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Sunday, December 15, 2019

Films for Planes Review: Ad Astra

Ad Adstra ☀️☀️

I like space movies, generally speaking, so when I was having my dinner on a recent Emirates flight I decided to watch Ad Adstra, starring Brad Pitt. It was very boring, but I watched to the end because I thought that something interesting might happy and because I like Tommy Lee Jones. In the end, as one of my female colleagues put it, it was just “Pitt porn” and I probably wasn’t the target market. But even Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t save it.

I’ve no idea what Donald Sutherland was doing in this tripe.

The story, about Brad being sent to find his father who has gone a bit Kutrz round the back of Nepture, was almost completely uninteresting. The space story vingettes were unbelievable and irrelevant. The only midly interesting part, where there was a fight between moon buggies (because the Great Power were, apparently, unable to eradicate space pirates living on the dark side of the moon) was ridiculous.

I genuinely don’t understand how millions and millions of dollars can be spent on something like this without someone in the room saying “hold on a minute, this is trash, let’s send the money to starving people in Africa instead” or something similar.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

  1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting.
  2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain.
  3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen.
  4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored.
  5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it.

So any movie I watch on a place usually gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.


Monday, July 09, 2018

Dumb and dumber (Science, bitch)

Oh dear. Just as I suspected, we are getting stupider. I thought the anecdotal evidence for this thesis (ie, the news) was pretty strong, but now science has stepped with the hard evidence to back it up. And it’s even worse that I thought, in the sense that Darwin was right and natural selection is a thing and it works. Unfortunately it selects for traits that lead to reproductive success, which means that the whole idea behind the movie Idiocracy (that the stupid will outbreed the smart) turns out to be true.

this analysis suggests genetic contributions to intelligence and educational achievement are currently disfavoured by natural selection

[From Data from half a million people show that natural selection has not stopped - Evolution in the modern world]

Yes, you read that correctly. Natural selection favours the Jeremy Kyle show over the Andrew Marr show. There is absolutely no hope, and the result of natural selection operating in this reckless manner is measurable. And has been measured. Broadly speaking, our IQs climbed steadily from our time in the caves through the anthropocene age until roughly when Shirley Williams was the Secretary of State for Education and then went off the cliff.

Since around 1975, average IQ scores seem to have been falling… “The drop is around 7 to 10 IQ points per century,” says Michael Woodley of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.

[From We seem to be getting stupider and population ageing may be why | New Scientist]

Basically, the robots are getting smarter and we are getting stupider, so the crossover point at which the robots are smarter than us is actually closer than we thought and, frankly, unless the robots take over fairly soon we are totally buggered. I mean, I feel humanity has given it our best shot, but we’re just not up to it. Do you think robots will watch Mrs. Brown’s Boys? No - of course not - they’ll be getting shit done.

Sunday, March 04, 2018

Waging war with disinformation

In the superb BBC Radio 4 documentary on Marshall McLuhan, by Douglas Copeland, one of McLuhan’s comments (from half a century ago) that really struck home with me was that in the electronic, networked, instant media age there will be “ways of being evil that we don’t understand yet”. How astonishingly prescient of the man who invented media studies. I think we are beginning to understand what at least one of those ways might be: destroying the trust that keeps a society together. We can see this happening all around us as the internet and social media are creating entirely new opportunities for “influence operations" (IO) and the mass manipulation of opinion.

It seems that (yet again) McLuhan was spot on. The era of mass manipulation is indeed upon us and it is aided and abetted by social media. The well-known example of Jenna Abrams (@jenn_abrams) illustrates the general case perfectly well. Jenna was an “alt-right” blogger with 80,000 followers on Twitter, and her tweets were cited by Buzzfeed, the NY Times and other news agencies. It subsequently turned out that “she” was a creation of Russia's Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.

