can you tell when the NHS was established? I can't; not from the graph. I would be looking for a reduction in mortality rate (which here would mean a steeper line), and sustained thereafter.

The big wobbles are the influenza pandemic of 1918. The NHS was actually founded in 1948 but I can see no evidence of that in the graph. In fact female mortality was falling more steeply before the NHS than after it.

People use statistics misleadingly, often without knowing it. For example, the BBC report referred to earlier asked "Has the NHS been a success?" and went on to answer "In purely medical terms the argument seems overwhelming. Men and women are living about 10 years longer on average than they did in 1948 - men to 74 and women to 79".

So that's a gain of 10 years in the 50 years since the NHS was established. But this trend, see second graph, has been in place for a century and probably owes nothing to the NHS. For example there was a 7 year gain in life expectancy from 1912 to 1932 followed by a 9 year gain between 1932 and 1948. From the graph it looks like the increase in life expectancy slowed down after the NHS (but this could just be a "ceiling effect").

But the NHS is world famous, surely? OK, try this. Name some world-famous UK hospitals. Chances are you came up with St Thomas's, Guys, Great Ormand Street, Barts, maybe Papworth. Every one established before the NHS. Apparently not one hospital, created since the NHS, has achieved similar status.

How big is the NHS?

The NHS has 1,300,000 employees. In fact it is the 4th largest employer in the world! Now how many GPs do we find amid the 1.3 million? The number is just 33,000. And 32,000 consultants. And, yes, you guessed it, 40,000 managers. BTW spending on management consultants increased 15-fold from £31m to more than £500m in just two years (and that was back in 2006).

Apparently, on a typical day, 700,000 people see their GP. So that means that every 90 working days the entire country has visited their GP at least once. Each year 700 million prescriptions are issued and cashed - more than 10 prescriptions for every man, woman and child. I mean, what planet is this? No wonder people have taken to calling it the National Sickness Service.

But at least it's free at the point of delivery, right?

Yes, that much is true. But only that. No such thing as a free lunch, not even in the NHS. The NHS is stunningly expensive, heading for £100 billion and 10% of the GDP.

Let's translate this into terms one can grasp. The cost to every man, woman and child in the country is £1,800 a year. So it cost my family of four £7,200 a year. From the birth of my daughters to their leaving home some 25 years later, the cost to my family has been £180,000.

Maybe we're a healthy lot: I doubt if each of us went to the doctor twice a year. But say we went five times. That's 500 visits at £10 a time, £5,000. Let's say we picked up £10 worth of drugs on every visit, that's another £5,000. By my recollection we had, between us, five operations, some trivial. But let's say they averaged £1,000 each. That's another £5,000. Up to £15,000 so far. Now let's double that, because maybe I was unrealistic, so that's £30,000.

So we received £30k benefit at a cost of £180k. That doesn't feel like value for money. By way of comparison, Tesco's top private health plan costs under £400 a year. Across the same time scale that would have cost £40,000.

Why is the NHS so expensive? Good question. I suppose it is like a huge middleman sitting between you and your doctor. For a start, your money is taken off you, not by the doctor, but by an army of civil servants administering the tax system. And after a long chain of apparently expensive events, some civil servant will pay your doctor.

Compare this will turning up at the consulting rooms, seeing the doctor, paying him or her x dollars, pounds or euros and then departing. Eeek, yes this scenario does have you dipping into your wallet, but trust me, you're doing that anyway, and having to go deeper. You just don't know it.

But the real problem is Central Planning systems don't work

We already know this from the failed Soviet experiment. In principle we've known it since Adam Smith's book "The Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776. In this he introduced the idea of the "invisible hand" that guides production so that what is needed is produced - and that, though this be through the profit motive and individual selfishness and greed, society benefits.

Just as the Soviets would have a wild stab in the dark about how many nails they would need in five years time (and therefore how much ore would have to be smelted and therefore how many foundries they would need and therefore how much coal would need to be mined and - well, I think you get the point) so our Department of Health tries to do the same. They set out to train or recruit x doctors, y nurses, z ambulance drivers, make this many beds to be available, this many wards to be shut, this length of time for waiting lists and so on. Given the scale and complexity of the NHS the issue is not that they will be in error, but by how much.

A report by Warwick University said "The use of market mechanism to allocate resources and deal with imbalances has yet to be fully exploited (read: doesn't happen). Markets are a very efficient mechanism for bringing supply and demand into balance and for providing signals which guide decision makers in the right direction, but the Department of Health and managers have so far shied away from (this) preferring to intervene and attempt to manage the system."

