At his talk chez moi on Friday Feb 22nd (see below) on How globalisation has made the world less rather than more homogenised, Michael Jennings intends to show us some photos.  Indeed, he will be dropping by earlier in the week to make sure that the relevant technology can be guaranteed to work properly on the night.  This may also require some creativity with the seating.

Here, in the meantime, are a few photos that he has emailed to me, together with commentary.  Enjoy.

Georgia:

This is in Sukhomi, Abkhazia, a breakaway non-recognised state that is de jure part of Georgia (and is supported by Russia). Mango is a fashion label that grew out of a stall in the Ramblas market in Barcelona, and is now to globalised retail what the sub-prime market is to home ownership.

Cyprus:

An interesting phenomenon occurs when there is a market for a particular international business, and that international business does not operate in that particular market for whatever reason: because the market is too small, too distant, too poor, too corrupt, or there are political problems. Clones of the business will often spring up. These can be particularly entertaining in places where there is no trademark law, trademark law is weak, or where it can be legally difficult to pursue claims from the owner of the trademark. This burger place in northern Cyprus in no way resembles Burger King. Obviously.

One of the most extreme cases in which this phenomenon occurred was in South Africa under apartheid. Many international companies boycotted the country, which in some ways was a modern country with a sizeable middle class, economy and legal system. (In various other ways, it wasn’t and isn’t.) South Africa in 1990 was therefore full of quite good clones of international businesses, that until then were constrained as to where they could operate, but faces competition only from one another at home. Post 1990, the international businesses that they were clones of entered South Africa in a big way, and the South Africans themselves were subsequently able to compete in the wider world. The South African clones weren’t good enough or rich enough to compete in the home markets of the major internationals, and have subsequently expanded into countries that are poorly served by the internationals for a variety of reason - this means Africa, parts of Eastern Europe, parts of Asia, parts of the Middle East. Politically dubious markets of questionable legitimacy a lot the time. One often finds South Africans and Russians side by side.

Tianjin:

One could write an entire book about fake Apple Stores. The ones in China (this one is in Tianjin) are the most awesome. The entire story of international brands in China is itself fascinating. Everyone is there, because of the perceived size and importance of the market. Yet the country is far more chaotic, far more unstable, far more corrupt, for more authoritarian, has weaker copyright and patent laws and a weaker rule of law in general than many of the markets these companies would generally consider operating in.

Mumbai:

India is more problematic in some ways: bureaucratic beyond words, and culturally difficult in ways that make foreign business models work less well, or at least require a lot more adaptation. (Imagine you are McDonald’s, and you are told that you are not permitted to use either beef nor pork in the food you sell). There have historically been limits on foreign investment. Supermarkets are only now in the process of being legalised. Very large companies can find entry to the Indian market - car makers or mobile phone companies. Medium sized companies - which is where most of the interesting stuff happens - find it much harder.

It’s going to be an interesting evening.

So far, for me, one of the most impressive or a great many impressive things to be found in Steven Pinkers new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is his description of The Enlightenment.  (I mentioned this huge volume, in passing, in my latest Samizdata posting, and at greater length in an earlier posting.)

What makes Pinker’s exposition of the ideas behind The Enlightenment so excellent is that he explains how the scientific project at the heart of The Enlightenment was joined at the hip to a new moral vision of mankind.  This was not merely a couple of vaguely benevolent quests, for scientific truth on the one hand, and for moral excellence on the other.  For, as Pinker asks, why did the quest for scientific truth necessarily imply a quest for moral improvement (as we now regard it), for greater “humanity” in our treatment of other humans?  Pinker answers this question.

I found that picture of Pinker here.

In other words, if, having read the above, you decide that you will be wanting to read what follows, best to do that now.

Bringing people and ideas together, of course, does not determine how those ideas will evolve. The rise of the Republic of Letters and the cosmopolitan city cannot, by themselves, explain why a humanitarian ethics arose in the 18th century, rather than ever-more-ingenious rationales for torture, slavery, despotism, and war.

My own view is that the two developments really are linked. When a large enough community of free, rational agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, steered by logical consistency and feedback from the world, their consensus will veer in certain directions. Just as we don’t have to explain why molecular biologists discovered that DNA has four bases - given that they were doing their biology properly, and given that DNA really does have four bases, in the long run they could hardly have discovered anything else - we may not have to explain why enlightened thinkers would eventually argue against African slavery, cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and the execution of witches and heretics. With enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be justified indefinitely. The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings. I think this process of moral discovery was a significant cause of the Humanitarian Revolution.

