British Telecom profit gouging and Trident

British Telecom owns much of the telephone and internet infrastructure of the UK. Once upon a time it had a monopoly but in recent years it has struggled to compete as first mobile phones and then the home internet phenomenon took off. In an effort to encourage customers to pay by direct debit the company has just announced that it will charge customers £4.50 to pay their bill in cash. I can see their point; it costs more to process cash transactions and automated payment will save them money. But come on. It is the right of everyone to restrict access to their bank details. A person should be allowed to use money if they wish. As long as bills are paid on time then BT should not add penalty costs. It amounts to profit gouging to save costs in every part of the business by a desperate company who are prepared to inconvenience their customers if it will save them money. But this is Britain today. No consumer protests will happen. There will be no boycott. People will not notice or care. Vivienne Westwood hit the nail on the head yesterday when she said that people were too busy with their lifestlye/consumer interests to care about the fact that the governement is about to spend £20 billion on a renewal of our cold war defence system. £20 billion to provide the armed forces with pointless busy work in the form of nuclear warheads to maintain.

Britain decides to renew Trident nuclear missile system

A quote from Yes Prime Minister Series 1

Sir Humphrey: "Don't you believe that Britain should have the best?"

Jim Hacker: "Yes, of course."

Sir Humphrey: "Very well, if you walked into a nuclear missile showroom you would buy Trident - it's lovely, it's elegant, it's beautiful. It is quite simply the best. And Britain should have the best. In the world of the nuclear missile it is the Saville Row suit, the Rolls Royce Corniche, the Château Lafitte 1945. It is the nuclear missile Harrods would sell you. What more can I say?"

Jim Hacker: "Only that it costs £15 billion and we don't need it."

Sir Humphrey: "Well, you can say that about anything at Harrods."

Global Warming

Last night the environment secretary David Miliband was on Newsnight to explain the future CO2 reduction targets set out by the government of the UK. Asked if emissions trading would go ahead he explained that it could happen that one country might buy spare emissions from another but that this was OK because it doesn't matter if a tonne of CO2 is emitted here or there. How does the minister know this for sure? Has he studied global airflow patterns and concluded that CO2 dispersal does not depend upon the release location? Is he certain that there are no special release locations which might lead to pockets or bands of high CO2 density in crucial areas of the upper atmosphere?

This is the sort of hand waving science that derails the global warming argument. The document published in February by the IGPCC showed that the climate is changing and it considered many factors that might be helping/causing this process, one of which was CO2 emissions caused by human activity. There could be many reasons why the climate is changing (such as changes in the sun) and they all need to be considered objectively. Politicians need to let the scientists check everything and gather as much data as is needed before they come down on either side. There are those who believe that there is a conspiracy to hold back the economies of developing nations such as China and India by restricting their emissions. Others believe evidence is suppressed or not considered. When scientific data becomes a political football for liberals/capitalists then objectivity is suppressed.

The Trap - Adam Curtis

A new three part documentary has just started its run on BBC 2. Called 'The Trap' it seeks to paint an individualist picture of modern western society and seeks to explain how we are all caught in the trap of private self interest. It is argued that this is ruining our lives and destroying community ties. This ideology was sprung out of the game theory based cold war lose-lose strategy and is diametrically opposed to the communist eradication of individualism and the belief in the collective. Modern target/league table driven culture has ruined education and the NHS. The first application of target driven management was in the Vietnam war when targets were set for kills of enemy soldiers. The US army duly met these targets by shooting innocent civilians.

I have only seen the first part of this meisterwerk but that was enough to stun me. This was, quite simply, the best hour that I have spent in front of a television in years and years. Writer and director Adam Curtis will no doubt be showered with yet more awards. I knew about the individual pieces of the puzzle but I have never seen before how they all slotted together. Being from South Yorkshire hatred of Thatcherism is in my blood but it has now reached new levels of concentration. Charlie Brooker has blogged about 'The Trap' from a TVphile/media perspective.

The Old Boys Network

Photos have emerged of the party leaders in their student days when they were members of Oxford dining (drinking) clubs. Blair is seen making either a hilarious rude gesture or an air guitar pose.


Cameron is seen as a new romantic. In case you can't spot him without his perma-smile he's at number 2. Number 8 is good old Boris Johnson. This club used to get drunk in their thousand pound tails and then trash hotel rooms, pubs and dining rooms and then pay for the damage. I'm so glad I don't live in Oxford with p****s like that around. Then again they now run the country so there is no real escape.

