A Place to Stand

Counting on my figures I have noticed that if Moore's Law (yesterday's item) continues for 50 years as i suggested than after 50 years it will have increased over 10 billion times.

I must admit I have some difficulty envisioning that. On the other hand so did the founder if IBM also just over 50 years ago.

"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers.”
Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM (around 1948)

Other quotes from people who would have known better if anybody had here We always underestimate technology.

A ten billion fold increase in computer capacity could really make it possible to look after the bodies of everybody in the world fulltime while providing each of them with an interactive simulated world as detailed as the one we currently inhabit. Scary.

May I respond to David Smith's article (23rd April) on the astonishing 5% rate of world average growth (& our own mediocre one of 2.2%). He says "the biggest puzzle about this question is why it is happening at all". I suggest that this is probably the result of what is known as Moore's Law. Technically it isn't a law at all, since it has no theoretical underpinnings, but is "only" an observed fact that, since at least the end of WW2 - for a fixed real cost, computer capacity has doubled every 18 months. Computer designers think that, with understood future possibilities, this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

It is generally accepted that technological progress is the ultimate driver of growth. As computerisation plays a far greater part in our lives & economy than it did 50 years ago we should expect it to exercise an increasing effect on growth. If so the future is indeed rosy. This would suggest that the astonishing thing, bearing in mind that we have a computer growth rate of 50% per annum, may not be that the world growth, at 5% is so high, but that it is so low.

The original article by David Smith If the world never had it so good why isn't Britain Doing Better is on a subject I have discussed before - how poor by world standards our growth is. I am very pleased to see my letter published. I guess I am not the first to draw this conclusion (Google has 31,700 items to the words Moore's Law & economic growth but it was original to me & this may well be the first UK newspaper publication. As a theory it is important because it is in complete opposition to the polically accepted Limits to Growth scenario. I will be on my opinion over 5 or 50 years & with good odds on longer. (5% growth over 50 years would be 1,100%)

I am also pleased in that this is my first in the Sunday Times. Having run the gamut from the Morning Star to this is rather fun. It seems as if I am collecting letters the way some people collect train numbers. Unfortunately, though I was rung up (a common precaution to ensure the letter is really written by the name given) I thought it hadn't been used. It turns out that it had only been printed in the English edition - the Scots one, which used many English letters, had ommitted it. I trust they will be more careful in future if only because it is good business to have local letters.

This came in yesterday from the scottish Lib Dems

Dear Mr Craig
I am writing to you to inform you that in a postal ballot of all members of the Executive of the Scottish liberal Democrats, the Executive voted by the required 2/3rds majority to expel you from membership of the party.

I understand from a recent email that you will not be contesting this decision. However I do have to inform you that under the terms of the constitution you may appeal to the Appeals Tribunal by writing to the President: Malcolm Bruce MP, House of Commons, Westminster, London SWiA 0AA

The email in question said that because the March conference had not merely voted not to replace or current nuclear reactors but insisted on their lives not being extended, which means Hunterston is to close in 2012 despite there being no possibility of there being sufficient capacity to replace it by the which will lead to blackouts & deaths, which I could not support or ignore I would not appeal my expulsion.

An article on that is 1st article here

Oh well. Of course the decision was really taken at least 5 months ago. At no time have the party disputed that I stand for the liberalism of the people who invented the word, that what I said about the word Liberalism having been jacked up & an entirely different vehicle slipped underneath committed to Ludditism & state power both over us & internationally.

Party Liberalism in Scotland may now be buried but as a principle it is alive, well & the fastest growing & freest countries in the world are adopting it.

"See what free men can do"
Burt Rutan, builder of Spaceship One & a natural liberal.

Obviously not committed by Yugoslav authorites but by Slovenian Nazis. Obviously not reported by our media so I am reprinting:

Will the Whistleblower Who Revealed
the First War Crime in Yugoslavia Go to Jail Soon ?
GEORGES BERGHEZAN
June 25, 1991: Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally proclaim their independence, the Yugoslav army is deployed at the country's international borders. Three days later, in the village of Holmec, at the Slovene-Austrian border, three young conscripts, attacked by Slovene police who had encircled their tank, waved a white flag and surrendered. They were killed in cold blood by the police in the presence of a cameraman from the Austrian TV network ORF. It was the first documented war crime in a conflict that would continue spilling blood in the former Yugoslavia for the next eight years.