I am prepared to take this line of explanation a step further. The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism. (It is also sometimes called classical liberalism, though since the 1960s the word liberalism has acquired other meanings as well.) Here is a potted account of this philosophy - a rough but more or less coherent composite of the views of these Enlightenment thinkers.

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty - all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Is there anything we can be certain of? Descartes gave as good an answer as any: our own consciousness. I know that I am conscious, by the very fact of wondering what I can know, and I can also know that my consciousness comprises several kinds of experience. These include the perception of an external world and of other people, and various pleasures and pains, both sensual (such as food, comfort, and sex) and spiritual (such as love, knowledge, and an appreciation of beauty).

We are also committed to reason. If we are asking a question, evaluating possible answers, and trying to persuade others of the value of those answers, then we are reasoning, and therefore have tacitly signed on to the validity of reason. We are also committed to whatever conclusions follow from the careful application of reason, such as the theorems of mathematics and logic.

Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science. The progress of science, with its dazzling success at explaining and manipulating the world, shows that knowledge of the universe is possible, albeit always probabilistic and subject to revision. Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge - not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Among the beliefs about the world of which we can be highly confident is that other people are conscious in the same way that we are. Other people are made of the same stuff, seek the same kinds of goals, and react with external signs of pleasure and pain to the kinds of events that cause pain and pleasure in each of us.

By the same reasoning, we can infer that people who are different from us in many superficial ways - their gender, their race, their culture - are like us in fundamental ways. As Shakespeare’s Shylock asks:

Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

The commonality of basic human responses across cultures has profound implications. One is that there is a universal human nature. It encompasses our common pleasures and pains, our common methods of reasoning, and our common vulnerability to folly (not least the desire for revenge). Human nature may be studied, just as anything else in the world may be. And our decisions on how to organize our lives can take the facts of human nature into account - including the discounting of our own intuitions when a scientific understanding casts them in doubt.

The other implication of our psychological commonality is that however much people differ, there can be, in principle, a meeting of the minds. I can appeal to your reason and try to persuade you, applying standards of logic and evidence that both of us are committed to by the very fact that we are both reasoning beings.

The universality of reason is a momentous realization, because it defines a place for morality. If I appeal to you to do something that affects me - to get off my foot, or not to stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning - then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours if I want you to take me seriously (say, by retaining my right to stand on your foot, or to stab you, or to let your children drown). I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

You and I ought to reach this moral understanding not just so we can have a logically consistent conversation but because mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children when they get into trouble, and refrain from knifing each other than we would be if we hoarded our surpluses while they rotted, let each other’s children drown, and feuded incessantly. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one where we both are unselfish.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. This foundation of morality may be seen in the many versions of the Golden Rule that have been discovered by the world’s major religions, and also in Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hobbes and Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal.

From the factual knowledge that there is a universal human nature, and the moral principle that no person has grounds for privileging his or her interests over others’, we can deduce a great deal about how we ought to run our affairs. A government is a good thing to have, because in a state of anarchy people’s self-interest, self-deception, and fear of these shortcomings in others would lead to constant strife. People are better off abjuring violence, if everyone else agrees to do so, and vesting authority in a disinterested third party. But since that third party will consist of human beings, not angels, their power must be checked by the power of other people, to force them to govern with the consent of the governed. They may not use violence against their citizens beyond the minimum necessary to prevent greater violence. And they should foster arrangements that allow people to flourish from cooperation and voluntary exchange.

This line of reasoning may be called humanism because the value that it recognizes is the flourishing of humans, the only value that cannot be denied. I experience pleasures and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same.

If all this sounds banal and obvious, then you are a child of the Enlightenment, and have absorbed its humanist philosophy. As a matter of historical fact, there is nothing banal or obvious about it. Though not necessarily atheistic (it is compatible with a deism in which God is identified with the nature of the universe), Enlightenment humanism makes no use of scripture, Jesus, ritual, religious law, divine purpose, immortal souls, an afterlife, a messianic age, or a God who responds to individual people. It sweeps aside many secular sources of value as well, if they cannot be shown to be necessary for the enhancement of human flourishing. These include the prestige of the nation, race, or class; fetishized virtues such as manliness, dignity, heroism, glory, and honor; and other mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, and struggles.