All that this serves to underline is the levels of cronyism in politics. The old school tie. Harriet Harman has suggested that a woman is needed at the top of government to fill the quotas. How about a quota of non-Oxbridge ministers? How about a quota of people who went to state school?

There are no photos of Ming Cambell. Maybe his wild days were before the camera was invented. I voted for your party you useless sod. Do something! Make the news, anything. The way that Charles Kennedy was treated was shocking. They shouldn't have sacked him.

Guest blogger - Sideshow Nic on media regulatory fun

The current furore over the great TV phone in rip off has no doubt fascinated many media watchers. I was watching TV coverage on this yesterday (there was the promise of more scandal to come btw) and I found myself reminded of the last scandal that happened under the nose of a media regulator, which saw many members of the public ripped off.

The Auction World.tv scandal happened back in 2004 and I would consider it a result of the failure of the regulator responsible, Ofcom, to react to a fast changing world of multichannel TV. Auction and shopping TV channels were a relatively new addition to British TV, but Ofcom didn't keep up, and before long Aution World.tv were the focus of an unprecedented amount of complaints from members of the public who had paid over the odds for substandard jewellery - if they even received the goods that they'd paid for at all. Ofcom eventually reacted to the complaints, fined Auction World.tv a record £450,000 and finally revoked their broadcasting license. This sent the rogue TV channel into bankruptcy and left hundreds out of pocket, and it could be argued that had Ofcom been quicker to act more people may have been able to get their money back. You can read the final Ofcom adjudication here while Wikipedia sums up the whole sorry affair here.

The TV phone in rip off could be seen as a repeat of Auction World - ICSTIS, the regulator, has failed to understand the growing interactive TV market, with the result that all kinds of dodgy practices have crept in. This won't be as bad as Auction World and people stand some chance of getting their money back this time. But surely regulators themselves now need to be placed under the spotlight and asked why they seem unable to keep up with progress in their supposed fields of expertise.

History Lesson

An American chap was causing a fuss on the train this morning because his seat reservation had gone wrong. He asked the steward if they could help him out and said 'come on, I'm an American, we saved you in World War II'. Whoa there! Hang on. The US did help us with food during the war and they sacrificed many lives in the Normandy landings and thereafter. But WWII was won by the Russians. 80% of the German troops were engaged fighting the Russians. The Russians sustained such heavy losses because a few years earlier, in a fit of paranoia, Stalin had shot all of his top generals leaving his army with no top level experience. The main reason the US helped out in Europe was to make sure that the Russians didn't seize all of Europe after the war.

The other main reason the US entered the war was because of Japan, a growing economic rival in the Pacific. This is why the Americans needlessly bombed the hell out of many non-strategic Japanese cities: they simply wanted to set the Japanese economy back by a few decades (the later Japanese recovery was rightly dubbed the 'Japanese economic miracle'). And of course we have the atomic bomb, dropped to ruin a few cities and show the Russians that the US had the bomb. The first Uranium bomb was dropped even though the American generals knew that there were US prisoners of war in the drop zone. The second Plutonium bomb was dropped even though the US knew the Japanese were to surrender and it was done purely to test the technology. So, yes, the US helped the UK during WWII but the motives were not so altruistic.

Cream rises to the top or s**t floats?

Harriet Harman has just announced her intention to stand as deputy leader under Gordon Brown. One of the reasons she cites is that she believes a woman is needed at the top of government. Really? Why? Is there something unique that only a woman could bring to the job or is it just to fill the quota and make sure the balance of the sexes at the top of government matches that in wider society? A person should not get a job based on positive discrimination. The best person for the job should always be chosen and no other factors should be considered.

Another thing about Harman is that she has been given a second chance in frontbench politics. Her first stint at the Social Security department was a disaster. We've seen this in politics before with Mandelson. We also get to see it in the world of football. A few years ago rat-faced England captain John Terry was involved in a spot of bother and I remember some commentators saying he should be booted out of football for good. Now, all is forgiven and he is the responsible face of the FA and all the merchandise and crap that goes with it.

I'm all for giving people a second chance but they better not screw up again. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Grampa Simpson gets an award for the cartoons Lisa and Bart wrote under his name 'It is a tribute to this great country that a man who once took a shot at Teddy Roosevelt could win back your trust'.

Science on TV

Science is in crisis. University Physics Departments are being closed down. Just today we have a talk in our University Department about how to attract more students to study Physics at University. There could be many reasons for the slump but one factor is the way Science is portrayed in the media.

