The 15 in Iran

I didn’t comment on the capture of the Naval personnel in the Gulf, because I think it’s fundamentally a bad idea to make such a big deal out of it. It becomes impossible to use military force effectively if you’re prepared to look at your troops as hostages that way.

If the 15 had been killed by Iraqis two weeks ago the media would pretty nearly have forgotten them by now. If they’d been killed by Iranians, there would be a bit of fuss, but everybody knows that people get trigger-happy on borders sometimes, and it would probably be on the way to blowing over by now.

The British government has been made to look very foolish, not so much by the way the situation was handled, but by getting into it in the first place. It does seem to demonstrate that Blair believes his own propaganda – that Britain has a perfect right to be in Iraq, and no-one else has any right to interfere. As I’ve said before, while Britain’s intervention can be defended, Iran’s taking steps can be defended just as well. Britain’s right to be in control of southern Iraq rests at least in part on possession of superior force. That being the case, there can be no excuse for the navy wandering around the Shatt-Al-Arab with its hands in its pockets as if it was the Serpentine. The accounts I have seen seem to indicate that the boarding party should have been well able to defend itself if not caught unprepared, and that in any case plenty of force was available to protect it had it occurred to anyone that it might be needed. That the party was caught both unprepared and unprotected suggests to me that they did not understand they were in a hostile part of the world among people who did not recognise their God- or UN- given right to be there bossing people around. I find that lack of awareness extremely worrying.

Peace processes

There is a lesson to the unexpected spectacle of the DUP/Sinn Fein power-sharing setup.

That is that a peace agreement has to be negotiated between the parties that are actually fighting. Distantly related proxies can negotiate all they want, but ultimately it’s what the conflicting parties themselves will accept that matters.

The initial peace negotiations in Northern Ireland were outside the political institutions, and they set the framework for the new regime. But at that stage it was still tentative.

The government formed by Trimble and Hume was not able to settle matters, because neither was able to satisfy the other side that was speaking for the hardliners. John Hume could not satisfy Unionists that the IRA was on board, because he doesn’t speak for the IRA. And Trimble could not satisfy Nationalists that the unionists were permanently committed to the new arrangements, because he could be overruled at any election by Paisley being elected.

So when commentators ask, how can Paisley make a deal that he attacked Trimble for making, the answer is that Paisley is making a deal via Sinn Fein with the IRA, not with the SDLP. And no deal with the SDLP is a deal for peace, because the SDLP was never at war.

Science and Climate

A very interesting guest posting on Roger Pielke Sr’s Climate Science Weblog.

What’s revealing is that the writer, Benjamin Herman of the University of Arizona, is not a “climate scientist”. That is because hardly anyone is a “climate scientist”, as in someone who’s job it is to understand the climate. Like thousands of others, Herman is an expert in measuring, understanding or predicting one small element of the world’s climate processes.

The views Professor Herman expresses on the subject of global climate are pretty much those I would expect.

  • He can see that the anthropogenic CO2 -> global warming theory is basically plausible.
  • He can see many sources of uncertainty that seem to have been ignored in the IPCC literature, with the effect of exaggerating the confidence of its statements.

It seems to me that the majority of scientists with specialties relating to climate hold pretty much these views, along with a third belief:

  • That pushing world energy production away from fossil fuel burning is highly desirable or essential over the long term, for a number of reasons mostly unconnected with climate.

As such, they have until now refrained from speaking up against the dishonesty or bad science in the AGW debate. After all, it might well be true, and it’s in a good cause even if it isn’t. Why step into the politically charged and dangerous arena of global climate prediction if you don’t have to?

The only people who have to take a scientific position on the issue are the holistic climate scientists. And pretty much the only reason for being a climate scientist in that sense is to predict global warming. The vaunted “consensus” that the IPCC represents is a consensus of a small group of people, fortified by the silence of the thousands of relevant scientists whose work they cite but who are not directly concerned with predicting the global climate, and who have better things to do than quibble about the confidence levels. If they have any hostility to the “consensus”, it is a kind of resentment that the work they’re doing is considered irrelevant: the questions they’re spending their careers working on are treated as already answered for the purposes of global climate prediction.

It’s an effect of the astonishing specialization in modern science. Scientists do not in general work on “big questions”. They work on small questions, and answering the big questions is left to summarizers, who are relatively few in number.

Of course, just because the police have fitted someone up doesn’t mean they’re not guilty. Even if this scenario has been foisted on us by a dishonest and politically motivated clique, that doesn’t mean it’s not true: it easily might be, and the alternative explanations of 20th century climate, while plausible, are not any better proved than the IPCC’s.

The curse of DIY

From Jeff Randall in the Telegraph, a piece on the carnage of DIY over the Easter weekend.

The curse of DIY is inflicted on us by two policies: income tax and trade credential regulation.

The income tax is obvious: There is a job in my house that will take a skilled person an hour. I have two choices: I can do it myself, or I can work for money with which to pay someone else to do it.

