The Uncanny Valley

This I think is interesting:

"Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori, whose study of engineering is heavily influenced by the teachings of Buddhism, posits the theory of the Uncanny Valley. This theory explains how humans react to robots and other non-human beings. The Uncanny Valley theory states that social acceptance of a robot by humans increases as the robot becomes more human-like in quality. Emotional response is increasingly positive as the robot gains more human-like qualities like movement and appearance. However, at a point where an automaton is almost nearly human-like, acceptance of the robot suddenly drops off (MacDorman, 2005), and the emotional response is one of repulsion. This is the point at which a robot is nearly human. Plotted on a graph with reaction and acceptance on the X axis and human-like quality on the Y axis, this dip in the acceptance curve is the 'Uncanny Valley'- a point at which observers find viewing or interacting with the robot disquieting or disturbing (MacDorman, 2005). As the appearance, motion and behaviour of the robot continue to be more indistinguishable than those of a human, emotional response once again rises and approaches human-to-human empathy levels."

from "Robots and Nursing: Concepts, Relationships and Practice"

Aric Campling, Tetsuya Tanioka and Rozzano Locsin

in Technology and Nursing: Practice, Concepts and Issues eds Alan Barnard and Rozzano Locsin Palgrave 2007

Pots and Kettles: Everybody's talking at me.

Pots and kettles.

It's been a day of being talked at.

I'm in the middle of an extremely interesting and useful course for my work. A lot of effort has gone into putting it together- the speakers are excellent, and I am seriously grateful to the organisers and also to my employer for giving me the time, and paying the costs.

And with that, you just know there is going to be a big but. There so often is with me.

And the but is this: We've had four days almost solid of the same format- 50 or 60 minutes of talking at, with a brief opportunity for questions. (We've also had a smattering of practical demonstrations, with other people giving up their time to make this possible; and again, I'm grateful to them.)

I just wish

a) we'd had some different formats- problem-solving and info-sharing sessions, where we could ask each other for experiences, share ideas and innovations, and also draw on the phenomenal experience of the lecturers.

[I suppose it's the whole open space/unconference thing...]

b) I had the social standing and guts to put this across to the organisers thereof, in a tactful enough manner that it didn't come across as a whine.

During the lunch break I walked past a group of protestors with their trestle table. They're doing good work, patently, on Gaza, but I do wish the 20ish year old student hadn't just spewed long lists of what they were doing/wanted to do, but instead had asked where I was coming from/what I thought. Not because I have any particular expertise/advice worth sharing, but because if he keeps at that, he's going to alienate a lot of people. And Gaza (and by extension Israel) needs all the friends it can get.

Things to (re)-read: that "Time to Listen" book

Pots and kettles.

More Davos hilarity

I blogged briefly yesterday on Davos, and couldn't get a comedy meta-tag to work. Never mind. Here's some more Davos hilarity from the FT and Indie (which had the front page headline "It just gets worse and worse". On first glance, I thought they were being honest about their own paper. I thought 'hmm, bold, but a little self-indulgent' before realising they were talking about the global economy...

[I suppose a responsible blogger would share his Profound Thoughts about Erdogan v. Peres, but I'm not, I've not got, and I can't be arsed...]

Davos gadgets

This year's Davos gadget was a little blue pedometer. Each delegate was issued with one and invited to “walk the global village”.

“Be fit, get there quicker and count your steps on the way. Enjoy breathing healthy mountain air. Reduce traffic congestion and contribute to a 'Green Davos'. Be recognised as Walker of the Year 2009”

Anyone who walks more than 20,000 steps is entered in a prize draw. With packed snow on the pavements and waist height drifts on the roadside, there will be more broken bones than on the slopes.

FT 28 Jan 2009 page 18

In downbeat Davos, the happy capitalist is hard to find.

Jeremy Warner

Independent 29 Jan 2009 page 43

“In all the years I've been coming to these annual gatherings of the global business elite, I've never known the mood to be more downbeat, or confidence so deflated. Global capitalism was meant to have all the solutions.

This year, business leaders and bankers are left forlornly wondering what more governments can do to bail them out.”

Problems shaping post-crisis party's guest list

I am now in Davos and preparing to play my part in “shaping the post-crisis world”, which is the official title of this year's forum. I must say this strikes me as over-optimistic. The words “shaping” and “post-crisis” seem misplaced. (I will grudgingly accept “world”.)

But what would be a better title for this year's Davos? “Sinking in quicksand” is closer to the spirit of the times; “Buried under an avalanche of debt” acknowledges our Alpine surroundings; “Up shit creek without a paddle” has an appealing directness and shares more or less the same length and meter as “Shaping the post-crisis”- so that is my favourite for the moment. But I am open to suggestions.

Gideon Rachman

FT 29 Jan 2009

Nobody has a fucking clue, as per William Goldman.

Magic Mountains, Mad Scientists

So, another January, another “World Economic Forum” in Davos, Switzerland.

[The World Social Forum, happening simultaneously, seems to have been disappeared.]

The FT has done what it usually does in these circumstances- sent a hefty delegation of reporters, got some guest bloggers etc. And for us time-poor proles, it has published a tabloid sized “Guide to Davos”, entitled “The Magic Mountain.” It's 16 pages. Four of those pages are full-page adverts for wind turbine maker Vestas. I think they hope to make some of the green stuff from green energy...

Anyway a letter in today's FT pointed out, merely name-checking the novel of the same name, written by Thomas Mann, is not really adequate.

Mann wrote a humungous novel (800 pages or so) about a bunch of sick people utterly divorced from the real world in their own self-indulgent bubble. Eventually, when the protagonist descends...

SPOILER ALERT

he is caught up in a violent global cataclysm and it is not at all sure he lives.

A few years ago American journalist Laurie Garrett was at Davos, and an email she sent to friends leaked, to amusement of most and annoyance of others. It was a minor internet sensation in 2003 (yes, you young folk, we had the internet all the way back in 2003. Steam-driven, with clacker-attacks, it's true, but tinterweb nonetheless):

"The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones."

[emphasis added]

Compare with this, from the FT supplement's roundtable discussion.

Gideon Rachman: “...but what you saw all the time at Davos was a huge faith in technology. But I wonder whether that technological optimism is, along with the market optimism, going to be diminished.”