Take the TV. When I first got interested in Science there were three flagship science programmes. Documentaries were shown regularly and on the schools programmes. On the commercial channels there is now no science. We are just left with Horizon on the BBC. This used to be a good show but it has steadily been dumbed down in recent years with more explosions and CG effects. This series, in an effort to chase ratings, the science has been watered down to the point of being pointless.

The nadir is the episode to go out tonight which will examine what the world would be like if the dinosaurs had survived.

WTF

Cue a pointless excuse to show dinosaur CG effects in a modern setting. I am going to watch this show just because I know I will spend an hour shouting at the TV for being pointless. At least it'll make me react.

Coffee

A new study suggests that a morning coffee will not make a person more alert. The buzz is in getting the hit as the withdrawal symptoms kick in after a nights sleep. Nothing we didn't know already then. I don't drink coffee as a stimulant. I like the rich multi-facetted taste. It's nice and refreshing to drink warm liquid in a morning. It wakes the senses. There is a downside to being a coffee drinker; headaches, 50 calories of sugar and milk at a time and the diuretic effects driving me to the mens room every hour. But I can manage these side effects of my addiction. I won't be mugging anyone to pay for my habit. And my mantra of coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon means I don't lose sleep. Unless coffee has long term mental effects like cannabis then I'll continue cleaning out my French press pot every morning.

Our era is one not of capitalism, but of rampant corporatism and consumerism, master and slave. The unavoidable end product is a company like Tesco. This faceless collective has grown by first offering the user the best alternative and then offering no alternative. The motto is 'everything, to everyone, everywhere'. How chilling. This cancerous market force has killed agriculture and millions of small and medium businesses. Poor quality, mass produced meat, fruit and vegetables have now replaced local produce and choice. Food shortages are common. Many times I have left without potatoes or bread or milk. There are often large queues at petrol pumps caused by the pulsing of shoppers and not by petrol supplies. Small town centres now contain just charity shops and building societies. My home village, once considered the 'queen of villages' now has a large polyp attached which has caused huge traffic problems, light pollution problems and has violated planning laws by expansion onto green land. This has happened everywhere, to everyone in every way. This is your prize for winning the cold war. Power over your life in fewer hands than ever before and with less accountability than at any stage. The Blue army has won.

Meet the Russian People

I know a lot about US culture and history, good and bad. TV, the cold war and American economic dominance have given me a sense of the good and history books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and anti US policy protests by people like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore have corrected the idyllic propaganda.

On the other hand I know nothing of the positives in Russian culture. Cold War propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 have left an impression of a totalitarian hell in which millions were slaughtered in Communist purges and in the death camps in Siberia. In modern times Russia is portrayed as a mafia ridden corrupt mess headed by a former KGB madman in which state assets were stolen by the oligarchs and the resulting country is left in a poor and crumbling state with whole cities blighted by AIDS and drug addiction.

I need to learn more. I want to know about some of the positives in Russian life now and then. What do/did people enjoy watching on TV? What literature/music encapsulates the Russian spirit? What good things happened behind the Iron Curtain? I am not prepared to let international politics blight my opinion of the people within a nation that has suffered more than most.

Random anecdotes from The New Shostakovich by Ian MacDonald.

'... in the interval between speeches by Stalin at a conference in the Kremlin during the forties, delegates were offered buckets of salt water to bathe their hands, swollen by hours of clapping.'

'Wife-beating was so thoroughly institutionalised in pre-Revolutionary Russia that a husband who refrained from it was thought abnormal. An old manual of etiquette published in Moscow included instructions to husbands on how to whip their wives 'courteously, lovingly' so as not to blind or deafen them.'

Good TV

At the moment I am mostly watching

Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
Top Gear
Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe
West Wing Season 2

PhD Viva

Three weeks today.

Rolling News Low Point

Last night a train derailed and slid down a steep embankment. I am a regular Virgin trains user and the experience must have been harrowing. Something happened last night on BBC News 24 that made me feel numb.

A BBC employee/reporter happened to be travelling in one of the coaches and she phoned in to give a live report from inside one of the stricken coaches. Around her we could hear the sounds of windows being broken as people made their exit and screams and shouts from hurt/scared passengers. She sounded most pleased with herself to be in such a career enhacing position.

Put yourself in that situation. As people are trying to evacuate a stricken train and help others to escape your first though is to phone your boss and enhance your career prospects. Why not get out of the train and help everyone else out and then do everything you can to look after injured people outside the train first? Then think about handing over an eyewitness report. These were tasteless and selfish first instincts.