This emergence of this kind of directed, industrial-scale trolling isn’t just about using mass media for propaganda purposes. That’s hardly new. But the scale and intimacy of social media make the misuse of them, as McLuhan predicted, a new and different kind of evil. The impact of this evil is not to convince the general public that some particular thing is true, but to undermine the general public’s trust of anything at all. Or, as noted in the Boston Review, the most toxic consequence of this kind of social media manipulation “[is] existential distrust".

It’s really hard to know what to do about this. In the past, new technologies (eg, rather obviously, printing) have come along and it has taken generations for society to evolve “political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval” of the information revolutions set in motion by those technologies (remember the instructions manuals telling people to say “hello” when they pick up the telephone). However, the accelerating rate of technology-induced change is creating a shock wave, just as an airplane flying ahead of the speed of sound creates a shock wave (that we hear as the sonic boom).
Now that we’ve detected the shock wave, we have to respond. We have to change either democracy or social media.
Whatever  you think about Hillary, she is right that the issue needs to be addressed. I think she is thinking about fixing social media, but given that, for the time being at least, democracy is under our control and social media is not, we instead need to think hard about reinventing democracy in the McLuhan age. But how? At the conceptual level, it seems obvious that someone who thinks the moon landings never happened should not be allowed to participate in any decisions that impact the rest of us. But what about someone who thinks the government spends more on foreign aid than it does on the NHS?  What about the one in five British voters who think that Sherlock Holmes was a real person? These people exist in social media echo chambers that are impermeable to reason and therefore never participate in the discourse that the rest of us depend on to learn about the world and set our opinions in response.

If we don’t take action, then a generation from now the rule of President Kardashian will make us rue the day the universal franchise was conceived.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Films for Planes Review: Patti Cakes

Patti Cakes ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

I couldn’t sleep so I flicked through the “new on board” category. I wasn’t bored enough to watch “Murder on the Orient Express” and I thought I recognised the name of this film from a good review I’d seen or heard so I thought I’d give it a try. But when I selected it, it didn’t look promising as it seemed to be something about rappers. But I figured I’d give it a try for a few minutes…

Wow. A movie that shouldn’t have liked but I enjoyed it immensely. I was caught up in it from the very first scene and genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen.

There’s a slight corniness to the story but all of the characters are interesting the story moves along at a clip. Even though I wouldn’t call myself a rap fan, there’s an intensity to the music in the film that is universal. 

The woman who plays the lead character is absolutely excellent.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

  1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting.

  2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain.

  3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen.

  4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored.

  5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it.

So any movie I watch on a place gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Films for Planes Review: Wizard of Lies

The Wizard of Lies ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

Now this is a great example of a film that is just right for a plane journey. It has an interesting story with interesting characters and you want to keep watching to see what happens next even though you sort of know what is going to happen next. It’s the story of uber-fraudster Bernie Madoff and how he made millions and millions of dollars by pretending to invest money for clients but really paying their imaginary investment gains from new investors. This is what is known as a “Ponzi scheme”, like social security, where the early investors do OK and can withdraw gains because there are enough later investors coming into to cover it but eventually it collapses because you run out of new investors (or younger taxpaying workers).

It’s too long, which meant it was a little boring in places, and I would have preferred a little more detail about how exactly the fraud was perpetrated (I still don’t understand how more people were not suspicious) but it was interesting and enjoyable. The acting of the central character and his wife, played by Robert de Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, is superb by the way - they are both wholly convincing.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

  1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting.

  2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain.

  3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen.

  4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored.

  5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it.

So any movie I watch on a place gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Films for planes review of "Eye in the Sky"

Eye in the Sky ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

I think more war films will be like this in the future: people in bunkers controlling drones, at least until the AI takes over. Basically the story is about a drone strike on terrorists in Kenya, and whether and when to pull the trigger. This is an ideal movie for a plane. 100 minutes long, just right for drinks, dinner and relaxing. Genuinely interesting story line and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Good actors, script with tension and thought-provoking without being too preachy.

