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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This is 1912 I am referring to (of course), when Britain had ended up behind the United States and Sweden, and not more recent times. A certain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who you may have heard of) is particuarly upset:
All who have our reputation as athletes at heart owe a debt of gratitude to you Correspondent at the Stockholm Games for his very clear and outspoken comments on the situation. We can now see the causes of past failure.
But he has a solution:
1. The first is the formation of a British Empire Team…
Like the Australians know anything about winning at the Olympics. Ha!
Actually, Sir Arthur is kinda sorta touching on, what is, in 1912, for Britain, a worrisome issue. Britain’s lead is slipping. France, Germany and the US are all catching up. Meanwhile, the colonies, especially Canada and Australia, are becoming less dependent on the Mother Country. Britain wants to retain some influence without getting into the same mess it got into with the Americans. Hence ideas are being floated for a combined tariff wall, a combined defence staff and (in this case) a combined Olympics team. They won’t work, of course, but Britain does, at least, manage to avoid a war of colonial repression. And the colonies manage to show up on time for the world wars.
The Times, Tuesday, Jul 30, 1912; pg. 6
Almost a SQOTD, but Guy beat me to it:
The technical and economic advantages of coattailing on the economies of scale of the trillion-dollar mobile-phone industry are astounding. If you want to understand why the personal-drone revolution is happening now, look no farther than your pocket.
That is Chris Anderson in Wired writing about how automated flying aircraft happen to need just the same sensors and processors that are found in smartphones, and hobbyists and increasingly serious people like farmers surveying their crops are taking advantage of this.
I suspect his first sentence applies more generally.
If you think £2m for a project without any policy implications is expensive, just imagine how expensive it would have been with policy implications.
– The IEA’s Kristian Niemitz on the Office for National Statistic’s venture in ‘happiness research’.
Earlier this year, I bought myself an FZ150. But now there’s an FZ200.
And the torture begins:
While in 2002 the 12x FZ10 had a maximum aperture of F2.8 across its entire zoom range, the 24x FZ150 in 2011 only offers this setting at its wider zoom positions. At the long end of the lens the maximum aperture is reduced to F5.2 which, in combination with the limited high-ISO capabilities of the small sensors typically used in superzooms, makes shooting at long focal lengths a difficult task in anything less than perfect light.
Now they tell me.
However, with Lumix DMC-FZ200, Panasonic has executed a veritable engineering coup by creating the first Lumix superzoom since 2004’s FZ20 to come with a F2.8 maximum aperture across the entire zoom range. And, unlike the 12x, 36-432mmm equivalent range of the FZ20, the FZ200 maintains F2.8 on a 24x, 25-600mm equivalent lens.
In combination with the newly-developed 12MP MOS sensor, this makes the FZ200, at least on paper, by far the best choice in the superzoom segment for low light shooting. That large aperture allows it to offer faster shutter speeds at the same ISO settings as its peers, or use lower sensitivities at the same shutter speeds as the competition.
Is this why some people hate progress?
The thing is, my FZ150 is the best camera I’ve ever owned.
And now there is a better one.
Incoming:
Dear Samizdata,
Defense Distributed, a libertarian student partnership, is announcing a project they’re calling the Wiki Weapon. This project’s goal is to test and prove a design for a completely printable, one-use ABS plastic .22 handgun, and to take that design from CAD and port it to a .STL file that will then be freely shared across all major file-sharing platforms to the world. DefDist is anticipating a world where 3D printing becomes much more economical and ubiquitous, and the Wiki Weapon will be one step in providing political and personal leverage to the peoples of that world. The value of such a file’s existence in the future cannot be overstated.
We ask that you please share the project or its video, located at http://PrintableGun.com and http://Indiegogo.com/wikiwep, with your readers and help spread the word that there are intellectual entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving Liberty in a time of almost unopposed statist planning.
Please find the attached press release for your convenience.
Thank you for your time.
You’re welcome.
Nepal to ban independent trekking. Public safety, job creation and ‘stimulus’ all in one; how long before other nations follow Nepal’s lead?
Yesterday some Samizdatistas met up on the roof of a multi-story car park in Peckham, where there just happens to be a semi open air restaurant (i.e. open air but under a canvass roof), which operates over the weekends of the summer. I first blogged about it here, but never since, I now realise, even though this is not the first time we’ve all met there. It is a splendid place, which looks like this:
That shot was taken during a favourite photography time: during sunshine, after rain. The rain cleans the air, and the sun then shines through it, to delightful effect.
Believe it or not, that cement muddle thing in the foreground is Art. But it was Art that was really suffering from the rain. Art in the outdoors shouldn’t do that, should it? Well, maybe it would be better if quite a lot of outdoor Art did just get rained out of existence, like a sandcastle being washed away by the tide (and many a sandcastle has deserved better than that).
And boy did the rain rain. Rain is not easy to photo, in my experience, but this rain was so violent that, what with the marginal cost of digital photography being zero, I just snapped and snapped, hoping I’d get lucky.