Colours of nature (part 2)

The other major colours you see in nature are green from foliage and blue for water. The sea looks blue because it reflects the sky. Water itself is transparent. Small depths of water look transparent (like a bathfull) but if you look through enough water (like when you are underwater and can see a long way) things look blue because there are so many water molecules that they absorb most of the colours completely. The only colours that can can more than about 20 metres are blue and a bit of green - that's why things underwater seem blue-green. From land the sea looks blue because it reflects the sky. So when the sky is grey the sea looks grey.


Plants are green because they absorb all colours except green. They break up water and carbon dioxide molecules and fit them together to make oxygen and sugars. They do this using a molecule called chlorophyll. If you give a chlorophyll molecule just the right amount of energy it will give you an electron. This 'just right' energy just happens to be the same energy of a blue particle of light. You can also get an electron if you give it a red light particle. This will have a different energy to a blue light particle but it turns out that this energy is also just right to get another electron from a different part of the structure. When chlorophyll has all these electrons loose they get passed around between loads of chlorophyll molecules until eventually they hit water and carbon dioxide molecules and help them to break down and reform into sugars. So blue and red light get absorbed by chlorophyll and green gets scattered back - green particles don't have the right energy to release an electron. That's why plants are green. Not all plants use light to make food. Funghi and mushrooms decompose dead or living tissue to make food. They often grow in fields or woods where little animals die and rot or the leaves and bark from trees rot. They don't need light and are rarely green.

Rover and Scientific Research

£270m of taxpayers money was used to prop up the ailing Rover car manufacturing company, which is now Chinese owned. As a result £68m given to the scientific research councils by the DTI will now be taken back to help balance the books. This means that thousands of research grants will be turned down and thousands of PhD and Postdoc projects across all scientific disciplines will never come into being. The worst hit research council is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) which loses £29m.

Science is the biggest thing in history. It has had a bigger impact than any king, politician, war, disease, political ideology or natural disaster. The changes in the world over the past 100 years have been science driven. Computers, TVs, mobile phones, space flight, electric lighting and much more have come directly from Physics. Hacking away at scientific research budgets in this country will cause it to fall behind. And it may prevent the spark of inspiration that will help find a cure for aids or cancer, develop the electric car or make clean nuclear fusion energy a realistic prospect.

Road Pricing e-petition

I am one of the 1.5 million people who has signed an online petition on the Downing Street website to ask the government to scrap plans for road pricing and road tracking. This morning I received a response e-mail from 'Tony Blair' which pretty much said that nothing had been decided and options were being checked but pilot schemes are going ahead and some form of congestion charging will have to be introduced. So the will of 1.5m voters and tax payers is to be ignored. Add these people to the list of attendees at the anti war marches a few years ago. Or the people who campaigned against the poll tax. This is not a republic; we don't elect people to make decisions on our behalf we elect them to enact our will. Democracy does not work in this country at the moment. But the masses are busy with their 'lifestyle'. No October revolution here.

The simple fact is that people have no choice; no-one willingly sits in traffic for tens of hours per week. House prices in this country prohibit many people from living close to where they work. The nature of the job market in this country also means at least one person per household has to travel. Give me a tax break to buy a house near to where I work and force the employers of my partner to let her work from home 3 days a week and that will cut four lengthy and 'unnecessary' journeys per day. But don't charge me to use the roads at peak times. I already pay to use them. Paying to congest the roads will not prevent congestion.

Mondrian

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch artist who contributed towards the De Stijl movement. He is most famous for his non-representational paintings and many examples are to be found on posters in student lodgings.

For some reason his early naturalist paintings have a deep effect on me when I look at them. Especially the two shown below. I think that for a long time I have been deep in the woods and now I can just start to see familiar things between the trees. Maybe. Or it could be that these are tremendously atmospheric paintings done by a genius in an early stage of his career.

Energy usage

I was given a gadget that will measure the energy use of my electrical appliances and help work out their monetary costs

Kettle 2890 W
Computer 130 W
Toaster 1010 W
Phone charger 0.002 W
Dishwasher 600 W
Big TV 110 W
Small TV 42 W (21 W standby)

Which means that £1 ($1.90) gets me

178 cups of tea (2 cups per boil, 800 ml water)
80 hours computer time
255 slices toasted bread
32000 charges of my phone
9 dishwasher loads (2 hrs per load)
100 hrs big TV
250 hrs small TV

I started a new job today.