The discussion is worth a read- it covered the usual: Economic Crisis, Banking/Global Economy, China/emerging markets, the end of Davos?, Barack Obama and the US, Climate Change, predictions for 2009.

Apparently you can listen to the whole thing at www.ft.com/roundtable

And finally, no discussion about the entirely sane and rational and peace-loving lotus-eaters who attend Omnicorp summits like this is ever complete without a compare and contrast with Davros, genteel scientist...

Weight of the World 4: One stepper forwards?

and two steps back...

128.7 bastard kilos.

That would be UP 0.8 of a kilo or whatever since last Friday

But, as I shall tell myself for the next few days, this is because muscle weighs more than fat blah blah blah and other blah blah self-deluding tosh.

Have been wellying it on the stepper, and it's true, my legs feel stronger and I can certainly go longer on the max setting. So, fitter, but pounds that I've gluttonously acquired over years won't be shed in weeks...

FaT heads: Facebook and Twitter

Facebook and Twitter (“FaT”) are not just methods of communication and exchange. [Just as a car not just a box with wheels that converts dead pressed ferns into kinetic energy and carbon emissions.]

They are- like cars- vehicles of display; we display ourselves and seek affirmation and validation through these technologies.

In FaT you accumulate popularity points. “Friends” and “followers.” Friends are easier to come by- asking someone to follow you seems a bit more like wheedling and neediness. Maybe this will change if Twitter starts a “push” technology of suggesting followers of followers (the maths would perhaps be tricky, but there are smart people out there who'll try to monetize this).

And inevitably there are “bandwidth bandits”- namely those users who break the “untyped” rules of etiquette, and over-send. These are either de-friended or unfollowed (“fallowed”, perhaps?)

In both there is a semi-visible gardener tending the “weeds”. Facebook has a spam filter that over-reacts on occasion and threatens to bar users for sending similar messagers out. Twitter disables accounts that seem suspicious- weird names that are strings of letters probably generated by robots/spiders/whatever-Wired-is-calling-this-stuff-these-days.

Twitter, I think, will be more useful for finding out new things, and making links that could get you a new job, a new way of seeing the world or whatever. And this is perhaps an example of the famous “Strength of Weak Ties”- most of the people you know (Friends) are exposed to the same info as you, on the same wavelength or whatever. But your “followers” tend to be random people you never met. And they tend to have little snippets and titbits and jobleads and all the rest of it.

(I'd recommend Philip Ball's “Critical Mass” for more on weak ties and social networks etc)

Practicalities

Facebook has the edge at the moment for advertising events, certainly in Manchester. That's simply Metcalfe's law- there are gazillions of facebookers, but fewer than a thousand Manchester twitterers. This will change, of course.

The limits of twitter- the 140 character limit demands the ability to compress your thoughts, and to use tinyurls, which are functional but aesthetically dubious. Some people are unable/unwilling to compress, and will witter rather than twitter: They will either vote with their thumbs and not use it or else send tweets spread over multiple messages, which is Bad Form Old Chap...

Twitter is “newer” in popularity, and so has a geek/early adopter cache.

Other people's posts on Facebook v. Twitter

Twitter versus Facebook: Should you Choose One?

by Guest Poster on January 13, 2009

“The usefulness of Twitter is not readily as obvious to some people as Facebook; although it may be more addictive once you get the hang of Tweeting; you get more immediate responses and it seems to live somewhere between the worlds of email, instant messaging and blogging. Twitter encourages constant “linking out” to anywhere and, in that respect, is more analogous to a pure search engine; another way to find people and content all over the Net.

"Twitter has quickly built brand awareness and a loyal following, especially among the technically adept; bloggers, online marketers, evangelists, basically anyone with something to promote seem to find Twitter extremely valuable.”

The Misunderstood Uses of Twitter and Facebook: Are You a Friend, Follower or a Fool?

by Guest Poster on December 20, 2008

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Twitter addict. I use Twitter daily; however, my uses aren’t to update friends. My sole purpose for using Twitter is to find others within my niche. I use it as a listening tool. I get a real-time pulse of the Tech sector, politics and any news via Twitter.

Bottom Line:

• Facebook’s main purpose centers on furthering and cultivating relationships with already established friends

• Twitter’s main purpose centers on social networking (meeting people across the world with similar interests)”

• 
  

Twitter versus Facebook

Good post from all the way back in July 2008!

UPDATE:

This from the fiends at readwriteweb
"Twitter May Have Found its Business Model"

Weight of the World 3: Still Early Days

127.9 kilos this morning. So, down 2.5 kilos in total over two weeks, which isn't bad going, I suppose, even if that figure (ho ho) disguises the fact that most of the weight was lost in the first week. But we're dealing with such piddling amounts per week that you just have to plod on for MONTHS. So be it.

Feel a lot better, stronger. May have even put some muscle bulk on quads and hams and glutes. Have been laying off the upper body workouts for just such a reason.

Ta to Pete for being shocked and appalled at my post-stepper pizza plan. It dissuaded me, perhaps for good...

Hard to see when I am going to get some proper sessions in next week, unless first thing in morning (only 60 mins), since every night is sort of booked with meetings and stuff...

24 hours a-twitter

First thanks to Tim Difford for patient coaxing above and
beyond the call of duty to get me close enough to Twitter
so that Chi-Chi Ekweozor could deliver the coup de grace
at the Social Media event last night.

I came home and got going, following TD's rule for
world domination.

And made a photo using, "Paint".

And didn't Read the Effing Manual.  So sent direct messages
out as updates, having already widgetted the
Manchester Climate Fortnightly blog.

So now everyone knows the names of my cats. Well, my
wife's cats technically.

What impressions?

140 characters imposes a pitch-perfect level of discipline.
Can anyone tell me whether this was accident or design?
Did the Twitter-meisters tool around with different lengths,
or was it serendipity, like SMS itself?

It's patently addictive.

It could easily be my number one time blackhole, the way
Scrabulous was six months ago.

It is going to have very interesting effects on how people
communicate with each other.


[Ed: that's enough banalities for now]

Sigmund Freud, the FT, and parapraxis

Siggie Freud is known for a lot of things, which shan't detain us here.