And I did:
I wasn’t the only one of us taking photos:
That’s Rob Fisher, whose wife and young son were also present, which made it all a lot more fun. → Continue reading: Sunny intervals and scattered showers – as seen on a roof in Peckham
What have you failed to find on the internet that you expected to be there?
The investment strike is one the government would do well to bust, writes Michael Burke in the Guardian. When I read the headline I gave him the benefit of the doubt. The Guardian subs do not cope well with nuance. But the headline fairly represents the views of the man:
Since both the cause of the slump and the cause of the deficit are the same, the investment strike by firms, economically the remedy is very simple. Government policy should aim break that strike and release sufficient resources to fund an investment-led recovery.
I bet them fancy-pants government ministers are kicking themselves now they see how easy the solution is. You just redefine thousands of separate people and organisations not wishing to risk their money in the present economic climate as a ‘strike’. Then you break the strike.
Don’t knock Mr Burke’s logic – when the British government redefines pretty much any behaviour it does not like as ‘terrorism’ and then uses anti-terrorism powers to suppress it, the tactic seems to work just fine.
In the Telegraph, Tom Chivers asks: what would it take to change your mind? It’s a good question; I’m forever using it in imagined arguments with socialists. It’s good because it helps distinguish beliefs that are rational from those that are religious. If you can answer it without being facetious or coming up with an impossible and improbable test then your beliefs are rational. If not, they’re religious. It’s a question I ask myself from time to time, as in: what would convince me that freedom is wrong?
Chivers here is specifically referring to global warming – he is a warmist. I’m not: I think it is a pack of lies. But if I’m claiming to be rational I should at least have a go at answering it.
Before I do I should point out that it doesn’t matter that much. Global warming is only part of a much larger issue: CAGWIT (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Inspired Tyranny). Warmists have to prove all of that. They can start by proving that tyranny works or even that a watered-down version of it works. I’m not holding my breath. Next they can prove that AGW is C. Haven’t heard too much on that front either.
But that still doesn’t quite answer the question. What would change my mind? On the AGW bit, that is.
In trying to answer it right from the start I hit a huge snag: I can’t rely on the authorities. You need only ask yourself what would happen if they turned around and said: “Terribly sorry, we’ve got it wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.” You can almost hear the sound of research grants drying up. Scientists are people too. They have families and cars and mortgages and titles and positions and they don’t want to give those things up. If they tell the world there’s a crisis the money keeps coming. If they don’t it doesn’t. They’re compromised.
However, I am still going to have to refer to some sort of authority. I do not have the ability to determine whether the planet is warming up or even if CO2 concentration is increasing. Or even if one begets the other and which way round. But if I am not prepared to believe the state-sponsored scientists who am I prepared to believe? The non-state sponsored ones? Or to remove the (mythical?) ones who are funded by big oil (just as dubious) – the non-sponsored ones. If Macintyre, Bishop Hill or Watts et al changed their minds I would be all ears. But having said that I am not entirely happy with relying on such a small number of people. And I’m getting very close to coming up with an unrealistic test. Has anyone out there got any better ideas?
One last point. I have to take issue with Chivers’s idea that taking advice from climate scientists is analogous to taking advice from a doctor (assuming, that is that anyone ever does take advice from their doctor). The reason I take issue is that the medical profession has a track record of both diagnosis and treatment. Climate science has to confine itself to diagnosis – treatment (should it prove necessary) is for economists. The problem is that even when it comes to diagnosis it has no track record – its theories are as contentious now as they were 40 years ago.
Call me selfish, but the only life I want to ruin is my own.
– A rather (I think) noble sentiment, expressed in a recently-shown-on-Brit-TV episode of the show by one of the 2 Broke Girls, the dark haired one who has always been poor as opposed the blond one who used to be rich.
Find a bit more of the conversation during which this was said, by scrolling down here, to where it says “Brokeback Girls”. Lesbians eh? Wherever they look, they see more lesbians. Mind you, the brunette character is called “Max”.
This is a long and detailed review of a gadget which might be more at home on a specialist tech blog than on Samizdata, but it serves also as a snapshot of the world of mobile electronics, a world that is perhaps less encumbered by regulation than is usual, which might explain the rate of improvement.
By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved capabilities comes along about every 18 months or so. A lot of learning is going on about what kinds of devices work best. The original iPhone had a 4-inch touch screen and only one button. Since then physical keyboards have somewhat gone out of fashion, tablets have appeared in various sizes, netbooks have disappeared, ultrabooks have appeared, and phones have got bigger, in contrast to a few years ago when everyone was trying to make them smaller. The point is that no-one really knows which kinds of devices fit in best with people’s lives and which do not. With formerly successful companies dying out, capitalism is mercilessly finding out.
No company is having more fun finding out than Asus. They pioneered the netbook — a small, cheap laptop — with their Eee PC. They combined the tablet with the netbook with their Transformer series of devices by making the screen detachable from the keyboard. And just recently they have taken this idea to a new extreme by sticking a smartphone inside the tablet. → Continue reading: Asus Padfone
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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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