Assume I get paid the same as a skilled tradesman. I have to work for an hour to pay for an hour of his time. Then I work for another 40 minutes to pay his income tax. Then I work for another 17.5 minutes to pay the VAT. Then I work another 78 minutes to pay my income tax. In the end I have worked three and a quarter hours to get an hour of someone else’s time. The temptation to think I can do it myself in less time than that is very strong.

The credentials are the other problem. The costs of getting a professional are inflated by rationing the supply.

It can be argued that the regulations are necessary to protect from under-skilled practitioners. But that assumes that the result of banning the less qualified provider will be that a more qualified one is used. The facts of DIY show the fallacy of this – if I can’t hire a cheap workman, I’ll probably have a go myself, with worse consequences.

It is like the ever-increasing monitoring of the quality of parents. I have seen at quite close hand the struggles of the underqualified single parent attempting to keep her child out of the clutches of the state. The process could possibly be justified if the end result was giving the child a better home, but in reality the only alternatives are the foster system or a children’s home. The most stringent sane criterion for judging the adequacy of a parent is whether she is doing a better job than the children’s home would, and the most stringent sane criterion for judging whether a workman should be allowed to do a job is whether he would do a better job than his potential customer.

300

I watched 300 last week, and it was a pretty good film of the sort I wouldn’t normally bother to review here.

I am, however, somewhat struck by the massive point-missing that has gone on. Many have complained that the film appears to be crude political propaganda, although there is some dispute as to who is being supported and who attacked.

How many of these people actually stayed to the end? The film is indeed crude propaganda, as we see at the end the narrator of the whole movie, the David Wenham character, standing in front of an army doing the St Crispin bit, presumably at the battle of Platea.

All the things that have been attacked make perfect sense in that context. The characters banging on and on about freedom while their many slaves never appear in shot, the domestic political rivals of the narrator being represented as hideous subhumans, the improbable monstrous character of the Persians (and for that matter the wolf) — the film was not the battle of Thermopylae, it was a pep-talk for Platea.

I haven’t read the graphic novel, and indeed have only the slightest aquaintance with them (Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns is I think the only one I’ve ever bought), but that kind of perspective-choice is one of the things I think they can do well.

The imagination of another’s perspective seems to be something in very short supply. Witness as just one example the Telegraph editorial yesterday accusing Iran of “meddling in Iraq” — it takes an amazing lack of imagination not to see how ludicrous that sounds.

Rockbox

Excited by the EMI/Apple announcement of imminent DRM-free downloads, I checked whether my audio player — an iAudio M5 — could play the AAC format that Apple sells. I found that it couldn’t, but that the open-source Rockbox player software, which can, has recently been ported to the M5.

I’ve installed it, and it works. I like the plugins – there’s a chess program, and a sudoku. The metadata database feature doesn’t seem to work, and the interface is sometimes slow to respond, which is irritating. (It can take a couple of seconds sometimes for a submenu to come up, and if you’ve repeated your selection, the extra events then take effect afterwards).

These are quibbles; I’m very impressed with rockbox. I’ll dig into the database issue over the Easter weekend, and maybe come up with some patches if I can work out what it’s supposed to be doing.

There are other obstacles to taking advantage of the Apple thing: there is some question as to whether rockbox can play 256kbps AAC in realtime, but I suspect on the M5 it can, as it has a more powerful CPU than some of rockbox’s older targets. I also understand you can’t just buy iTunes from the web, you need to install the software. Apple may change that, or I might be able to get it working with Wine.

There is also a question as to whether the iTunes offer is value for money. I currently get music by buying CDs from the likes of Play or 101cd, typically at GBP5-8 each (very little music that has come out in the 21st century has interested me). I will try it out if I can, just because it’s a step that has to be encouraged.

Europe's good government

It is reasonably obvious that the biggest factor affecting the quality of a school is not the building, the management, the teaching staff, or the level of funding, but the intake. By that I do not merely mean that pupils who go in better come out better, but that a pupil entering a school with a good intake will come out better than the same pupil would entering a school with a bad intake.

While this is widely recognised for schools, I think it applies also, and possibly just as much, to other public services. The difference between a good train service and a bad train service is, to a significant degree, down to the passengers. The biggest reason for a person to prefer to drive a car, rather than take a train, is to avoid the other people who would be on the train. Indeed, the point is so strong in transport that we do not consider as “public transport” a service which does not force us into proximity with other users, i.e. taxis, which operate on exactly the same basis as any other form of public transport.

There are two kinds of public/private distinction: there is the distinction between state-provided and privately-provided services, and the distinction between publicly-consumed and privately-consumed services. They line up sufficiently to cause confusion, because publicly-consumed services are not excludable and are therefore “public goods” generally considered better provided by government. Public/private provision is a more definite yes/no question, albeit with hybrids funded by subsidy plus usage fees, while public/private consumption is a continuum – a medical operation is a private good, but control of infectious disease is somewhere in the middle.