[Funniest Freud thing I ever read was a play called “Le Visiteur” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, set in 1938 Vienna. The Nazis are there, Anna's trying to get dad to London and someone turns up plausibly claiming to be God, wanting psychoanalysis because he's depressed about the coming 6 years... Check it out! But I digress]

Am just reading about him and the possible organic base for the “ego-defence mechanisms” in “Phantoms in the Brain”, a top notch popular science book by a journalist Sandra Blakeslee and an absurdly astute neuroscientist called V.S. Ramachandran. But I digress again.

One Freudian insight most people like is the “slips of the tongue” thing. It's technically known as parapraxis-

"A minor error, such as a slip of the tongue, thought to reveal a repressed motive."

Well, my favourite read, the FT, has lines worth reading between. And parapraxis.

In “California scheming”- an article on infotech/clean tech and the idea of a “smart grid” there is the following admission.

"While it prides itself on a brand of hypercapitalism defined by the self-reliance of its entrepreneurs and the almost constant state of creative destruction in which they work, the Valley has long been a big beneficiary of government largesse. From the defence build-up that helped to create the semiconductor industry to the birth of the internet (itself initially a project of the Pentagon), much of the research and early contracts for new technologies has been funded by the taxpayer."

This of course will come as No Surprise to anyone who knows the concept of Military Keynesianism. Noam Chomsky is extremely strong on this stuff. See here for a review of a good book about him, that has a quote about MK.

Enoch Powell, the FT and parapolitics

Enoch Powell was a High Tory as well as a racist. There's his infamous and career-ending “Rivers of Blood" speech but there's also the sharp understanding that Great Britain had, really, lost World War Two to the Americans, with the British Empire subsumed within the Pax Americana. (Empires often take over other empires as semi-going concerns- the Brits had done it with the Portuguese. But I digress...)

Powell also said something along the lines that British Foreign Policy (now) consisted of doing what the Americans wanted, before being asked.

And we have this in today's (15 Jan 2008) FT.

“The defence secretary, John Hutton, is to attack the commitment of the UK's EU allies to the war in Afghanistan, saying Europe can no longer continue “freeloading” on the back of US military security.”

And since we all know Obama wants an extra 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, I think we can see what signal HMG is trying to send him...

If you really want the skinny on “the Special Relationship”, and the mechanics of how the Americans have ensured a biddable British elite, then you need to look at “parapolitics”. And one of the best places to start for that is Lobster Magazine, issue 56 of which is reviewed here.

Social Media and Manchester

Went to an event (more on that word later) last night about "Social Media", at the Northern pub, just off Oldham St.

Six workshops over two sessions on all different aspects of "social media" (internet technologies that enable better communication and collaboration and hangin' out).

Very relaxed atmosphere, lots of mingling, lots of interesting people.

I went to a "Beginners" session, and learnt about the basics of twitter and 'tweeting' etc run by Chi-chi Ekweozor of www.realfresh.tv

Tim Difford, of onegreenerday, suggested I come (not that anyone needs an invite- it's very informal), and for this I'm grateful to him.

"Event"- implies centrally organised and a bit boring. "Meeting" implies one strict agenda and a bit boring. This was something in between or off to one side. It had obviously cost some people time and energy to put together, but they weren't trying to get a direct ego hit in terms of attention/adulation.

I will certainly go again, and forward on details of the next one to all and sundry. I am now also determined to have a "Social Media and Climate Change" workshop at the conference on 7th March...

Green Capitalism: Images and 'Hidden' Realities

"Of course, the more familiar image of green capitalism is one of small grassroots enterprises offering local services, solar housing, organic food markets, etc. It is true—and promising—that as ecological awareness spreads, the space for such activities will grow. We should also acknowledge that the related exploration of alternative living arrangements may contribute in a positive way to the longer-term conversion that is required. More generally, it is certainly the case that any effective conservation measures (including steps toward renewable energy) that can be taken in the short run should be welcomed, whoever takes them. But it is important not to see in such steps any repudiation by capital of its ecologically and socially devastating core commitment to expansion, accumulation, and profit."

This is banal to some, obvious to others and deeply heretical to most everyone else- at least, to those in the Corridors of Power of "our" political, economic and media insititutions.

Anyhow, it comes from an excellent article called "Capitalist and Socialist Responses to the Ecological Crisis" in Monthly Review November 2008, by Victor Wallis, who also writes for CNS.

Oh, here's a bit more:

"As this whole current of opinion becomes stronger, advocates of green capitalism pick up on the popular call for renewable energy, but accompany it with a vision of undiminished proliferation of industrial products. In so doing, they overlook the complexity of the environmental crisis, which has to do not only with the burning of fossil fuels but with assaults on the earth’s resource-base as a whole, including for example the paving over of green space, the raw-material and energy costs of producing solar collectors and wind-turbines, the encroachment on natural habitats (not only by buildings and pavement but also by dams, wind-turbines, etc.), the toxins associated with high-tech commodities, and the increasingly critical problem of waste disposal—in short, the routine spinoffs from capital’s unqualified prioritization of economic growth.... While the need to cut greenhouse gases is recognized, the challenge is posed in narrowly technological terms. Attempts to resist consumerism are belittled, on the assumption that innovations, along with massive public investment, will solve any problem of scarcity (the vision is emphatically centered on the United States, with China invoked to signify that the drive to growth is unstoppable). The very existence of an environmental nexus is called into question, on the grounds that the category “environment” can only be conceived either as excluding humans or as being synonymous with “everything,” at either of which extremes it is seen to make no sense. The biological understanding of the environment as a matrix with interpenetrating parts is not entertained."

Weight of the World 2: Early days

Jan 9th
There's always low hanging fruit, not that I get my five portions a day.

The first week has gone well- down from 130.4 to 128.6 kilos. Weighed on the same (zeroed and accurate) scales at same time of day in same clothes blah blah.

To what do I ascribe my fantastic weight loss? Starvation since Wednesday? Cutting out all pizza etc?

No, I ascribe it to having gone to the gym and done a minimum of an hour (sometimes closer to two) on the stepper literally every day.

That's unsustainable in the long term (but great for getting through copies of the Financial Times and Capitalism Nature Socialism, Monthly Review etc.)