These facts were kept secret for the next seven years until the ORF footage showing the surrender and the execution of the three soldiers -- two Serbs and one Croat -- was finally broadcast on Slovenian television. Pressured by the Slovene branch of the NGO Helsinki Monitor and its president, Neva Miklavcic Predan, an official inquiry was conducted, but it concluded in 1999 that no war crimes at all had been committed (the soldiers would have simulated their execution and they would have been killed shortly afterward in combat).

Things probably could have stayed there -- and the affair could have continued to be completely ignored by the international media -- if Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, during his cross-examination of the Slovene President, Milan Kucan, who had been summoned by The Hague Tribunal in May 2003 to testify against Milosevic, had not posed several troubling questions to his adversary and brought several supplementary pieces of information to the case, which included the death certificates of the aforementioned soldiers. Visibly caught off guard, Kucan gave assurances that the case had not been closed, all the while denying that the conscripts had been executed. A few days later, Neva Miklavcic Predan held a press conference in Ljubljana in which she cast a shadow of doubt on Kucan testimony. The statements made at this press conference sparked a defamation lawsuit filed by twenty-six Slovene war veterans whose "feelings were profoundly hurt" by her allegation of war crime.

At the same time, a Slovenian court closed the case once again at the beginning of April 2006, reiterating that no war crime had taken place in Holmec, basing its decision on the 1999 inquiry. On the other hand, in Belgrade, a special tribunal for war crimes finally decided to open an inquest on the matter. At The Hague, despite the evidence provided by Miklavcic Predan, and then by Milosevic, there still does not seem to be any interest in what appears to be the first war crime committed in the Yugoslav wars.
For Neva Miklavcic Predan, however, the case has not been closed. The complaint filed by the war veterans has gone its course and resulted in the trial now taking place. She risks being sentenced to two years imprisonment and the next hearing has been set for May 30. During the first two hearings, the accusations relied on a gross falsification of the ORF video that tries to make one believe that the Slovene police did not fire upon the Yugoslav conscripts.

Furthermore, she is accused of having tried to bribe a government official in order to obtain citizenship for a Roma. This second trial has now been suspended. She could be sentenced to three years more in prison as a result of the proceedings. Finally, a judge in Ljubljana, feeling offended by a remark that Miklavcic Predan made, has also filed a complaint. She is subject to three months' imprisonment if she is sentenced.

Neva Miklavcic Predan considers herself to be the victim of political trials intended to punish her for having cast a shadow over the mini-war of independence waged by Slovenia, which has often been characterized as a model among the new members of the European Union. Even if the affair starts making headlines throughout the former Yugoslavia, it still remains unknown beyond. However, the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) have initiated a campaign of support and have requested writing to the Slovene authorities in order to stop the harassment of the president of Helsinki Monitor. We have taken up their appeal, which we reproduce below.

Action requested:
Please write to the Slovenian authorities and ask them to:

i. Put an end to any kind of harassment against Mrs. Neva Miklavcic-Predan, and ensure that her right to a fair and impartial trial be guaranteed in any circumstances;

ii. Conform with the provisions of the Declaration on Humans Rights Defenders, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1998, in particular article 1, which states that "everyone has the right, individually or in association with others, to promote the protection and realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms at the national and international levels", and article 12.2, which states that "the State shall take all necessary measures to ensure the protection by the competent authorities of everyone, individually and in association with others, against any violence, threats, retaliation, de facto or de jure adverse discrimination, pressure or any other arbitrary action as a consequence of his or her legitimate exercise of the rights referred to in the present Declaration";

iii. More generally, conform with the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and with all other international human rights instruments binding Slovenia.