It’s also Alan Rickman’s last film and he’s very good in it.

I didn’t buy the mini-drone but hey, it’s a film right.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

  1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting

  2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain

  3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen

  4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored

  5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it

So any movie I watch on a place gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Our Wall

Mr. Trump’s plan to build a thousand mile wall along the border between the United States and Mexico is attracting a lot of attention. A good friend of mine, noted for her knowledge of strategy and history, told me not to get too worked up about this harmless public works project. After all, this kind of things is often undertaken by national leaders to secure a place in the national imagination. Although it may never become a tourist attraction to rival the Great Wall of China, and indeed may become a new Maginot Line for future generations to investigate, it may well become a Keynesian landmark integral to the tourist industry of the southwestern states. 

I am pretty sure, however, that what it will not become is a barrier to the smuggling of people, drugs or money.

How do I know this?

Well, we Brits have been there and done that. We built a wall. We built a wall that was twice as long as Mr. Trump’s wall. And there is absolutely nothing left of it today.

In the days when Her Majesty Queen Victoria was Empress of India, the British administration in the subcontinent had, amongst other depredations, increased the hated salt tax (which later spurred the noted rebel Mahatma Gandhi to begin his campaign against the many benefits of British rule with the Dandi March). 

Our salt tax was not the first  (under the Mughal Empire, for example, there was a salt tax of 5% for Hindus and 2.5% for Muslims) but it was particularly despised because hundreds of millions of people in India’s interior were dependent on salt from the coast to survive and it had become something of a cash cow under British rule. Increases in the salt tax meant that the price of salt more than tripled and the natural result was that it was smuggled from the Bay of Bengal to the interior. Other things were smuggled too — opium, people and so on — but it was the smuggled salt that upset us Brits the most.

Now, rather as the United States is run by Trump Inc., India was at that dawn of Victoria’s reign ruled by the Honourable East India Company (until 1858, when it was taken under the wing of the Crown following the rebellion of 1857). So it was that the Company decided to do something about the salt smuggling.

The Company decided to build a wall down the middle of India.

A big, beautiful wall. And the Indians would pay for it.

This wall, or the “Inland Customs Line” as it was called, turned out to be quite hard to build. In large parts of India, there wasn’t the rock needed to build it or bricks to build it from. But a civil servant thought laterally and came up with an amazing solution. Allan Octavian Hume, a political reformer, ornithologist, botanist (and one of the founders of the Indian National Congress), a man who remains unknown to the masses but who should be as celebrated and revered as a British innovator in the mould of a Barnes-Wallis or a Dyson, was appointed Commissioner of Customs for the North West Province (1867-1870). 

The Line became Hume’s problem. An observer of local flora and fauna, Hume had noticed that along various sections of the Line, thorny hedges had taken root. In 1869 he began to experiment with different shrubs and as a result of his work, the British were able to grow a thorny barrier that stood in for rock, bricks and other traditional materials. A green alternative had been found! As the map below shows, it became the greater part of the Line.

Yep. You read this right. The British built a hedge to stop the smuggling of salt, opium, cannabis, sugar, people and who knows what else. This astonishing feat of gardening is described in detail in one of my all-time favourite books, Roy Moxham’s The Great Hedge of India,  and that is how I shall describe it hereafter.

The Great Hedge is described in the official proceedings of the British Parliament (Hansard) on 13th August 1878:

In order to prevent the ingress into our territories of salt taxed at lower rates, a line had been maintained of many hundreds of miles in length—at one time 2,400— consisting principally of a hedge of thorny trees and bushes, supplemented by stone walls and ditches, which could not be passed by anyone without examination.

