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Education experts are apparently flocking to Belfast. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa humbug. The pre-report linked to above includes an intriguing titbit:
That could have some interesting incentive effects. January 7th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I had a small bit of free time this morning, so I have counted the December numbers for Coalition deaths. Without further ado, here is this month’s plot:  Copyright Dale Amon. All rights reserved. May be used with attribution to Samizdata This month contains a higher number of casualties among other Coalition troops than usual. 5 Bulgarians and 2 Thai’s are included in the combat deaths (hostile) count and one Pole was involved in a fatal accident (non-hostile). American combat deaths fell to 25; no Brits were killed either by accident or in combat in December (Two died in a road accident on the New Year). It is concievable but not provable the surviving Saddamites are specifically targetting non-US/UK forces in hopes of frightening their governments out of the coaltion. Only on the ground intelligence could tell us and that sort of information is rightfully not in the public domain. Most significant, of course, is the large drop. One could hypothesize the opposition threw everything they had into a ‘Tet Offensive’. Like the Viet-Cong before them, they lost; unlike the Viet-Cong there is no regular army from a neighboring country, armed and funded by a super-power, to take their place. This is only a supposition; one cannot state this with any confidence of being correct until there are a few more months of data to back it up. One could alternatively hypothesize the enemy is quietly regrouping after their offensive. I do not believe this, but it is certainly possible. January 7th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it looks like on Mars. That is the vista that will greet the first humans to set foot on that planet. I do not expect to be around to share in that experience but I still tingle with excitement at the prospect. January 7th, 2004 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
At first it reads like bad news:
What’s going on here? My take: the Chinese government knows it has to have great gobs of education if it is to race ahead economically like it wants to. But (just like India) it can’t afford to supply this entirely out of its tax revenue. So it is going to encourage private sector, profit-oriented education. But won’t encouraging profit-oriented education encourage profit-orientation? No, says the government. We won’t be encouraging profit-oriented profit-oriented education, only non-profit-oriented profit-oriented education. So there. And the shorter version of the above reads: never believe anything until it is officially denied. In China, as in so many places, “official” is another word for “not”. The point here is not the answer, which is contradictory waffle. The point is the question, which is: how about all this private sector education? How about it indeed. I am increasingly starting to believe – and I seem to recall (quick phone call) our own David Carr hinting here not so long ago at something similar – that the next great challenge to statism and statist economic policies may come not from the likes of us, but from the East. January 6th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m not really all that interested in what Hollywood does with its stuff. I mean, they’re only the size of the porn industry. I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It’s about manipulating factory processes, it’s about mass customization, it’s about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we’ll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that’s not really that big of a deal. – Bruce Sterling, interviewed in Reason. (Link via slashdot). January 6th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Back from Hastings with a satisfactory joint 3rd spot in my section of the weekend chess congress, I worry about what news I’ve missed since Friday. I shall report on this later in the week. Today I discover from the French Socialist Party’s website that they have a new, improved, cunning five-point plan to tackle unemployment:
I would go so far as to admit that for government job centres to call in their long-term unemployed, find out what they are doing to find work and even suggest re-training can produce results. But proposals 1 and 2… which incidentally contradict each other… I seem to recall that Jacques ‘Superliar’ Chirac proposed something like this in the 1990s when he stood for the presidency, but I and all the people I know that voted for him at the time were sure that he was lying.  January 6th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
He was not a ‘show biz personality’. He did not appear in Hello magazine. He did not share his view with us about the case for toppling Saddam, and as far as I am aware, has not greatly troubled the front pages of the world’s newspapers with drunken antics. He was, boringly, one of the finest, toughest sportsmen of the age. And boy, could he use a cricket bat. Steve Waugh, cricketing colossus, has finally quit the field. January 6th, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Journalism is a dog-eat-dog business these days. Lack of talent is no longer enough. No, you have to do something truly original and spectacular in order to get noticed. Take, for example, Osama Bin Laden. After years of fruitless struggle (and the customary mound of polite rejection letters) he has finally been rewarded with his own column in the Guardian:
Employing him was clearly the right decision. Who else can boast such an enticing combination of political commentary, history and anti-Western rhetoric? This is sizzling stuff. Looks like the Guardian has landed itself a new champion of social justice and the environment. January 6th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The state is something different from society; it is ultimately the servant not the master of individual human beings; its potential for inflicting horrors remains as great as ever. January 6th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Norman Lebrecht is a name familiar to all classical CD geeks, of whom I am definitely one. He has written vast books full of rage. The air is thick with the sound of nails being hammered on the head, and of thumbs being crushed with that same hammer. Excellent explanations charge headlong into ridiculous explanations for the same phenomenon, the phenomenon to be explained usually being the “death of classical music”, which is the phrase Lebrecht sometimes gives to the current travails of the classical music performing and recording enterprise. He sometimes gets that distinction right, and then in the next sentence quite forgets about it. He knows something important is happening to something important, and he hits nail after nail into the wood pile, hoping eventually to nail it all down. (He reminds me of how I write about Modern Art.) → Continue reading: Norman Lebrecht and the death of classical music January 6th, 2004 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
My friend Michael Jennings is looking for a job. At the top of his CV it says:
Michael is a one man research department, which is a very cost-effective and useful thing for a person to be. If your company or enterprise is thinking of expanding into new areas, to take advantage of newly emerging trends, technological and/or political, you need someone like Michael to answer your questions, which are liable to be complicated and which must be answered correctly. Answering complicated questions correctly is what Michael does best. Michael is the sort of person who is easily mistaken for a useless geek, but actually he is a very useful geek indeed. There are several reasons for this. → Continue reading: Michael Jennings – your questions answered January 6th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Maybe mankind, even in these dumbed-down days, can take only so much dreck. That, in my ‘umble opinion, is one lesson we can reasonably draw from figures showing a fall in the sales of Hollywood-made movies in north America. Yes, Lord of the Rings 3, Finding Nemo and some others have proven a big hit, but all too often the formula of big action movie has proven a dud. Of course, certain factors are involved here. Remaking comic strips into films is bound, after the early flurry of excitement, to leave audiences cold. DVD sales and rentals may also be playing a part, though heaven knows it is difficult to work out if there is a direct cause and effect. I would be willing to bet, though, that one factor which Hollywood film executives are missing is the changing demographic profile of our culture. All too many films are still pitched at teens and twentysomethings, but surely as populations age, as they are in parts of the West, film producers need to take account of a more mature audience. The Peter Weir historical drama movie, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and based on two seafaring novels by the late Patrick O’Brien, was my favourite of the year, and much better than I had come to expect of literary screen adaptations. It has not shot the lights out at the box office, but deserved to do so. Or maybe films made in Asia and elsewhere are going to pick up the slack from Hollywood over the long term. We live in interesting times. January 5th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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