Addresses:
· President of the Republic of Slovenia, Dr. Janez Drnovsek, Erjavceva 17, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 478-10-00, Fax: 00 386 1 478-12-00, Email: janez.drnovsek@up-rs.si; gp.uprs@up-rs.si
· Premier of the Republic of Slovenia, Janez Jansa, Gregorciceva 20, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 478-10-00, Fax: 00 386 1 478-17-21, Email: janez.jansa@gov.si; gp.upv@upr-rs.si
· Minister of Justice of the Republic of Slovenia, Dr. Lovro Sturm, Zupanciceva 3, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 369-52-72, Fax: 00 386 1 369-52-76, Email: lovro.sturm@gov.si
· Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Dimitrij Rupel, Presernova 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00386 1 478-23-73, Fax: 00386 1 478-21-70, Email: dimitrij.rupel@gov.si
· Supreme State Prosecutor, Barbara Brezigar, Dunajska 22, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 434-19-35, Fax: 00 386 1, Email: bbrezigar@dt-rs.si
· District Court of Ljubljana, president, Tavcarjeva 9, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 366-44-44, Fax: 00 386 1 366-45-18, Email: marjan.pogacnik@sodisce.si
· Local Court of Ljubljana, President Vesna Pavlic Pivk, Miklosiceva 12, 1000 Ljubljana. Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 47 47.701, Fax: 00 386 1 47-47-705, Email: urad.@sodisce.si
· Higher Court in Ljubljana, President Jernej Potocar, Tavcarjeva 9, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 366-40-00, Fax: 00 386 1 366-40-70, Email: jernej.potocar@sodisce.si
· Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia, President Franc Testen, Tavcarjeva 9, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel.: 00 386 1 336-42-02, Fax: 00 386 1 336-43-01, Email: urad.vhrs@sodisce.si
· Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia, President Janez Cebulj, Betthovnova 10, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel: 00 386 1 477-64-00, Fax: 00 386 1 251-04-51, Email: info@us-rs.si
· Ambassador Mr. Aljaz Gosnar, Permanent Mission of Slovenia to the United Nations in Geneva, rue de Lausanne 147, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland, Tel: + 41 22 716 17 80, Fax: + 41 22 738 66 65, Email: mge@mzz-dpk.gov.si
· Permanent Mission of Slovenia in Brussels, 30 avenue Marnix, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium, Tel : +32 25124466, Fax : + 32 25120997

AUTHOR'S ADDRESS : g.berghezan@tele2.be

An interesting article I saw via Jerry Pournelle's site on the power of the mob in nature.

When songbirds perceive some sign of danger, a roosting owl, a hawk, a neighborhood cat, a group of them will often do something bizarre: fly toward the threat. When they reach the enemy, they will swoop down on it again and again, jeering and making a racket, which draws still more birds to the assault. The birds seldom actually touch their target (though reports from the field have it that some species can defecate or vomit on the predator with "amazing accuracy"). The barrage simply continues until the intruder sulks away. Scientists call this behavior "mobbing.... "

For us human beings

In the early 1980s, Heinz Leymann, a German psychologist working in Sweden, was conducting clinical studies of workers who had encountered violence on the job.......he stumbled upon an even less obvious group that showed the most surprisingly acute measures of stress. These were people whose colleagues had ganged up on them at work.

Inspired by Lorenz's writings on animal mobbing, Leymann coined the term "workplace mobbing" to name the phenomenon. He defined it as "an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker."

And where is such lynch law prevalent?

In the thousands of mobbing case studies that Leymann carried out, universities were among the most highly represented workplaces. Mr. Westhues, a sociologist at the University of Waterloo, is not surprised.

Max Weber, a founding father of modern sociology, saw bureaucracy as the living embodiment of cool, procedural rationality. In Mr. Westhues's view, mobbing is a pathological undercurrent of irrationality in bureaucracies — a crabby ghost in the machine.

According to Mr. Westhues, mobbing occurs most in institutions where workers have high job security, where there are few objective measures of performance, and where there is frequent tension between loyalty to the institution and loyalty to some higher purpose. In other words, the ghost is alive and well in many academic departments.

Tenure is supposed to protect scholars from outside control, but it does a lousy job of protecting them from one another, Mr. Westhues says.

This seems to me to have a wider application throughout group behaviour. The tendency of groups to coalesce against others is obvious. We humans have a great ability to make sacrifices for our own group (soldiers in battle who die rather than run) & an equally greabilitylty to inflict horrors on those outside the group (Auschwitz) which in both cases goes beyond individual self interest.

This is a perfectly natural phenomenon. Indeed in the example of the songbirds it has evolved because the individual birds would be lost if they let the owl go unmolested. Where it gets really bad is when it produces extreme results.

"What happens in a mobbing is that everybody gets lined up on one side," he says, "with one or a few targets on the other side who are demonized as being beyond the pale

Or even further.

