We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The BBC reports that Big Blunkett is proposing to introduce yet more draconian powers to lock up suspected terrorists without a fair trial.
The new proposals are an extension of the current anti-terrorism laws rushed into being after September 11th. Those have already been condemned as creating “Guantanamo Bay in our own back yard”.
The new proposals would see British citizens tried partly in secret and denied access to the evidence against them. They would also reduce the burden of proof from “beyond reasonable doubt” to “on the balance of probabilities”.
Speaking on the Today programme, Senior lawyer Baroness Kennedy described the proposals as “a disgrace”. She went on to say:
“It is as if David Blunkett takes his lessons on jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe”
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
This post is not going to be about “NASA screwed up, how come after 40 years we still have a space ‘program’ and not a space industry, NASA is drifting off focus and no longer has a clearly defined mission, etc.” I will leave it to someone else to write that column, because Rand Simberg (or our own Dale Amon) could do it a lot better than I could anyway.
What I do want to talk about is: how the way information is organized and presented can make a difference in how it is received – and how bureaucracy can sometimes stand in the way of effective data organization and promote cluttered thinking. When we lost the Challenger in ’86, it should have been clear that it was unsafe to launch the shuttle on that cold January morning. NASA had plenty of data to suggest that it was not prudent to launch that day – the problem is that the data was not refined into a conclusive answer, but rather was shrouded by poor communication and bureaucratic ass-covering.
Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale and author of several brilliant texts on graphic design and the visual display of quantitative data, has made the Challenger accident a centerpiece of his traveling seminar. His exegesis of the Challenger disaster is available in his book Visual Explanations (Graphics Press, 2001).
In hindsight, it was quickly determined what caused the Challenger to fail: the poor cold-weather performance of the rubber O-rings in the field joints that held sections of the solid rocket boosters together. In a memorable session of the Rogers Commission (the group that investigated the Challenger disaster) the late Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, conducted a dramatic experiment. He affixed a C-clamp to a sample of O-ring material, dropped it into his glass of ice water, and then removed the clamp, revealing that the O-ring rubber lacked resiliency when cooled to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. (See photo below.) → Continue reading: Reflections on NASA’s grim anniversaries
Michael Jennings has a fascinating posting up at his own blog about the introduction of colour photography, the point being that it was very gradual.
When you look into this a little, it is possible to find brilliant, clear, full colour photographs from the last decades of the 19th century. The reason for this is relatively simple, which is that if you can take black and white photographs you can take colour photographs. Just split the image into three, run one through a blue filter, one through a green filter, and one through a red filter and record each image on a piece of film (or actually, at the time, on a glass negative). You have three images. Given those three images you have everything you need to print a colour photograph. However, designing a suitable process through which you can print that colour photograph clearly was initially a little tricky, and 19th century colour photographs could not be readily and accurately printed in the 19th century. However, they can be printed today, and I have seen some spectacular colour photographs from the 19th century, which are as clear and beautiful as photographs taken any time since. (In particular, I once saw a wonderful collection of photographs of Russia, but I cannot find any online).
Michael goes on to say that perhaps the decisive moment in this story, if there was such a thing, was when colour television arrived on the scene in the nineteen sixties. That was when black and white rather suddenly came to seem old fashioned. That was when they stopped making black and white movies, even though they had been making some movies in colour for about a quarter of a century.
But the titbit that got my attention was that bit about colour photographs taken in Russia over a hundred years ago, despite them not knowing how to print them on paper. Michael says he could not find any of these photos online. Can anyone in our ultra-knowledgeable commentariat do better than that? It would be fascinating to see such photographs, if they are anywhere to be seen.
On this day one year ago, the crew of the shuttle Columbia died when their spaceship broke up during re-entry.
Rick Husband
Kalpana Chawla
Laurel Clark
Ilan Ramon
William McCool
Michael Anderson
David Brown
Barry McCool, father of Columbia Astronaut Willy McCool,
accepting a Space Pioneer Award from NSS Board Chairman Kirby Ikin
at the 2003 conference in Palo Alto, California. (PS: Kirby is not a midget!)