From EAST INDIA REVENUE ACCOUNTS—THE FINANCIAL STATEMENT. (Hansard, 13 August 1878)

Wowza. The Great Hedge of India. It really happened. There were customs posts every mile, and in order to pass through you had to pay the tax. Many of the customs posts had a police cell where smugglers could be detained on the spot. These were called “chowkis”, the Indian word for a police station (from the Hindi cauki). This is why English people of my parent’s generation (my grandfather served in the British Army in India in the 1930s and my mother lived there as a small girl) still refer to prison as “chokey”, the anglicisation of the word.

It was not only smugglers who found the Line inconvenient. From the beginning, the British Viceroys of India didn’t like it either because it was an impediment to trade. They did not feel that the tax collected to the benefit of the East India Company would compensate for the reduction in trade. You can read about it in “The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule: From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837”, where Romesh Chunder Dutt writes:

The East India Company would not willingly sacrifice even a revenue of £220,000, or any portion of it, for the prosperity of the internal trade of India. Professing the utmost anxiety for the material welfare of the people of India, they were unwilling to sacrifice a shilling to promote that welfare.

Walls everywhere are a barrier to trade, and trade is essential to prosperity. Hence the objections of the commercially-minded. The Line had all sorts of negative impacts on the trade in things other than salt. Sugar, for example.

Sugar was one of the most important products of our own people in Northern India; but the effect of the Customs line was to place artificial obstructions upon its export. "So far as competition exists," said Sir John Strachey, "the duty acts as a protective duty in favour of foreign and against our own sugar."

From EAST INDIA REVENUE ACCOUNTS—THE FINANCIAL STATEMENT. (Hansard, 13 August 1878)

Yet the Line was built and by 1872 had a staff of 14,000! Even with this manpower it did not stop the smuggling. In some places the smugglers just drove laden camels through the hedge, in other places they threw the salt over the top of it. I suspect that rather than use laden camels to circumvent Mr. Trump’s proposed barrier, smugglers will choose more modern pathways, ranging from drones and boats to ladders and tunnels. (I note incidentally that there are expert tunnellers in Mexico, so unless every Tom, Dick and Harry will be welcome across the border, the wall will need to go down a fair few feet too.)

Smuggling was reduced, but at an unacceptable cost. Apart from the substantial running costs, it also led to clashes between smugglers and custom officers (including an event in 1877 when two customs men attempted to arrest 112 smugglers, with predictable results) as well as stimulating bribery and corruption. Dutt again:

evils had grown under British Rule as compared with the state of things under the Nawabs of Bengal; manufactures were killed and internal trade paralysed by the Customs’ Officers who were paid so low that it was possible for them to live only by extortion; travellers were harassed and the honour of women passing through the lines of customs houses was not safe; and that this huge system of oppression was maintained for the sake of an insignificant revenue.

In the end, there was a victory for common sense and the Line was abandoned. The first quote from Hansard above actually began with Mr. Stanope telling Parliament that “it had been so often described that he was almost ashamed to ask the House to bear in mind what it was desired to abolish”. Work stopped in 1879.

There is nothing left of the Line today. When India became independent in 1947, the remnants of the hedge were torn up. In some areas, the Line provided the only surveyed straight line and so it was used for the route of highways in the new country, which is why no Ozymandian testament stands as a reminder to the executive power of the Honourable Company today.

Hence this practical suggestion. Why doesn’t America create a cheap, green and sustainable wall out of thorny cacti, which flourish in abundance in places like Texas and New Mexico? After all, since the wall won’t make any long term difference, why waste money?

What eventually ended the smuggling wasn’t the wall but tax reform, as is always the case. Hansard again (I have reformatted to make it easier to read):

The steps, therefore, necessary for the abolition of the line were

  • first, to extend railways into the salt-producing districts, and to enter into arrangements with the Native States of those districts, so that all salt might be taxed at the place of production;

  • secondly, to remove the inequalities in the rate of duty in different parts of the country.

Sir John Strachey (the minister whose tax review led to the abolition of the Line) later described it as “a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilised country”. Oh well, what did he know about building walls. Sad.

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