Oh, and I hadn't been doing any upper-body, which I've just now done, so some of that loss may have been from atrophy of pecs and deltoids etc.

So, an uniequivocal success so far.

Western Buddhism and the menage-a-moi

"The problem of the uncritical acceptance of acontextual enlightenment should not be underestimated. As Slavoj Zizek often points out, what he calls “Western Buddhism” can function as the highest form of adaptation to late capitalism, allowing members of the most privileged sectors of the global system of domination to go about their work on behalf of that system while minimizing their level of guilt and stress and assuring themselves of their deeply compassionate qualities and the absolute perfection of their underlying Buddha-Natures. We may add that many of them also take comfort in the likelihood of a spectacular rebirth in their next lives: the ultimate upward mobility. What such “Western Buddhism” misses, or course, is that Buddhism is not about complacency but rather about the awakened mind."

This is from page 26 of the latest edition of Capitalism Nature Socialism, in an article that was slow to start, but really got going towards the end. It's called “Nagarjuna and the Ecology of Emptiness," by John Clark.
Zizek I can sort of take or leave. I did like his concept of the vanishing mediator, however...

Aida Hurtado said all that needed to be said on this.

"It doesn't matter how good you are, as a person, if the institutions of the society provide privilege to you based on their group oppression of others. Individuals belonging to dominant groups can be infinitely good, because they are never required to be personally bad."

She's quoted by the very interesting anti-racist activist Time Wise (blog, website). Check out this on Hilary supporters who were saying they'd vote McCain/stay home- ouch!

See also
New Age Capitalism by Kimberley J. Lau
Ones who walk away from Omelas, a short story by Ursula Le Guin

Are We Human or did you exchange...?

I've an old favourite song, that's definitely on my desert island discs.

It's “Wish You Were Here” by Pink, or Floyd (I'm not sure which one is Pink)

It's got a line I love

“Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

There are various interpretations, but to me it means you've a choice of being the star in your own soap opera, or you can get on with being a small and unglamorous part of the Bigger Picture.

You have to make it up as you go along, you never know if your efforts will pay off (in fact, you can be sure that most of them will end in 'failure'. The Mirror Test is no fun...)

And it relates to the whole notion of what some call the “Star System”, where social movements are seen as springing from individual heroic leaders (Martin Luther King, Gandhi etc). And if those leaders aren't around, nothing can happen. And that is both completely untrue, and conveniently disempowering. And- as usual in my experience- there's a quote from an interview with Noam Chomsky that says it well.

"The bad dynamic, what you're pointing to, is the "star story. It's standard when a popular movement takes off for people to show up and say, OK, I'm your leader. A Eugene McCarthy type, say. Here's a big popular movement. Fine. I'm your leader. Give me power. If you can't give me power I'll go home and write poetry and talk about baseball. And if you can give me power then I become your leader and now you look up to me and you go home and put the power in my hand. That's a familiar dynamic, and Bakunin's Red bureaucracy, no matter what its politics are. It could be right wing, it could be left wing. But there's a better dynamic, which is that the popular movements continue and strengthen, and where there are people around who, for whatever reason or quirk or privilege or whatever it may be, can contribute to them by intellectual activity, they do a part of it. That's all. They're not stars. They're not leaders. They're just contributing in the way that they know how to contribute. That would be a better structure. But it can tend to degenerate into this other very quickly, especially in a culture which is reinforcing their worst tendencies by trying to create an imagery of leadership and stars and heroes and so on."

And there's a new favourite song, which may not stand the test of time, but for now I love it.

It's the Killers, asking pretty much the same question as Messrs Pink and Floyd- “Are we human, or are we dancer?”

The lyrics are here, and they stand a read and a think and a listen.

“up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
and sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door”

Which comes to the same fear- of our smallness, the inadequacy of both our talents and our discipline to the problems we face (Samuel Johnson wrote a wonderful essay- “What Have Ye Done?” on this subject... (Dec 22^nd 1759 in The Idler)

"will your system be alright
when you dream of home tonight
there is no message were receiving
let me know is your heart still beating"

And to close, with a (from memory) phrase on the front of the Mozambican school exercise books I used to use.

“Vamos estudar e fazer do nossa de nossa educaca um instrumento de libertacao do povo.”

Which translates as “Let's study and make of our education an instrument of the liberation of the people.”

Catastrophising; C3PO, Jock and Game Theory

It only just occurred to me that C3P0 is basically a tin version of Jock from the TV show Dad's Army. And there's also Eeyore and Chicken Little and the whole "Sky is Falling" thing.

So, I don't know the whole psychology of learned pessimism and catastrophising, but here are some guesses.

• It's prophylactic- if the worst happens you are (slightly) prepared, and if it doesn't then you are pleasantly surprised, having managed to lower your expectations.
• It's pleasurable- as in "disasturbation".
  
• Also, invoking “game theory”* you don't lose credibility. To predict the “worst” makes you look tough-minded, where optimism is regarded as woolly idealism and naivete.
• It ties in with the whole Conspiracy-Apocalypse-Paranoia Complex that I wrote about yonks ago and should dig off the hard drive and post somewhere.
  

This is all true, but dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system is hegemonic, in the sense of it being something that changes the rules of the game. And were are too cognitively limited, as a species and often as individuals, to spot that. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, I guess. If you were tolerably rich.

[* I've done no such thing of course, just used the term (too) loosely to give a patina of profundity. But once I get my head around GT properly, I'll blog on it. A lot of it is tosh, and I recently read some rather good chapters in Philip Ball's “Critical Mass” on the subject. But I digress...]

Book Review: Participative Web and UCC

Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking

By Graham Vickery and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent

OECD 2006

Boiled down to three sentences
User Created Content is having various impacts on the Web, the people who use it and their societies and economies. But reliable information is hard to come by and hot damn this field is moving so fast that these guys didn't talk about facebook and twitter, which were gleams in a venture capitalist's eye back when it was written.