Photo: Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved.
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
– Frédéric Bastiat
RyanAir has just lost a legal dispute with Bob Ross, a customer of the airline who suffers from cerebral palsy, due to the fact the airline did not supply him with a wheelchair for use within the airport at RyanAir’s own expense. The low cost air carrier was ordered to stop charging disabled passengers £18 ($33) for the use of wheelchairs the airline provided at Stansted airport as this was deemed to be in violation of the Disability Discrimination Act.
[The Judge ruled] the airline should pay £1,000 compensation for injured feelings to Bob Ross, a cerebral palsy sufferer, who brought the case after having to pay for a wheelchair to take him the half-mile from Stansted check-in to the aircraft two years ago.
[…]
The Disability Rights Commission, which supported Mr Ross’s case, praised the judgment for recognising that Ryanair’s policy was a “slap in the face” for disabled people wanting to take advantage of low-cost flights. Bert Massie, the commission chairman, added: “It beggars belief that a company that made £165 million profit last year should quibble over the cost of a wheelchair.”
So what we are being told here is that because the unfortunate Mr. Ross has a terrible affliction, he can forcibly impose his costs on others who do not wish to bear them. In a civilized society, a civil society, people should feel that it is right and appropriate to assist those who are disabled. Enlightened businesses should seeks to cater to those with special mobility or other needs and it is right that social opprobrium be heaped on those who decline to do so. Yet Mr. Ross did not seek social opprobrium for RyanAir but rather the forcible appropriation of its resources.
Yet why does a disability give anyone, no matter what unfair cards fate has dealt them, even a terrible affliction such as cerebral palsy, the right to legitimately help themselves to other people’s money by force? Whilst I think RyanAir’s policy of applying these charges was perhaps unenlightened (and certainly bad P.R.) to ‘quibble’ over the costs of a wheelchair, I fail to see by what right Mr. Ross is owed by force backed obligation a special charge on the resources of a company he elects to do business with.
As the regulatory state, and those who make their living from it, work to replace more and more social exchange between people with mandated politically derived behavioural formulae, less and less people (and the companies run by people) will seek to do ‘the right thing’ from any sense what is reasonable and decent, and instead will merely do what is mandated by political processes. When people like George Monbiot and Peter Hain describe their visions of a total political ‘society’ (which is to say the replacement of social interaction by political interaction… the replacement of society with state), Mr. Ross is an exemplary product of that world view.
Of course to some it would seem any criticism of a wheelchair bound person suffering with cerebral palsy is beyond the pale. But I prefer to think of Mr. Ross as a human with the same rights as myself, but not more just because he has less mobility. Yet it seems this man has not just the right to impose his needs on others but to say otherwise means the state will force you to compensate him to the tune of £1000 for hurting his feelings. I wonder when the Disability Rights Commission will take this to its logical conclusion and start going after people such as myself for airing such heretical views if they hurt the feelings of those who want to impose their needs on others?
I have not run across this elsewhere, but I have not been looking either. If the mad mullahs of Iran are executing officers who are war heroes, it is a worrisome sign of what they are planning for the population. If it was just a matter of tightening control over the Army, they could just ‘retire’ the offending officers. Executions mean they want to remove any possibility forthcoming orders are not followed or troops switch sides in a showdown. I am worried they are preparing for a major pogrom with an end result of yet another set of unrecorded mass graves in the deserts of Central Asia.
I have been getting conflicting information on what might happen if it comes to a confrontation ala Eastern Europe. An Arab friend feels that the majority of the country is not of the urban middle class and the country folk are absolutely loyal to their tribal leaders and very fundamentalist. A physicist friend with urban contacts tells me the balance is not so clear cut and during the previous Iranian Revolution the liberals simply got double-crossed by the fanatical mullahs with whom they had a temporary common cause.
Perhaps members of our commentariat or some Arab friends could lend insight into what might happen if push really does come to shove in Tehran.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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