Conclusions

It's not hard to like the idea of the NHS. Unfortunately it is intrinsically flawed because centralised planning and control is too. What keeps it going is that (a) it can't go broke because the government will tax, print money or borrow to meet shortfalls and (b) no politician dares speak against it. The result is a health system that is inferior to and more expensive than a system which is exposed to the discipline of market forces.

Postscript

What follows is my experience with the French health system. In 2000 the World Health Organisation ranked France number 1 out of 191 member countries (UK was rank 18). The French system takes of bigger slice of GDP than the UK, but not much; perhaps 11% rather than 10%. But there is also a cash top-up element on an as-used basis, see below.

Why does it work so well? I don't pretend to know the details, but all consultations and treatments have a paying element to them. The state pays 70%, you pay 30% directly. At your option you can take out insurance to cover some of this, but you are liable for the premiums. I think this paying element provides market information to the system and allows it to be responsive.

About 6 weeks ago I went to my GP with a suspected urinary infection. He detected a heart arrhythmia during the consultation. Within five days I had seen a cardiologist who recommended intervention. Five days after that (ten days after my first visit to the GP) I was driving home, having had a catheter ablation operation at a top heart clinic. It just happened. I didn't have to push or shove.

World War II (a very bad idea)

2008-04-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell: I think most of us grew up believing that Chamberlain was mistaken to try to appease Hitler (and so avoid WWII). Here I explore the idea that the only mistake was that he failed.

I was born in February 1945, just before the end of WWII. I grew up believing that to be British was best, that the Germans were pretty dodgy, the Japanese unspeakable, and above all that WWII was not just inevitable, but right, and we were on the side of the righteous.

(Time passed. Nothing in my education or experience dispelled the war mythology, though I am pleased to say that I discovered that both the Germans and the Japanese are exceedingly meritorious. )

WWII is taken as an example of how important it is to stand up to tyranny - and how bad it is to try and appease an aggressor. In recent times Saddam Hussein was explicitly described as another Hitler. "Just like we did with Hitler, we have to do the necessary, and do it now, and certainly we can't appease him because it will just get worse". The Balkans have provided other examples.

These supposed parallels, and how to deal with them, should set alarm bells ringing.

WWII did not have to happen. It was not a good thing. As alternatives go, it was probably the worst possible thing. Appeasement was an option. A very good option. Of course, History has taught us that Any Attempt At Appeasement Was A Very Bad Thing. Chamberlain with his "piece of white paper" has been held up to ridicule ever since.

Chamberlain returned from Munich on 30th September 1938.He had attempted to negotiate a way around the tensions of the time. He felt he had succeeded and described his achievement as "Peace in our time". It is generally not known, now, that this agreement, though short lived, was considered by many to be a notable coup and was hailed, as such, internationally.

OK. So this is a watershed moment with two possible outcomes. Outcome number 1: Appeasement succeeds and WWII is avoided. Outcome number 2: Appeasement fails and WWII results.

Well, we know it was number 2. That's history. But it's also odd. What's odd about it is the stuff about it being good, right, inevitable and the way to deal with bullies. But what I find even stranger is that the appeasement alternative was deemed Very Bad. Does this stand up to any kind of scrutiny? My thesis is that appeasement, probably at any cost, would have left the world in much better shape than WWII.

Before I begin, I want to be completely clear that this post is not about rehabilitating Hitler. He was undoubtedly a nasty bit of work and his aspirations deeply suspect (actually the same could be said about Churchill, but that will be explored elsewhere). I am not a neo-Nazi. I'm not even a pacifist. OK, with that out of the way, let's move on.

How much harm can one man do?

In this scenario, appeasement works and Hitler is left to do what he wants to do. How much harm can he do? I'm sure the answer is "quite a lot". But I'm comparing scenarios. The issue is not that Hitler would not have done harm if left to get on with it. The issue is how much harm, relative to that actually caused during WWII.

Hitler was born in 1889. By 1960, say, he would have been 71 years old. He was not a healthy man, so he might well have been dead by then. He had political rivals who may have usurped him (don't forget that he did come to power by democratic means). He may have been assassinated. So from 1938 we're looking at perhaps 22 years worth of his reign, probably much less.

Rather than try and quantify how costly it might have been to leave Hitler in place, I'm going to take the simpler course and show, instead, how costly WWII was in so many ways. A cost in money, materials and life so huge that it is hard to believe that any despot could do worse.

How much harm did WWII do?

Material destruction

In 2008 money terms, the monetary cost of WWII was about 6 trillion dollars ($6,000,000,000,000). For comparison purposes, that would meet the full cost of running Britain's National Health Service, with its 1.3 million salaried employees, for the next 40 years, without having to raise a penny in taxes! Or enough to give every man, woman and child on the planet $1,000.