“Coolest” quote (it's all relative)

It is worth stressing that the social impact of the Internet in general and the impact of UCC-related pass-times and communication on society and personal relations have not yet been researched in detail. The spectrum of predictions ranges from Internet communications leading to the “breakdown of personal relationships and social contact” to Internet communications “holding great promises for improving real life relationships and tasks”. Recent assessments point to people communicating more than ever but that their pattern of communication and interaction has changed (Statistics 121 Canada, 2006). There is also insufficient understanding of how media consumption generally affects brain processing, learning, attitudes, and behaviour, e.g. the impacts of virtual worlds on behaviour, or on learning/skills (see also OECD, 2005d for skills in the context of online games).
More research in these fields is warranted.

Page 97

Should it be read? If so, by whom?
Sort of, if you're a sad anorak who wants to be able to boast about reading OECD reports in the original bureaucratese.

Other things on this theme I have read/seen that I'd recommend
The FT has a good tech coverage, though they seem a little over-enamoured of Twitter.

Couple of articles I read recently

Is Google Making us Stupid?
Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic Monthly, July 2008

The Autum of the Multitaskers
Walter Kirn, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2007

Pretty entertaining "Web Crashes" Onion TV story...

See also another dwight towers posting, on "The Angel of History"

Which includes a plug for/link to Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil

Other things on this theme that I should get round to
Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott- it's on my list of books for 2009!

Other things by this author that I should get round to
blah

When/where I first encountered this author
blah

When/where I bought this book
Library book, cited somewhere that I can't now remember

Angels of History, Morning and Harlem

Walter Benjamin, patron saint of cultural studies, famously wrote;

"There is a picture by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. In it, an angel is depicted who appears as if trying to distance himself from something that he stares at. His eyes and mouth gape wide, his wings are stressed to their limit.

The Angel of History must look this way; he has turned to face the past. Where we see a constant chain of events, he sees only a single catastrophe incessantly piling ruin upon ruin and hurling them at his feet.

He would probably like to stop, waken the dead, and correct the devastation - but a storm is blowing hard from Paradise, and it is so strong he can no longer fold his wings.

While the debris piles toward the heavens before his eyes, the storm drives him incessantly into the Future that he has turned his back upon.

What we call Progress is this storm."

Which sort of knocks Juice Newton's Angel of the Morning and U2's Angel of Harlem into a cocked hat, eh?

On "Progress", I'd recommend

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology by Langdon Winner
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway by Clifford Stoll
All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
Anything on technoscience by Donna Haraway or Cynthia Cockburn

I mean to get around to
The Myth of Progress by Tom Wessels
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
False Dawn by John Gray
Vandana Shiva's latest stuff

John Berger and Ways of Seeing

This morning I was having breakfast with my collaborator Marc Roberts, the insanely prolific cartoonist. It turns out that Cantankerous Frank has a grand-daughter (when we dreamed her up, she was a daughter, but there's been some generational slippage). She's named after one of the people I most respect- Judi Bari.

Anyway, we were discussing what Judi would look like, and how hard it would be for her to have a family resemblance to Frank, who is, well, fugly. Because then it would MEAN something. And Marc went into this very intricate riff about another of his characters, Wendy, and her back story. I am hoping he will blog about that (I asked him to).

Anyway, I mentioned to Marc a quote from John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" which I have now tracked down. I think it is a corker:

"Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.

"To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room, or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually."

And Frederick Raphael, what has he done except provide the occasional morsel of amusement for the editors of Private Eye?

Nature article on ursine defecation patterns...

The prestigious journal Nature will not be publishing this article in a forthcoming issue.

The persistence of ursine defecation patterns in arboreal and sylvan eco-systems: rhetorical artefact or empirically proven?

Marc Hudson, Matthew Bright & Cassidy Irving

ABSTRACT: The question of the specific nature and site of ursine mammalian excretory processes is one that has exercised the rhetorical skills of homo sapiens sarcasticus for a considerable period of time. Given the frequent reference to this conundrum in demotic speech, it is surprising that this topic of lively debate has not been examined systematically. Paleo-ontological excavation of coprolites would indicate persistence of this behavioural trait through geological epochs. However, no meta-analysis of available scientific studies had been conducted. The authors review the literature and conclude that further well-funded research into this vital issue- alongside the nature of theological orthodoxy in the Vatican's leadership- is required. We offer a short list of suitable recipients of any grants that would be forthcoming.

Dr Who and the Parallels of Doom...

Over at MancunianGreen, Brian Candeland has posted some political satire/fan fiction that is well worth a look. I don't think the Doctor has "done" the Middle East since about 1964, so it's good to see him getting around, albeit in unhappy circumstances.

And on this topic (Doctor Who, not the horrors of the [escalation of] the attack on Gaza), wasn't the Christmas special a relief? After last year's dire Voyage of the Damned (tastelessly named after a 1939 incident involving Jewish refugees from Hitler, many of whom were not allowed into Britain or USA and were sent back to Germany, where about half them were murdered in places like Auschwitz and Sobibor) it was great to see it all come together.

Especially good; David Morrissey, the Doctor's compassion having figured out what was going on "do you really want me to tell you?", Dervla Kirwan as the scenery-chewing baddie, the companion Rosalita, the knowing touches ("You ask a lot of questions." "Well, I am your companion" and "People will be talking about this for years.") all capped off with a giant iron cyberman coming up out of the Thames. Yessssss!!

Pity they didn't go for something a bit different (Paterson Joseph or Colin Salmon), because we have gotten comfortable enough, at last, with a figure of Britishness like the Doctor being, gasp, "not white".

Anyway, I witter...

Peter Gowan, Viz 181, Exhausted Nature...

Peter Gowan is

“Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University and course director of the MA in International Relations. He is a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, on the advisory boards of other journals and is a member of the America Discussion Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.”

He's a startlingly smart guy, IMHO. His article "Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe"(New Left Review 1/213 Sept/Oct 1995) is brilliant on the political choices around how Eastern Europe was dealt with after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

His book The Global Gamble (1999) has heaps of useful things in it, on what he calls “the Dollar Wall Street regime”. One day I'll blog on suzereignty...

