Quote of the day

I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this.

So says Father Daniel, a Romanian Orthodox priest, who is accused of murdering a nun by crucifixion.

Now that's what I call art.

Click here now. Don't say "I'll come back to it later", you'll only forget. Go there now. If you reckon you have time to waste reading my blog, then this is a vastly better spent five minutes than whatever it was you intended to do when you left. It truly is a work of genius. Like I said, go there now.

Via Chris Lightfoot.

A missed opportunity

I've just had an offer accepted to buy a flat. If I had been a little more patient, and prepared to move out of St. Andrews, I could have bought 101 Main Street, Lower Largo. This property stands on the site of the cottage where Alexander Selkirk, a.k.a. Robinson Crusoe, was born, and comes complete with Robinson Crusoe's statue. It needs a bit of upgrading, apparently, but fifty grand for a flat and the statue is peanuts, and owning Robin Crusoe's statue would be kinda cool.

On the other hand, it would be a dreadful nuisance to have to wait to be rescued by a ship every morning before you could get into work.

Cyclotouriste is easy to get along with

Find out why here.

Via Catallarchy and digamma.

This is the thin end of a wedge

A few weeks ago, Richard, of Militant Moderate, when following up on the 1952 committee, wondered if I would use this blog to encourage would-be Tory voters to remember the Tories' muddle on the ID card issue before they cast their votes. I replied that I wouldn't. Anyone who's interested why should count the frequency of my posts on this blog. It's typically about once a month, maybe twice a month if I'm feeling frisky. I have no intention of changing that [How on earth do proper bloggers ever get any work done?], so I'm not going to start writing posts just because someone else has decided that I ought to. Now, Patrick Crozier has decided that I ought to write about the books I have read. However, since this is an infinitely more interesting subject than the general election, I'll make an exception. Just this once, mind.

How many books do you own?
I'm not sure, but not very many. It can't be much more than 500. Still, there's plenty of time yet to build the sort of book collection that every respectable gentleman ought to have.

Last book read
New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought, Todd G. Buchholz. I had spent half-an-hour, or so, snoozing in the Cambridge branch of Borders - it has very comfy armchairs, you see. Free-riding like this always makes me feel a bit guilty, so I usually buy something from them whenever I do this. New ideas ... was the purchase on this occasion. I read it in a couple of days. It's a very nice account of the important ideas in economics, and the personalities behind them, and it should prove a useful tool in the careful induction of certain anti-globalisation acquaintances of mine into the realm of more sensible thought.

Last book(s) purchased
New Ideas... See above
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith. Liked the film, bought the book. Not read it yet.
Choice: The Best of Reason, Nick Gillespie (ed). Columns from the libertarian magazine.
Letter from America, Alistair Cook. I'm a devoted fan. I listen to his tapes every night to lull myself to sleep. I guess I've virtually memorised his tribute to Dean Acheson by now.
How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff. A vital manual in the art of propaganda. Some of the references seem a bit dated though. I mean, nobody takes trade union leaders seriously these days, do they?
The Bourne Trilogy, Robert Ludlum. Great films, great books, even though by the time you get to the second installment, the plots are radically different.
Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke. If space travel ever becomes safe and affordable, space elevators may be the way it's done. This is the book where the idea originated.
Lonely Planet: Scandinavian Europe, Glenda Bendure, Graeme Cornwallis (ed). Needed for backpacking last year. I'll show you my photos sometime.

Name five books that mean a lot to you
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell. Did I ever tell you that I am paranoid? It's all George Orwell's fault.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes. Probably the most exciting book I've ever read.
The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman. I used to tell people that I was an anarchist, but didn't really mean it. Now, I tell people I'm an anarchist and this time I'm deadly serious.
University Physics, Francis W. Sears, Mark W. Zemansky, Hugh D. Young. I read this when I was fourteen and thought "this relativity malarky isn't as difficult as everyone pretends". At that moment, I decided I wanted to be a physicist when I grew up. And so I became one.
The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins. The finest popular account of the theory of natural selection available.

Honourable mention to:
A History of Torture, George Riley Scott. Not because it means much to me, but because whenever anyone visits my house for the first time and peruses the books in my living room, they will spot this book, take it off the shelf, flick through it and exclaim "Good God! What does that say about the sort of person you are?" Everyone does this, without fail, as if they've been programmed. I'm not sure what it says about me, but it certainly says something about human nature.

Five people to tag
You do realise that over 6 billion people will be required to play the thirteenth iteration of this carry on? I predict that it won't last.
Scott Scheule, Stuart Dickson, Bishop Hill, David Farrer, William Connolley. If none of them read this, then too bad.

Here's a joke about books:
If all the books by the Bronte sisters were published in a single volume, it would be called a Bronte-saurus. (Written by a colleague of mine.)

Hide your driving habits

What do you do when the Government proposes a policy package that includes an idea which you favour (replacing fuel duty and Vehicle Excise Duty with a system of road pricing) and one that scares the willies out of you (another technological step on the road to a surveillance state)?

I know what it is like to be under surveillance, or rather, to discover that you were under surveillance after the fact -- not by the state, but by criminals. One morning, when I was a teenager, we discovered that our family car was missing from our driveway. The police recovered it the same day after it had been used as a getaway car in the armed robbery of a post office on the other side of the city. (One benefit of being the victim of such a crime is that it adds a certain cachet to a dreary vehicle like a Montego. When I started driving it, any ridicule at this magnificent specimen of British engineering would be met with the response "Mock ye not. It was once a getaway car in an armed robbery.") One of the policemen involved in the investigation said to us "I don't mean to alarm you, but I think it likely that you were being watched."

Think about what those criminals would have known about us. They would have known that, at our house, there lived some teenage boys who might come home very late at night at the weekends, but rarely during the week. They would have known that on alternate weeks, my father would be driven to work by a colleague and would leave the car at home. They would have known that the car was parked out of sight of anyone leaving the front door, and that if my father didn't look over his shoulder as he left the gate, he wouldn't notice that the car was missing. They would have known that the car wouldn't be used until later that morning, when, say, my mother would drive to the supermarket. She didn't discover that the car was missing until nearly 10am, by which time the armed robbery had already occurred. If, for the sake of argument, she had been a nurse working night shifts, her arrival home at 6am would have meant that the police would be hunting the robbers four hours earlier. With hindsight, it appears that we were the ideal targets for such a crime.

So, my knee-jerk response to the Government's plan is to think that it is a charter for armed robbers. I have no idea how many of us are suitable targets for such a theft. Perhaps, with enough knowledge about our habits, we are all suitable targets, but presumably some of us are better targets than others. By collecting detailed data on car usage, the state will be doing some of the robbers' work for them. Some of the information that would be useful to such a robber will be contained in that database. All that is then required is a suitable bribe to a corrupt bureaucrat with access to the database and, with a little data-mining, you could easily find out who is in the habit of not using his car until late in the morning. Steal that car, and the police are unlikely to hear about it until you no longer need it.

Of course, we can expect to hear some waffle about safeguards to prevent abuse of the data. Perhaps the detailed data will be promptly destroyed, and only aggregate data will be kept for the purposes of billing, or maybe the punishment for illegally selling the data will be boiling in oil. Even so, the idea is decidedly creepy.

It's not as if there aren't alternative technologies that would serve the same purpose, but without the violation of privacy. We could simply hand over cash at a toll booth. Or, if slowing down for a toll booth is too inconvenient, we could use pre-paid cards that use anonymous digital cash and respond to a radio signal from an automatic toll booth, without any need to slow down.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." I'd quite like to hide my driving habits, if that's all right with you.