I would argue that Enlightenment humanism, whether invoked explicitly or implicitly, underlay the diverse humanitarian reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries. The philosophy was explicitly invoked in the design of the first liberal democracies, most transparently in the ‘self-evident truths’ in the American Declaration of Independence. Later it would spread to other parts of the world, blended with humanistic arguments that had arisen independently in those civilizations.  And as we shall see in chapter 7, it regained momentum during the Rights Revolutions of the present era.

When I go out photographing, the process goes: that looks interesting, snap, forget about it and immediately on to the next one.  Which means that I get all those nice surprises later, when browsing, that I keep going on about.

What do you make of this, for instance:

I can just about remember thinking at the time that a very large number of snappers were taking a mysterious interest in what looked like a very unremarkable young man, including one snapper with very thin legs.  And the young man was most definitely cooperating.

But now I ask again, as I asked myself when taking this snap, who is this young man?

My policy with any celebs I myself recognise is that if they are just wandering about making no effort to attract attenntion and probably hoping very much not to, then I will photo them, but will not shove them up on the internet, until a minimum of a few years later.  If, on the other hand, they are out and about being photographed, they are totally fair game, and can be internetted within the hour.

Not that I did this to this guy.  The photo was taken on March 30th of this year, on Westminster Bridge, and no sooner had I taken it than I forgot about it.

So anyway, who is this guy?  Here’s a close-up that makes him a bit more recognisable, if you recognise him.

Are there already clever face-recognition procedures that would enable me to find out who he is, if he is anyone?  If you are the kind of person who knows about such things, then please do this yourself, and tell me.

Last night I went along to that meeting that Simon Gibbs and Andy Janes flagged up in comments on the previous posting here, and am very glad to have done so.  I will try to do a write-up of it for Samizdata (although I promise nothing).  Meanwhile here are a couple of pictures I took:

On the left, the guest speaker at the meeting, Tom Burroughes.  On the right, a snap of somewhat over half of those present, including Tom.

The picture on the left shows how good speaker photos can be, even in poor light.  The picture on the right shows the usefulness of having a wider angle lens that I have hitherto had.  However, only a rather small proportion of the rather few snaps I took came out well, which was a slight disappointment.  The new camera is better for this kind of thing than the old one, but not as much of an improvement as I had been hoping.

Or maybe I am just getting used to it, and my standards have gone up.

Here’s another picture that works better with the new wider and more panoramic lens.  It’s the venue of the meeting, the Rose & Crown, taken when I first got there:

Another for the Pubs Dwarfed by Modernity collection.  Pubs in London are like Churches, in that they have a habit of surviving when all around them is replaced by higher rise modernity.  (Of course, you no longer see the pubs that perish.)

I had been wandering around in Southwark beforehand, mostly snapping the Shard through random architectural and other junk in the foreground.  As a result I found myself approaching the Rose & Crown from an unfamiliar and more interesting direction than usual.

Yesterday I walked over to Parliament to be part of the Rally Against Debt.  I went because I feared it would be tiny, and because I hoped it might be huge.

In the event it was neither.  The turnout was in the low hundreds, rather than the mere dozens I had feared or the thousands that I had, thinking about it now, hoped for.  Photo it all close up and you could make it look quite big.  Step back fifty yards, and it was cut down to its true size.

I’ll probably be doing a Samizdata posting about it along these lines, Real Soon Now.  In the meantime, what with signs being a current preoccupation here, here are some of the signs as I managed to photo.

These big clutches of photos probably don’t work that well, judging by the comments, but I think this clutch may be different, because each little square gets the message across.  You don’t have to click at all, to get the point, in fact you can get forty points without doing anything except running your eyes over it all.

I was impressed by how many hand-done signs there were.

Should I have been?

Are these signs merely of amateurism, and as such do they mean little?

Or do hand-done signs signify depth of feeling?  And do they therefore count for more than the mass produced sort of signs, which by the way were also present in large numbers.

The one about the Che T-shirts was off message, as were several other signs that I spotted but did not include here.  I include the Che sign because I really like it.

Bloggers, borrow at will.  No need to mention me.  The message is the thing, and anyway, it was the sign-makers who did the real work.

Many other photographers were also present.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon some more Men, ...

… which I could have sworn were the work of the same man, Anthony Gormley, as did these South Bank Men.

