Time by Gregory Benford is a fairly entertaining piece of classic science fiction. The premise is that a set of super intelligent children born in one generation have the ability to understand time in a way no-one else does. This leads to a set of events some of which cause themselves.
The book is headlined by Reid Malenfant who is an american iconclast trying to get past the government red tape to mine the asteroids (shades of atlas strugged here but it’s not the point of the book). At the same time he’s being convinced by a rather strange character that the human race has only 200 years of existence left (based on the doomsday argument). He’s led by a signal from the future to change his destination and finds a time gate which shows an alternate fate for humanity. However since people seem to be able to reach in an amnipulate events before they occur, all bets are off.
It drifts a bit at points and ponders a little too much on some kind of anti-Nasa bias but overall a pretty good read.

Just finished Fisher goes to war about the famous chess match between Fisher and Spasky in the 70s. Chess doesn’t sound like a dramatic enough subject for a book but this is very well written and fraught with drama – mostly generated by the reasonable insane Fisher. It gives a good insight into the man who’s a bit of a mysterious figure these days. Interesting to read but not to dip in and out of.

Tried out the “super electric mode” on the Prius – no petrol engine at all as long as you stay under about 25 mph. Great for traffic though the battery lasted exactly 17 minutes doing this! Maybe it was very run down or something. Cute how you can just ignore this though – the car kindly took itself out of power saving mode, started the engine and I carried in almost unaware.
Still annoyed about the feel of the car but everything else is pretty great – if you already drive a Toyota I can’t see why you wouldn’t buy one of these.

Got a spanky new Prius Spirit this morning on a test drive until Friday. This is the the top of the range Prius at the moment with all the toys – CD-changer (though strangely my test model doesn’t have one), GPS, rear parking camera, bluetooth phone integration and an auxilary port for my iPod (thus I don’t care about the CD changer).
I currently drive a 225hp Audi TT convertible – the original one with the turbo charger. This is quite a change. First impressions are:
- All the toys work and it’s wonderful to have them play together. Phone calls go quite for a moment so I can hear the GPS directions – I get traffic updates and GPS sync is instantaneous
- The car has a little more room than the 2 seater convertible – well about 600 times as much space I suspect
- The switchover from electric to petrol is fairly smooth though the petrol engine seems to kick in all the time. There’s some “use electric more” button but I haven’t played with it yet
It’s not a zippy as the TT but not bad – for in town driving this is all I think I’d need.
The downside is that damn thing drives like a toyota – which means there is a real disconnected feeling from the road – I drift over speed bumps and around corners – it’s really point and go and instead of any real driving experience.
Why am I even thinking of the jump? In a word – money. I won’t pay the congestion charge in London and I plan to drive there a lot – also I save real money each month because insurance becomes cheaper and such.
This is just my feeling for the first 5 miles of driving about home. Have a big 100mile each way trip to Ipswich planned for the morning – will update my thinking then.

I’m a few days late since I was in Madrid but Hannah is now apparently OK – good news. I bought her a plush bull to celebrate her hardheadedness – will add a picture when I see her.

I generally work on a Mac Powerbook and my presentations are in Keynote – I do this because it gets out of my way and lets me create the content without being overburdened by options. Everything also looks gorgeous. When I work in Powerpoint all the fonts looks stark and awful to my eyes.
I had to send this over to someone else so I exported to PP – checked it looked ok and mailed it on. It looked quite good in Mac PP. Then I opened it on my PC notebook – uuurgh. It looks awful. The fonts are horrible.
There’s been a flurry of posts about this recently. In general I agree with the Mac way of doing this though I can see why the Windows people would prefer the crisp Windows fonts.
When it comes to presentations however – where the fonts are 2 feet tall on a wall, the Mac absolutely dominates. I think this is the main reason people go “ooooohhh” when they see a presentation from my Mac even if it’s just a simple title page – everything feels smooth and like a printed page – the Windows PP presentations look stark.
I never knew why it was that I felt this aversion to Windows notebooks after working on a Mac for a few months – this is why. I’ve no doubt the Windows guys have the same aversion.

A friend of mine has just texted me to say he dropped his daughter from his shoulders onto the tarmac at Geneva airport. Sounds like she’s fractured her skull but seems to be OK. Kids are generally pretty reslliant and I really hope that’s the case here. This is just one example of how brave parents have to be to deal with babies – I cannot imagine the horror of this happening.