Often my NLR's get left in their plastic wrapper for a bit. However, when latest thudded onto the mat with an editorial by Gowan “Crisis in the Heartland”, it got put in the "urgent gym reading" pile. There's HEAPS of good stuff in it. Tasters-

"All modern economic systems, capitalist or not, need credit institutions to smooth exchanges and transactions; they need banks to produce credit money and clearance systems to smooth the payment of debts. These are vital public services, like a health service. They are also inherently unstable: the essence of a bank, after all, is that it does not hold enough funds to cover all the claims of its depositors at any one time. Ensuring the safety of the system requires that competition between banks should be suppressed. Furthermore, policy questions as to where credit should be channelled are issues of great economic, social and political moment. Thus public ownership of the credit and banking system is rational and, indeed, necessary, along with democratic control. A public-utility model along these lines can, in principle, operate within capitalism. Even now the bulk of the German banking system remains in public hands, through savings banks and Landesbanken. The Chinese financial system is overwhelmingly centred on a handful of huge, publicly owned banks and the Chinese government does indeed steer the credit strategies of these banks. It is possible to envisage such a public-utility model operating with privatized banks. The post-war Japanese banking system could be held to have had this character, with all its banks strictly subordinated to the Bank of Japan’s policy control via the ‘window-guidance system’. The post-war British commercial bank cartel could also be viewed as broadly operating within that framework, albeit raking off excessive profits from its customers."

and

"This crisis of the American and European set-ups will no doubt have two intellectual effects. Firstly, to raise the credibility of the Chinese model of a state-owned, bank-centred financial system. This is the serious alternative to the credit models of the Atlantic world. The maintenance of capital controls and a non-convertible currency—which China has—are essential for the security of this system. Secondly, as the crisis unfolds, broader discussion of the public-utility model seems likely to return to political life, re-opening a debate that has been silenced since 1991."

I think there IS doubt about its intellectual effects. I think there's no guarantee a proper debate will be had. But then again, in a debate on this topic with Gowan, I'd back him every time...

Viz is something which, if I had any guilt/shame I'd call a “guilty pleasure.” It was the cause of most of the early rifts between me and my now-wife (I've found new ways to annoy her, mostly to do with not doing my share of the housework...) I've subscribed for a long long time, back before you saved any money doing so. It's gotten better over the years, I think. More frequent, funnier. I don't buy these myths of the golden age, and narratives of decline.

True, it's uneven, but you usually get a bellylaugh or two. Occasionally three. This time mine came while I was on the stepper, which was a bit disconcerting for me and t'other punters. It was during a cartoon in which Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is trying to leave an apology on Andrew Sachs' answer machine, but keeps getting drowned out by farting elephants and “swearing” presenters etc. It's entirely formulaic, a little puerile and very very funny. I don't know if I was laughing with the cartoonist, at him, or at myself for laughing at it. And I didn't care.

Other good bits- “Ban this Filthy BBC filth”
Saint versus Saint- Santa Claus trying to get the ascetic Saint Augustine to accept consumerism
Tasha's mam- all your class prejudices at chavs/scallies etc rolled into one, magnified and reflected. God bless ratboy, eh.
Christmas with the Drunken Bakers- makes Samuel Beckett look like Benny Hill.
Raffles the Gentleman Thug with what looks to me to be some quite rude Italian bits
The incomparable Roger Mellie writing a misery memoir
John Fardell's “The Critics” getting another comeuppance when they rub a genie up the wrong way (oh yes they do)
Sid the Sexist with a horribly wrong-placed wet dream

A couple of Profanisaurus entries-
“to punt from the Cambridge end”
“shituation”- a bad situation
worm-burping

Brilliant stuff.

Finally, I just had time to start reading more about the Exhaustion of Nature, in Monthly Review.

New Left Review, Viz, Studs Terkel, Cystic Fibrosis

There's a bunch of words you don't see often together. Anyhow, here's a fascinating rundown of my fascinating day (irony alert).

After a pretty sleepless night (I got to read most of the book about the participaive web), I saw on the bbc's tinterweb site that the Aussies are struggling against South Africa in the dead rubber in Sydney. I may not see that Matthew Haydn in next year's Ashes, but then again, I may. Made the missus her first cup of tea, did the washing up, walked to walmart/Asda with the plastic recycling to walmart, bought vaseline for chaffing prevention.(fat bastard). Used the automated till- one more weapon in thinning out the workforce, eh? On the stepper for 80 minutes

Read Peter Gowan's New Left Review essay on the financial crises. He and I both get the FT, but he 'gets it'. Then for something a little heavier I read Viz (of which more separately- it made me laugh out loud and actually cry a little, which is kind of embarrassing on the stepper at the gym). Then started in on a piece from November's Monthly Review on soil and nature and capital.

Came home collecting cans as I did in days of yore. The rumour goes that one can recycled is equivalent to three hours of a TV on standby. There's a lot of TV hours on standby between the gym and home...

Read my bible for the King James Version posting (here).

Went on the March, via the newsagent for an FT and then a vegetarian pizza. So managed to miss both the pre- and post-march speeches. What a shame.

Back here and typed up the Terkel quotes, did a review. Woohoo.

Then got stuck into finally cracking out a crude but (in)effective CAECUM site. I am semi-serious about a Campaign Against Enduring Counter-productive & Useless Meetings. We really are lousy at them.

Sigh.

Oh, then to work to treat a young lady with cystic fibrosis, a cruel cruel disease.

Right. Separate posts about Gowan and Viz to be done...

Book Review: Will the Circle be Unbroken by Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel (2001)

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death and Dying.

Boiled down to three sentences

Studs Terkel, pushing 90, lets a whole bunch of people talk about death, dying, heaven, hell. There's war stories, AIDS stories, cancer stories, inflected with a clear understanding of how race and class and gender and your sexuality can really get you into more trouble than you need to be in- life as a shit sandwich and all that...

Coolest quote (there's a LOT)

One night we broke into the budget office of Chicago. We stole the records, we reviewed the numbers, and guess what? We found two million dollars that was unused in the city's health budget. We ran to the alderman, Helen Shiller. She made a stirring, stirring speech on the floor of the Chicago city council, saying , “Mayor Daley, you cannot kid us, you cannot lie to us.” In an impassioned plea, she revealed the truth to the entire council that magical day: “How do you explain these figures? How is it that this money has been unspent? And why are you telling the health department and people with AIDS in Chicago there is no money for services like affordable housing, transportation to clinics, groceries. How dare you. This is unconscionable.' The mayor was flabbergasted because I'm sure he's thinking, How the hell did you get this information? The vote was unanimous, the bill was passed, and two million dollars that we discovered was indeed available went to the organisations that were involved with the day-to-day life of people living with AIDS.