It was getting late, but on the plus side there was a sunset in progress.  I had fun lining up these (I assumed) Gormley Men with some nearby Big London Things:

I returned a day or two later, earlier in the day.  But it was gloomier.

When I returned more recently, I found I had lost all interest in lining these Men up with the Towers of Docklands.  I had become interested in their immediate setting:

On closer inspection, they looked like the moulds from which the Gormley Men had emerged.  But actually, they are not Gormleys.  They are the work of Peter Burke.  The official title of these Men is: Assembly.

And, I found myself wanting to photo them much closer up.  This is because I came to see that, inside and under all that armour plating, there is a much more specifically human man than is presented by the Gormley Men.  In particular, the face is much more detailed and less generalised, albeit the same every time.

Note how the camera, mine anyway, sometimes lies, especially when snapping sculpture, and especially when snapping sculpture close up.  In situ the eye sees context and hence knows what is really going on.  In situ, the eye darts hither and thither and makes sense of everything, provided only that there is sense to be made.  But give the eye only a photo, and all its sees is the photo.  So, here, it can turn the insides of the heads into heads in their own right.  Or, it can turn a comprehensible three dimensional shape into a two dimensional abstract muddle. 

My first reaction to these Men was that there is something very military about them, what with them being outside the old Woolwich Arsenal.  And I still think that.  To me (I have no idea what Peter Burke thinks he was doing) they suggest a reflection on how the military personality is shaped by its armour, by its uniform.  But, on closer inspection, there are still human beings in there.

I do wonder, however, how well Burke and Gormley know each other, and what they each think of the other’s work.  For real I mean, not in the form of the official art bollocks that they emit for public consumption.

Do any accusations of copying fly around, and if so in which direction?

Or, are they part of a “school”?

For some time now I have had a couple of nice bridge pictures clogging up my desktop, and I want to dump them here, note them, say how nice they are, and then forget about them.

First there is this very recent bridge, for a high speed railway:

And this one:

...which is an aqueduct.

I like a lot of things about both these bridges.

I like how plain concrete works in sun drenched places, the way it doesn’t in merely drenched places like the one I live in.  I went to the south of France a few years back, and suddenly, concrete modernism was an evolved tradition rather than a totalitarian horror show imposed by people getting even with the human race for having been bullied by it at school, or whatever it was.

I like how both bridges are gun barrel straight, one because the trains are travelling as fast as airplanes and would crash if the bridge was not gun barrel straight, and the other because it is for transporting water, and that can’t work if the bridge goes up and down even a bit.

I like how they could build the train bridge during the dry season.  How convenient.  Just the one dry season, I trust.

And I especially like the aqueduct, which was built in 1939, for its unselfconscious functionality.  If only all modernism worked so well.

The train bridge is “all rights reserved”, so if there’s a complaint it may have to disappear from here.

I saw this at Instapundit, but I have no idea whether they were aiming it particularly at me, or at people generally.  I don’t know where I am with adverts any more.

Being a Z list blogger has its advantages as well as its humiliations.  I can take the piss out of stuff like this, confident that only my readers will notice.

Just spotted another advert in the same spot, for something along the lines of credit rating UK.  That suggests targetting to me.  I.e. not a proper advert at all, just junk mail in among what I am trying to read.  I really can’t see this “business model” (free verbiage plus non-adverts) going anywhere very fast.  Note that it even drains the juice out of real adverts, because you no longer believe that any of them are real.

More on the whole paying-for-what-you-read thing by me here.

I know.  You want brilliant blogging from me.  Well, I’ve been busy.  So have some brilliant blogging from some other people.

Perry de Havilland’s Why I support Wikileaks is a model of what blogging should be, as I told him over the phone this afternoon.  On a significant subject, well written, and not too long.  “Indeed”, said he.  “Say what you have to say and then get out of there.” Wise words.

I also very much like this, which is a great send-up of climate science by Zanzibar-based Sam Duncan.

On the latter subject, I think some are getting it a bit wrong why we mock these climate scientists about all the snow we’ve been having lately.  It’s not that this snow (in London it’s been no more than a light dusting) proves directly that there is no global warming going on.  No.  What the snow proves is that the climate scientists are ignorant prats, because they were saying that any snow in such places as London would be a thing of the past, or at the very least failing to contradict the prats who did say this, nearly loudly enough.  Therefore they don’t understand weather, or do but have been lying about it.  Therefore their prophecies of global doom are worthless, either mistakes or (my opinion) more lies.  If they don’t (or won’t) understand climate, why should we trust their climate models?