It is with this assumption that I look at Tyler Cowen’s controversial assertion that, as an effect of differences in structure, Western European governments provide public services better than the US government can. To the degree that this is true, I think the cause is more to do with the different attitudes of Europeans and Americans to public services than to different structures of government organisation. As the Economist blogger illustrates, even a straightforward benefits system will be much more effective in a public-oriented society like Denmark than in the USA.

In Britain, we seem to have the worst of both worlds: something approaching a European-sized state sector with very American public attitudes to the services it provides, and I think that more than anything explains the current state of our public services. It was not always that way — some years ago I mentioned in a discussion of mobile phone tariffs that, where evening calls were free, some customers were using their mobile phones as baby monitors, by making a call from one handset in one room to another and leaving the call open all night. To me that was reasonable and unsurprising, but my older friend found it hard to believe that people would abuse a limited public resource that way, just because they weren’t being charged. Publicly consumed services work much better with that older generation’s attitudes than with those of my generation.

Ripped off Again

My collection of toys was augmented last month by this device:

Carol Vorderman Sudoku Keychain

Notice the puzzle displayed in the image:

8 4 . . . . 6 . .
. 2 . . 6 8 3 . 4
3 . . . 1 . 9 . 8
. . . . . . . . 3
2 8 5 7 9 . . . .
1 . . . 2 6 . 9 7
. . 8 . . 5 . 4 .
5 9 . 2 . . . 8 6
. 7 2 6 . 9 . 3 .

Unlike a proper sudoku, the grid does not have a unique solution. Any of the following three filled grids are possible:

Solution 1
8 4 1 9 3 7 6 5 2
7 2 9 5 6 8 3 1 4
3 5 6 4 1 2 9 7 8
9 6 7 1 5 4 8 2 3
2 8 5 7 9 3 4 6 1
1 3 4 8 2 6 5 9 7
6 1 8 3 7 5 2 4 9
5 9 3 2 4 1 7 8 6
4 7 2 6 8 9 1 3 5

Solution 2
8 4 1 9 3 7 6 5 2
9 2 7 5 6 8 3 1 4
3 5 6 4 1 2 9 7 8
7 6 9 1 5 4 8 2 3
2 8 5 7 9 3 4 6 1
1 3 4 8 2 6 5 9 7
6 1 8 3 7 5 2 4 9
5 9 3 2 4 1 7 8 6
4 7 2 6 8 9 1 3 5

Solution 3
8 4 9 5 3 7 6 1 2
7 2 1 9 6 8 3 5 4
3 5 6 4 1 2 9 7 8
9 6 7 1 5 4 8 2 3
2 8 5 7 9 3 4 6 1
1 3 4 8 2 6 5 9 7
6 1 8 3 7 5 2 4 9
5 9 3 2 4 1 7 8 6
4 7 2 6 8 9 1 3 5

My experience with the device has exposed more errors of this kind. On “Medium” difficulty, I got the following grid:

4 3 . . 1 8 . . .
5 . . . . . . . 1
. 9 1 . . . . 6 4
. . 3 . . . 7 . 6
9 . . . 6 . . . .
6 . 5 . . . . 9 .
. . . . 7 6 . . 9
. 6 . . 5 . . . 7
. . . 8 . . . . .

I will not enumerate here the 13748 solutions my trusty xemacs mode found for that grid. The only one the machine accepts as correct is number 10310.

Does anybody have Carol Vorderman’s email address?

Since I installed Rockbox on my M5 there’s no need to use it anyway, but it’s really my public duty to complain.

Cadbury's

Private Equity, blah blah blah, capitalism, blah, tendency to monopoly, blah blah.

Cadbury Schwepps announced plans to split into two separate businesses.

“Splitting into two distinct companies could dramatically increase Cadbury’s value – perhaps by £3.4bin

“It may also become easier to manage after suffering a spate of problems”

This is happening under the threat of a takeover by a private investor.

The force driving companies to get bigger is Parkinson’s Law. The force tearing them apart when they get unmanagably large is the market.

The size of a company that matters for organisation is not the annual turnover, it is the number of decision-makers.

All Thatcher's fault

Watching the much-anticipated C4 film “The Great Global Warming Swindle”.
The science is OK – I was worried they would over-egg the pudding and drag in some of the siller arguments (the Monckton stuff, e.g.) It’s more cautious than that – nothing I have seen so far can be trivially dismissed.
The only really startling claim (1/2 hour still to go) is that Baroness Thatcher kicked the whole panic off in the 1980s in an attempt to undermine the NUM. According to Nigel Lawson, she wanted nuclear power to reduce dependence on coal and oil, saw the early suggestions that anthropogenic CO2 might cause warning, and set up a large Royal Society research project to go and back it up, leading directly to the IPCC etc.
I’ve never heard that storyline put forward before, and I can hardly wait to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Just imagine telling all the anti-capitalists that they’re just left-over pawns of their most hated enemy.

The programme seems to be winding up with whacking some easy targets – the idea that malaria would spread because of warming is plain silly, and I have never actually heard it before. Apparently the IPCC reports have put it forward, so it is perhaps worth taking on.