The material destruction beggars belief. The number of ships sunk was in the region of 4,500. Something like 20,000 Spitfires were destroyed and 12,000 heavy bombers. Entire cities like Dresden and Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disappeared. Over one million homes were destroyed in London, another 800,000 in other parts of the UK.

In today's money a Spitfire would have cost maybe £250,000, so for every four destroyed we could make a bonfire of £1,000,000. A bomber would have cost maybe a million, so we are looking at 12 billion there. Who paid? Well our parents of course, but you and me too (oh yes, hang on to your hat, war debt was still being paid off in 2006!). The government used tax revenues, or debt, or simply printed money to fund the immediate costs, but in the end it was we who paid.

Now I know that some people think that though war is a bad thing, it does benefit the economy. Actually this is codswallop. If you believe that, then why don't I come around to your place and bash your windows in? You could return the favour and bash mine in. Somehow this destruction will help us both. Err, not really.

People killed

People killed? Well, something like 70 million in all, and of those 50 million were civilians. For each person killed, many other lives would have been changed forever - widows, orphans, aged parents who did not expect to outlive their children.

The holocaust

Almost six million Jews died in various extermination camps during the war. Would this have been different had the war not started? For hundreds of years Jews were subject to various forms of discrimination and harassment in Europe, and it is clear that they had a rough time in Germany and Austria before the war - e.g. Kristal Nacht in 1938.

However, whatever governments or groups get up to in civilian times, I believe that the position is much worse during a time of war. Then the prevailing administration can award itself draconian powers, can suppress (or make) all the news it wants to, can arrest and hold people without trial and so on - all in the name of national security.

I don't think it is any accident that the holocaust happened during WWII, and personally believe that nothing like it could have happened under civilian jurisdiction, no matter how unpleasant daily life may have been.

Creation of the State of Israel

Israel was created as a state in 1948. Would this have happened without WWII in general and the Holocaust in particular? I think it is unlikely, though the history of the region is complicated (Ottoman Empire, Palestine, British Mandate etc). If I am right the tensions in the Middle East today can be seen as a particularly harmful consequence of WWII and its aftermath.

Centralisation of power (and its retention)

This is one of those consequences that I believe has been very bad indeed, though it probably goes unnoticed by most people. Government gets Big during wars and essentially wants to run everything and everyone. If you are philosophically inclined towards laisser faire and small government, which I am, then this is a bad thing.

A state of war meant that the UK government was free to pull together resources as it saw fit - either during the war itself (e.g. the de facto nationalisation of the rail network by the Railway Executive Committee, The Ministry of Food being absorbed into the Ministry of Agriculture and the subsequent control of both the supply and price of food in the form of rationing), or in the immediate aftermath (e.g. Bank of England nationalised in 1946, NHS created in 1948).

Bad though this is during a time of war, it is the nature of big government not to let itself get small and many powers were retained long after the war ended, right through to modern times. Even today, in England, four pounds in every ten is spent by the government (and it tends not to spend that money very wisely). That is an enormous drag on the economy.

Agriculture

This follows on from the previous section and serves I hope to show how wide ranging the consequences of centralised power can be. The UK government, in common with others in Europe, got quite twitchy about food production during the war. It's not clear why, since there was not much privation during the war, and that that there was tended to be caused by malice or incompetence (e.g. food shortages in Holland and Jersey).

Sadly this preoccupation did not end with the war and governments have made it their business to push agriculture very hard. This has led to exponential growth in the use of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, as well as mechanisation of farming. To what end? Well, massive food surpluses, an insidious system of subsidies that encourage the above and huge environmental degradation, as well as trade barriers that have left the 3rd world unable to sell into Europe. It has also led, paradoxically, to a flight from farms so that now many farmers live alone and the suicide rate among farmers is twice that of other workers.

There is much more that could be said, but not here. I include the above just to try and show the distortions that I think can be traced to a war time mindset, that persist long after the war is over.

The war with Japan

Would there have been a Pearl Harbour without the war in Europe? Difficult to say. There were pacts between Germany and Japan in 1936 and 1938, and in 1942 after Pearl Harbour. My guess is that having an ally like Germany which was already at war, and doing quite well at it, increased their propensity to attack America.

The Cold War

Rather a huge topic. To me it seems that the Allies were at best uneasy bedfellows. Their treaties masked huge ideological and political differences. After the war there seems to have been a bit of a land grab by all the victors, though the Potsdam Conference in 1945 pretty well presaged it. Notably France and Poland were not invited to attend.