Not a complete and comprehensive proof, I admit.  But definitely a relevant part of the argument.

Remember the scorn I poured on BP for pretending that BP just means ... “BP”.  As opposed to what it actually still does mean for as long as the initials B and P continue to be used in this connection, in this order: British Petroleum.

Here’s another such piece of foolishness:

Sorkin apparently did not get the memo (we did) in which TLC announced, about a dozen years ago, that the “T” and “L” and “C” no longer stand for “The” and “Learning” and “Channel” and it was now to be called “TLC” ...

If your channel used to be The Learning Channel, TLC for short, and you continue to use the acronym TLC, then TLC continues to mean The Learning Channel.  Sending out a memo saying that from now on, TLC does not mean The Learning Channel is like sending out a memo saying that the Milk in Milk Marketing Board has nothing to do, any more, with the white stuff that comes out of cows but that the Milk in Milk Marketing Board is merely a random collection of letters meaning nothing at all.  This is Humpty Dumpty talk.  Words mean exactly what I want them to mean, etc.  No they don’t.

The truth is that words have a life of their own.  You can’t change the meaning of a word by merely announcing that it has changed its meaning, even as everyone else continues to use the word to mean what it has always meant.

The same applies to acronyms.  If people continue to think that TLC means The Learning Channel, then that is what TLC continues to mean, memo or no memo.

It accordingly still makes perfect sense for Aaron Sorkin to mock TLC for being, in his opinion, nothing to do with learning.

Questions concerning the death of copyright protection on dowloaded MP3s

Wired:

In January 2009, Apple announced that it would remove the copyright protection wrapper from every song in its store. Today, Amazon and Walmart both sell music encoded as MP3s, which don’t even have hooks for copyright-protection locks. The battle is over, comrades.

Question.  If, say three years ago, you bought an MP3 which did have DRM ("Digital Rights Management” – in English: anti-copying measures) built into it, are you still stuck with all that restriction?  Or, if you want to have no such restriction, do you have to buy it again, under the new regime?

Basically, about three or four years ago now, I heard news to the effect that DRM would in due course be done away with, and I said to myself: fine, when they do that, I will consider paying for downloaded MP3s. Until they do, forget it.  I want to be able to listen to all MP3s I own on whatever machine I want to play them on.  If I even doubt that this will definitely work, then forget it, no deal.  Won’t even think about it.  But now, I’m thinking about it.  Hence all these questions.

What will prevent people just copying and sharing MP3s amongst themselves?  What will stop me emailing them to people?

If the answers to the above are: nothing, and something (even if that something is only that it will take so damn long), then that will greatly encourage meatspace network building, so that you can get your hands on tons of free recorded sound.  Won’t it?

Indeed:

Fernando Motolese, a creator of viral videos, recently approached French food giant Danone (known as Dannon in the United States) with an unusual proposition. He had filmed a gross-out humor video about the gastrointestinal effects of Danone’s Activia yogurt, and he intended to release it on the Internet. Would Danone pay him a few pennies each time the video got viewed? If not, Motolese said, he might upload an even more offensive spoof.

“It felt sort of like blackmail,” says Renato Fischer, Danone account executive with the advertising firm Young & Rubicam, who fielded the offer.

Yes, I imagine it did feel like blackmail.  Although I suppose “obtaining money with menaces” might be more exact.

I would not be amazed if Fernando Motolese were to have a mysterious accident at some time in the future.  It seems to me that he crossed the line when he started swapping silence for money.

But, me being a proper libertarian and all, I ask myself: What’s the proper libertarian line on this?  Presumably Walter Block would not see any problem with it.

I’m dining at Chateau Perry tomorrow evening, and I must remember to ask her about this.  Guess: she’ll say the big brands had it coming.  The era when they did control their brand messages and brand images was the anomaly, not the era now, when they don’t.

Bugger:

There will be no highlights of this winter’s Ashes on terrestrial TV according to a report in the Daily Mail.

The newspaper claims no terrestrial broadcaster responded to the tender document offering free-to-air rights because of strict limitations on the time they would be allowed to air any highlights package. It was expected the tender, sent out by IMG earlier this year, would attract interest from the BBC or Channel 5.