There’s a post here about a study that some economists did to understand the effect talking on a cell phone had on the accident rate. As in the UK, a number of US states are passing laws banning talking on cell phones while driving. Any number of studies has shown that you pay less attention to the road and are more distracted while talking on the phone. We’ve even all been behind some idiot swerving around and talking. It seems to make sense.
Yet when you dig into the accident rates, there are no more accidents as a result of people driving and talking. Why?
Something that politicians and environmentalists alike seem to ignore – the propensity for people to change their behaviour according to circumstance.
When mandatory seatbelt laws were passed in the states, the number of fatal accidents didn’t fall anywhere near as much as they should have – turns out drivers felt safer wearing their seatbelts and drove faster and took more risks – insurers and others call this “Risk Homeostatis” – you have a certain amount of risk you’re willing to tollerate while driving and if the government forces you to lower it in some places you take it back in others. The safer cars and airbags we have today make us feel we can now survive a 50 mph crash so we speed.
This is the fun thing about economists – unlike what most people think, their job is about human behaviour. These guys didn’t look at reaction times or the ability to identify dangers in the road while driving – they studied what actually happened when people spoke on the phone.
In this case they took advantage of the fact that cell phone companies started to offer lots of free minutes starting at 9 pm. They could clearly see a large spike in the volume of calls at 9 pm. The number of cars on the road didn’t change. So there must have been a spike in the volume of people calling while driving. Yet there was no corresponding spike in the number of accidents.
It’s speculation but one of the obvious assumptions is that people did something to deal with the risk – they drove slower or pulled into the slow lane. They kept their calls short – basically all the stuff we remember doing when we used our phones while driving before it was illegal.
I’m now going to take a huge jump and swing this towards the enviromentalists and in particular the scare-mongerers of global warming.
The debate these days is really about what we should do to abate any ill effects of global warming. There’s a fringe of people who simply want us to stop any pollution because the earth is sacred. The majority I feel want to stop the warming and the effects thereof.
If you leave feelings of love for the earth out of it, this quickly boils down to an argument over costs and benefits. We could simply ignore the problem and when the seas rise, pay to move everyone to higher ground and all live in a warmer climate. This is completely doable but may not be sensible.
We could stop all the actvities which cause the warming and negate the effects – however you give up all the advantages of those activities – you know transport and the ability to eat. Again probably doable but kiss civilisation goodbye.
It boils down to “What will global warming cost us?” and “How much will it cost to avert x% of that damage?” and “Can we live with the remaining damage?”
The problem right now is that the damage estimates are completely insane – they assume that we basically just carry on ignoring everything that might change forever. People just don’t act this way. The dutch didn’t simply throw their hands up and complain about the sea – they moved it. People will alter their behaviour to adapt to real changes and that will mitigate a large volume of the damage. I’m not saying the earth won’t heat up just as much but maybe it will matter far less – people will stop buying seaside properties so there just won’t be that many people to save from the rising sea levels. Or as we sell more and more air-conditioners there will be an incentive to develop ones that run on less power because people will pay for that – or at least businesses will put shutters on the windows to save the power bills.
People are smart and adaptable not beacuse they’re altruistic, but because they’re selfish and greedy. They will do good simply because they doing it for themselves.

This article is an amusing story about a divorce brought on by some electronic toll passes in the USA. It has a serious undertone – I’m sure the designers of the EZPass system were good people and great engineers who never thought that they’d end up splitting up a marriage. Similary the London Underground Oyster pass system which tracks your every journey would never be used by the government to track your moves right?
The traditional argument is that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” but that was the case here – I don’t think people should have affairs, but it’s not illegal and is exactly the kind of thing you’d want kept quiet. If that doesn’t work for you morally, try imagining you call in sick on Monday but drive down to the cinema in the afternoon – you’d not want your boss to have the ability to track that would you?
We’re on the cusp of introducing ID cards in the UK that will make these kind of minor tracking examples pale into insignificance. Every time you use your card – and that could be as simple as showing ID to buy some beer – it will be recorded. There’s no telling how this information could be used.
Technologists understand that promises to “be decent” about this stuff are worthless – you need a law that restricts exactly what you’re allowed to use the information for (and generic sounding restrictions such as “national security” don’t work). I don’t trust the government simply because I don’t know who they’ll be in 10 years time. Even if you think Gordon Brown is a saint, remember he might be succeeded by someone who’s not.

So I’ve been using this thing for a few days now and in general I’m pretty happy. Amusingly this is the best remote for my Sony DVD player I’ve ever had.
However it has one very annoying feature – the fast forward buttons are ‘virtual’ – you can’t fast forward without looking at the remote and carefully positioning your finger. This is pretty annoying when using my Tivo – this is basically the most useful function on a Tivo and it’s difficult to use.
If you’re thinking of buying one of these things I’d suggest you go with an expensive one but one that has real fast forward and play buttons.
Aside from that I’m happy – it’s cleaned up my living room tables and looks pretty sleek.