Page 280-1

Should it be read? If so, by whom?

Everyone should read this, whether they've got a terminal disease or not.
And everyone does have a terminal disease. It might take them 70 years to die, but they got it.

Other things on this theme I have read/seen that I'd recommend

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Body Work, a brilliant short documentary

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Other things on this theme that I should get round to

dunno. Suggestions welcome.

Other things by this author that I should get round to

• Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) ISBN 0394427742

• Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). ISBN 0394478845

• Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977) ISBN 0394411021

• American Dreams: Lost and Found (1983)

• The Good War (1984) ISBN 0394531035

When/where I first encountered this author

Peter Euben, in Classical Political Theory, mentioned Working. Terkel just snuffed it of course, in October 2008

When/where I bought this book

Just before Xmas, from that cool remainder bookshop at the foot of Waterloo Station.

Of Body Counts, Max Weber and Gaming the system

I've just read a really great collection of interviews about death and dying. Here's a bit from one with a Vietnam veteran, very very fucked up 35 years or so after the event-

"Fear death? Hell, no. I've been through some of the worst crap in the world. Jesus, when you got something that people don't talk about... One of the things they were interested in over there was a body count. If you didn't have enough bodies, they'd go around,taking a machete, chopping off body parts, putting them in different bags so you have more bodies. Enemy bodies. Throw a couple arms in this one, a leg in this one."

From an interview with Victor Israel Marquez
Page 112 of
Studs Terkel's
Will the Circle be Unbroken? Reflections on Death and Dignity.

Now, I've read a few good books on Vietnam- Dispatches by Michael Herr, Nam by Mark Baker, Journal of Plague Year by John Parrish and A Rumour of War by Philip Caputo among them, but this was the first time I'd heard that level of gaming the system. In one of the ones above (Baker? Herr?) there's a story of a grunt who had a necklace of Vietnamese ears. He was ordered to sew them back on the bodies, and in an act of rebellion (Good Soldier Schweik) he did so, but backwards. But the Marquez quote- urgh.

The obvious historical parallel is with King Leopold and his bounty for hands of the people of the Congo. Heart of Darkness meets Iron Cage of Rationality.

And the best documentary I saw about the grunt's experience of the war was Winter Soldier. Best film? Full Metal Jacket, which is half Dispatches, half "The Short-Timers."

The body count is a classic "not everything that can be measured matters; not everything that matters can be measured" dilemma. Asides from the morality of killing millions of people of course.

An historical note- Alain Enthoven, an early exponent/proponent of the body count, ended up as the godfather of the NHS's 90s to naughties "market" reforms.

I ain't marchin' anymore.

Radio

I had the privilege of listening to Emporer Lib Dem Nick Clegg on the radio this morning. He started out with the obligatory and Ritual Invocations of Israel's right to defend itself. (No talk of morality or proportionality or Palestinians' right to resist illegal occupation of course.)

What Clegg's position boiled down to was- in paraphrase- "look, this is counter-productive, not in Israel's long-term interest blah blah blah.” Like a “dove” during the Vietnam War.

At which point I was dying for an Israeli to turn around say “Gee, thanks for the unsolicited strategic advice Mr Clegg, but we think we know our own interests better than you do, so we're going to keep on bombing, if it's all the same to you.” And would have loved to have heard Nick's response to this. Within the logic of his critique, where would he have been able to go?

The March
A very good turn out on short notice, and the organisers will doubtless be cheered by this. I've only the vaguest guesstimate of how many were there- so the usual heuristic applies- halve the number the organisers boast of, multiply the police estimate by two, and voila, you have the range of likely numbers. Two thousand? Three thousand? Something like that. A lot of Asians, maybe 60% of the turnout? Ditto for gender? At worst 50/50.
[Update 4.1.09 Sure enough, the BBC says 2000 and the organisers say 5000...]

Walking along, I overheard one of the police calling in to central control to get a specific CCTV camera trained on a group of 8 lads who looked like, well, 8 lads. God bless the Panopticon, eh?

We trudged up from from All Saints park, down Oxford Rd, right onto Deansgate, right up whatsit road and so into Albert Square, where a giant Santa squatted incongruously in front of the Town Hall. And it was cold. As TS Eliot said, in a different context "A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a journey."

And then, inevitably, we had the speeches. God will we ever learn? No-one can hear what is being said (which is usually a good thing for the reputation of whoever is speaking), and all the lines of attention are at a distant Leadership. Never are we invited to get into sub-groups based on where we live, what work we do etc and to start thinking about how to sustain a campaign that would force our government into something sensible and humane.

OF COURSE this is not always possible, and won't always work, and marches can be a merely a demonstration of strength rather than a further recruiting ground/planning space. But as it stands at present, local organising is, as far as I see it, rarely going on. There are spasms of activity when the atrocity levels rise from merely terrible to actually apocalyptic. And these set- piece marches, which make the participants feel like they're Doing Something, however briefly.

The marchers get to feel they've Done Their Bit, the invited speakers get an ego-boost and their organisations get added 'exposure', which beholds them to the march organisers. The police get overtime payments I guess.

So everyone is happy, and nothing changes.

Analysis

I haven't read enough on this, so I reserve the right to be absolutely wrong.

A couple of weeks ago there were some articles in the FT about the Saudi plan of 2002 getting dusted off, and Bush/Rice sort of backing it, for “legacy”/PR reasons. And taking the Chomskyite/MAD Magazine line that the thing a military industrial complex fears is a real prospect of peace, then the attack on Gaza “makes sense,”

If you don't want a final peace deal (yet, or maybe ever), and you want to keep strangling your enemy for an ever better deal, and you have a lingering fear that the New Guy might not tolerate your excesses, then you strike out. This has nothing to do with Jewishness, Inuitness, AlphaCentaurianism, this is just how the powerful play the game with much weaker opponents.

Best book I ever read about Israel was that Arthur Neslen's "Occupied Minds" published by Pluto Press. It's extraordinary.

Apologies to the late Phil Ochs for (mis)appropriating his song for the title of this posting.