Given that the Cold War could easily have become WWIII this might have been 'the' catestrophic consequence of WWII. Even in the absence of such, the Cold War nevertheless changed the world - Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Balkans etc etc etc).

Although the Cold War did not have the material destruction of WWII, it cost all of us plenty - those pretty little things in the photograph are "mothballed" jet fighters costing 10s of millions each. They are fully functional, but it is unlikely that they will ever be used again. I really can't get a grip on the cost but it was, of course, financed by (you guessed it) tax, debt and by printing money, i.e. inflation. Whatever this huge sum is, it was diverted from its alternative use of civilian prosperity.

The rest

This is a partial list of things (good, bad or just interesting) that were materially affected by WWII:

Advent of the atomic age (and indeed the first hostile use of atomic weapons)

A huge acceleration of technological development (e.g. biplanes at the start of the war and jet planes by the end)

Mobility and mass migrations of populations

Destabilisation of Middle East

Growth of state welfare programmes in Western Democracies

Collapse of the British Empire

Unsustainable industry and agriculture

Massive increase in pollution of all sorts

Stimulation of consumerism to mop up surplus industrial capacity

Move away from rail and ship to road and air

How much harm can one man do? (Take 2)

I said it was easier to start by looking at the harm we already know WWII did - either directly, or by subsequent social and political change. I felt that by the time we got here it should be a no-brainer. If Hitler had been active up to say 1960, as I suggested, then for him to have equalled the harmfulness of WWII, he would have had to kill more than 3,000,000 people a year, every year, and destroy resources at the rate of $300 billion a year, every year. And he would have had to do this in the context of a civilian regime, not a war-time one.

I personally don't think he could have achieved this. Now I guess you either agree with this or you don't. It can be challenged, but it stands up to the challenge pretty well.

For example you might cite the number of people that Stalin killed; he is probably the most convincing contender. At the top end the estimates would have us believe that he killed 2 out of 3 in Russia, but that seems highly unlikely. Many estimates settle at the 20 million level. However, these include not just murders, but death through incompetence too - such as mass starvation following collectivisation, poor conditions in labour camps and so on. The lowest estimate I found, for actual state executions, was 650,000.

Pol Pot, the lunatic who ruled Cambodia in the 70s is credited with the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians in the infamous "killing fields".

The Rwandan massacres and reprisal killings accounted for something like 800,000 deaths, mostly in 1994.

The awful thing about this is that by "standing up to tyranny", "fighting for freedom" and "defending democracy" we seem to have done ourselves much more immediate and long term harm than if we had not stood up to tyranny, fought for freedom or defended democracy. It reminds me of a cold war slogan, popular in America: "Better dead than Red". That was kind of catchy until someone put up the alternative: "Better Red than dead". The choice of most I suspect.

The imponderables

There are many scenarios that I haven't explored, and can't do justice here. For example, suppose we had done what I suggest, and simply done nothing against Hitler.

Well, maybe he would have stopped after he had addressed what he (and the German people, and at least some politicians in Britain and France) believed were the injustices inherent in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI.

What if he had continued? Invaded various western European countries, or Russia. Well I never said that WWII could be avoided in all circumstances - just that we would have been much better off if it could have been avoided. If it happened, then it happened and those countries were invaded anyway.

It is interesting to speculate on the course of the war if Britain had remained neutral. Would he have invaded? Actually this is not likely; he regarded Britain, at that time, more as a friend than foe. But if he had? Well, then I guess that for a period of some decades the language of administration in Britain would have been German rather than English.

What about the fate of British Jews? This is an important and difficult question. I personally have no doubt that the Jews in Europe did far worse during a time of Total War than otherwise. But that may not have applied everywhere.

My conclusions

I believe that Chamberlain was right to try and appease Hitler and that the failure to do so has cost all of us an unimaginable amount in direct suffering and loss of prosperity.

Worse, I believe that a self-serving myth has arisen around this, namely that it is always worth "fighting for democracy / freedom / civilisation / you name it". This allows governments to justify their intervention in theatres like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. The latter provides perhaps the most contemporary parallel to my arguments above. Saddam Hussein was not a nice man, but as time passes it seems more and more that the intervention has been a worse alternative for all parties than leaving him alone.

(Sources: I'm a lazy SOB, so I'm not going to spend half this life or any other trawling through original material with a handlens looking for "the truth" (does it exist?). However, I don't just grab the first handy fact off the first handy website just because it suits my argument. Most of my numbers come from Wiki or .gov websites. I believe that I am not an order of magnitude out on any of them)