However, both broadcasters said scheduling restrictions put them off making any bid. The terms are believed to have stated no highlights could be shown before 10pm, a delay of almost a day, and they could not overlap with any of Sky’s live transmissions, which usually start at around 11.30pm, giving a very small window for them to be shown.

Incoming from “Tony et famille”, who live in Quimper, Brittany:

Hello Brian

Bonjour.

I caught Caesar the cat in the act of sneezing on the hot tin roof of our car in Quimper.

According to the date embedded in this picture, this took place as long ago as September 7th 2009, or maybe even July 9th 2009.  Yet did the mainstream media pay any attention to this sensational circumstance, either at the time or since?  I googled “cat on hot tin roof” but all I got was a lot of drivel about a play.  No wonder blogs are taking over the media world.

If you would like to use the pic in your blog the usual fee of 50000 Euros will apply ...

Fine.  I’ll settle up in a couple of years, by which time a single figure clutch of our British pounds should more than suffice to obtain the appropriate brick of Euros.

I recently read a piece saying that the age of the big box computer is drawing to a close, and that such dynosaurs are being driven slowly but surely to extinction by laptops.  Fair enough.  If that’s how other punters feel, I’m not going to tell them otherwise.  But speaking for myself, I think my next computer, which I am pondering now, is probably going to be a ... another big box computer.

It’s not just that you can still surely (comments?) get more power into such a thing than you can squeeze into a laptop.  There are other considerations in play.

I also have a laptop, and the most important feature of this laptop, apart from it being small and having a sane operating system identical to the one on my real computer, is that it is extremely cheap and contains only what I am doing during that particular bit of mobility.  Which means that if I lose it, or drop it, or have it stolen, it’s not even the temporarily the end of my world.  My big box computer could also get kicked, or even stolen, but this is far more unlikely, I think.

There’s a line in a Brit gangster movie that I like, which goes: “You can’t steal a warehouse.  It’s big.  It’s heavy.  It’s stuck to the ground.” Okay, my big box computer isn’t quite that heavy, or quite that stuck to the ground, but you get my point.

There is also the matter of something being temporarily lost to take into account.  This is why I still have a phone that is attached by a piece of wire to the wall.  You don’t need wire any more for phones to communicate with the rest of the world, but wiring them to the wall sure makes them stay put.  I have never yet temporarily lost my laptop, by leaving it in a strange place, the way people temporarily lose car keys, but it could well happen.  I have lent it to people, in fact it is being lent out now, which is a very useful feature.  Which obviously wouldn’t be happening if that was my only computer, with everything important of mine on it.

Last night, and I’m not changing the subject I promise, I attended a talk about art, and how people “ought” to buy more of it.  I know.  Why “ought” they to?

The matter of people having the sheer wall space was raised.  What if there is nowhere to put all your art?  People with an art habit need space, which is seriously expensive stuff.  And it really helps if you are not constantly moving from place to place.  Art is for people with big and settled abodes.  Does not the same, on a smaller scale, apply to computers?  I am one of that lucky demographic that has somewhere big and unchanging to put my big box computer, where I also do all my serious work.  I have a big box computer, which is more desirable than a laptop for the reasons stated above (can’t be lost, dropped, stolen etc.), because I can.  Many don’t, not because a laptop is automatically superior, but because they can’t have a big box computer.  They have no one place to put it.  They live in constantly changing accommodation or work in offices where they likewise have no fixed abode.  Or, they just have to have their whole computing story with them both at home and at work.

What I’m saying is: if you don’t need your computer to be portable, you need it not to be portable.

Of course, the day may come when computers get so cheap that most can afford to lose them, damage them, have them stolen, like cheap mobile phones.

Also if our important computer stuff is not stored on our own computers, but is instead stored somewhere out there in virtual-land, and our computers are merely cheap tools to access our stuff - which (notice) remains on big box computers, in big information warehouses which are big, heavy, and stuck to the ground – that changes things.  Suppose the computers we own cost next to nothing.  Then, they become something we could afford to lose, break, have nicked, etc.  People have been saying that would happen for years, but it keeps not happening.  Is it now happening?  Is that another reason why laptops are conquering the big boxes?

The person I am currently lending my laptop to is, come to think of it, probably using it a lot like that.  Is this the future?  And is one of the reasons why this is the future is that people have now to use laptops, so are obliged also to find a big box somewhere else to store their vital stuff, owned and controlled by someone else?  It’s not that they want to live like this; it’s that they have to.