Adjective Adjective Noun

Reading through some old Prospects, I stumbled across a wonderful review of Zack Synder's delirious film "300" by the critic Mark Cousins (this may be him. Er no, I'm leaving that link in cos the guy sounds interesting, but I think THIS is the Mark Cousins I mean.) He uses an entirely apt phrase for this film- "gay Rumsfeldian surrealism."

Which, after I wiped the tears of laughter and recognition from my eyes, set me to thinking of other adjective adjective noun forumlations.

There's "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys", Groundskeeper Willie's take on the French, beloved by the neo-cons during their moment in the sun.

There's Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire - "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

And my favourite of all is John Harris on Newsnight Review, describing U2's song Vertigo- and I think the whole How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb as ... wait for it...

wait for it....






"Pompous Rock Esperanto."

Genius. I wonder if he practiced that one in the mirror beforehand, a la Travis Bickle?

Weight of the World 1: Let the games begin

OK, so new year's resolution blah blah get fit blah blah lose weight blah blah develop a little hamstrings length etc.

Jumped on the talking scales today and they said "One at a time please." Or they would have.

Currently I am 130.4kilos, or 287.4 pounds

Now, I'm 6'3 and a half, so BMI isn't necessarily entirely accurate (apparently above 5'10" it gets wonky), BUT that is akin to saying "I'm not obese, I'm just short for my weight." My fighting/running weight is 100kilos or so, which I haven't seen for about 5 years.

So, what is to be done? Er, stop stuffing my face so much and get on the stepper a lot more.

Weekly progress to be charted on this blog.

Book Review: Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky

The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky
By Alison Edgley
Published by Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415205867, 9780415205863
205 pages

I should declare an interest as I open this review; I met the author of this book at a recent conference and got on very well with her. In fact, she gave me the copy that now sits, heavily annotated, on my bookshelf. So, take my praise of it with that in mind.

Edgley is arguing that although

“Chomsky's work has an intended atheoretical quality to it. He wants us to concentrate on the detail, gruesome though it is. He wants us to remain in touch with the experience of those in the picture and he wants us to feel the 'reality' of those experiences.” (page 5),

if you look hard enough there are social and political theories he uses as underpinnings.

She quotes him (twice) as saying 'Is there anything in the social sciences that even merits the term 'theory'?” That is, some explanatory system involving hidden structures with non-trivial principles that provide understanding of phenomena. If so I've missed it'.

In six chapters- entitled political theory, the 'good society, state capitalism, state theory, nationalism and politics and the media, she teases out his theoretical underpinnings, showing a good grasp of the literature in question and work of relevant theorists (it was nice to see Bob Jessop, an interesting theorist of nationalism, get explained sympathetically).

She gives various excellent glosses of both the changing emphases of his work-

Chomsky's early work focuses on the more obvious ways in which the state can exercise control through the military and through the judiciary. He has also always had an eye upon the way in which intellectuals are quick to accept such control as natural, thereby justifying the process. His later work advances on the analysis of control by exposing the more subtle aspects of state control,through, for example, the media.
Page 81

and concepts like Military Keynesianism.

This is the system whereby the state stimulates demand, in this case for military hardware. The need to stimulate demand arises because the economy has the tendency to spiral into recession as a result of investors withdrawing investment when the return is too low. Keynes argued that if the government stepped in and boosted demand, investors would be given the incentive to invest. Under the military form of Keynesianism, the government not only subsidises production costs but is also the consumer. Keynes' model, however, sought for governments to intervene in the arena of welfare, with housing, hospitals and social welfare generally. Keynes recognised that workers are not just workers, they are also consumers, and that demand from them, and thus consumption, would be boosted if they had a higher standard of living. Hence creating a health productive economy. However, as Chomsky points out, these forms of state expenditure, when taken too far, interfere with the class-based nature of society, by giving ordinary people security and expectations which undermine the privileges of the wealthy.
Page 114

Her treatment of one of Chomsky's key influences, Rudolph Rocker, is excellent.

Indeed, Rocker is deeply critical of the view subscribed to by the historical materialist version of history that connects the rise of the national state with necessary progress. As far as Rocker is concerned '[t]he rise of the nationalist states not only did not further economic evolution in any way whatever, but the endless wars of that epoch and the senseless interference of despotism in the life of industry created that condition of cultural barbarism in which many of the best achievements of industrial technique were wholly or partly lost and had to be rediscovered later on.' In a discussion of the development of European industry, Rocker talks of 'unbridled favouritism.. convert[ing] entire industrial lines into monopolies.
Page 87

Given this, Chomsky's repeated statements that technologies are selected not merely for their profitability but also for their effects on class composition (e.g. Numerical control machine tools) are even more interesting.

Edgley's writing is rarely weighted down with jargon, though as is inevitable with any PhD thesis that becomes a book, bits of it are heavy going, especially the extended Hayek/Nozick etc section in chapter 2. These bits might usefully be skimmed over.

The only other thing I'd say is that there are some damn fine bits of Chomsky's “World Orders, Old and New” that would have illuminated some of Edgley's points to great effect. But there is only so much background reading you can do, and Chomsky seems to write a book more frequently than a normal person can read one.

If you're interested in Chomsky, and you've read a few of his books and interviews, this is a very good place to start.

Also worth reading: Milan Rai's “Chomsky's Politics”, which I read when it came out, in the mid-1990s.

(The other, more recent, Chomsky books may well be worth a read, I don't know. I am not so much interested in Chomsky's biography or what he thinks about specific issues as in using his example and his methods to do work of my own.)

Recycled resolutions

One of the few advantages to being a 'rabid environmentalist' - alongside the smugness and comfort of the anticipation of saying "I told you so" to fellow scavengers of out-of-date tinned food in 20 years time- is that you get to recycle resolutions.

And many of them, from the tail end of 2007, have hardly been used at all!

So, the usual stuff about a less chunky (ahem), fitter Dwight for this year, there's saving money for the Big Trip, reading (and co-blogging) the King James Bible, writing a lot, including the following-

• The Bourne essay
• The Facebook essay
• The Mindlab piece
• The "C words" piece
  

and The Book,

all this alongside reading the prescribed list.

And being a nicer person, natch.