The Law of Group Polarization, formulated by Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that a bunch of people who agree with each other on some point will, given the chance to get together and talk, come away agreeing more strenuously on a more extreme point. If this tendency has a curdling effect on intellectual debates, it can have a downright menacing effect when the point of agreement is that a particular colleague is a repugnant nutjob

There are however, examples rather closer to home. As in the case of Auschwitz I suspect Hitler could only get away with the Holocaust (or perhaps even only convinced himself of its propriety) because the German people went along with mobbing behaviour towards Jews over many years. Humans, & Germans, being language using creatures were able to convince themselves that all the "racial inferiority" claims must have something to them - this is a positive feedback situation & positive feedback is almost always explosive, literally. In Yugoslavia, because the NATO countries ganged up on that country they were, by mutually reinforcement, able to convince themselves that there must be something to our atrocity propaganda & therefore our genocide was justified. Stalin came to power because a paranoid party (justifiably so since the western powers really weplottinging against them) came to agree on ever more extreme paranoias. In global warming, the AIDS myth, nuclear hysteria & an enormous range of semi-scientific subjects we see authority & consensus trumping reference to facts.

(On a lesser scale the unanimous decision of the Lib Dems that I should be expelled without evidence is another example though, if I am correct in my assessment that the controllers of the party aren't liberals but luddites who have captured the party their decision was sensible. Dishonest but sensible.)

The point here is that mobbing behaviour, when it goes beyond the gentle pressure to conform that every society needs, is a sign of a seriously sick organisation. Our Yugoslav genocide & the Kyotos process were not only not in the interests of our victims they are not in our interests either. It produces decisions which are literally insane.

The only solution to this seems to be vigilance & a willingness to loudly tell the mob they are wrong (which I admit is a dangerous procedure but possibly not as dangerous as living in a society where hysteria rules).

"One of the most painful experiences in my life," Mr. Westhues says, "has been to go to dismissal hearings where everybody is sitting around a table as if they were embodiments of pure reason." What's really going on in many of those settings, he thinks, is just brutish behavior ratified by procedure.

"What we've got to do is cultivate an academic culture that is aware of the tendencies in us, of the herd instincts inside of us," he says. "We have a tendency, especially us pompous academics, to think we're above all that."

Translate "dismissal hearing" into "Milosevic trial" or "the public debate on GM" & "academic culture" to "political culture" & the fit is perfect.

The long term lesson for Messrs Clinton, Kohl & Blair is not good.

best hope for his work on mobbing is that it might have an impact on administrators. (The provost of Southern Illinois sat in the back row, scribbling notes.)

Professors seeking to eliminate one of their colleagues cannot get very far without the backing of the administration, he said. And in cases where many professors are pitted against one, administrators' first instinct will often be to side with the majority.

But because mobbers tend to be so impassioned and sloppy in their reasoning, Mr. Westhues argued, administrators who side with them may suffer for it later. Mr. Westhues's research provides numerous examples of mobbing victims who have walked away with fat court settlements, and of administrators who have walked away without their jobs.

I have made it clear here that what we are dealing with os not some cartoon evil but part of being human. Having used this earlier to defend Hitler I am not going to to be more harsh on our current leaders. However this is a matter of negative feedback, or to put it another way that to deter destructive action such actions must have consequences. This is why, despite being a liberal, I support the death penalty - not because murderers are so infinitely worse than the rest of us but because they are so like the rest of us & we need the example. Thus, if we do not brithosesoe guilty of genocide to trial (Clinton, Blair & Kohl), we are likely to commit, or attempt to commit, genocide again.

Full article http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i32/32a01001.htm

A thousand years from now what is seen as the most important undertaking of our time will probably be something which has had almost no coverage in the world's media.

Space Adventures has moved to Singapore.

Space Adventures & Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic are the 2 biggest free enterprise space rocket builders. The fact that there are 2 real contenders makes the venture much more secure than if there were only one. An even greater worry has been that the US government might introduce environmental & suchlike regulations which would make the business effectively impossible. The fact that NASA is, understandably, unsympathetic to an organisation which is doing things they could, or would, not on less than 1% of their budget did not make things easier. Singapore's enthusiasm for new technology is legendary (that is how they got from being a 3rd world country to a world leader in the time it took NASA to go from being able to land on the Moon to not having a working shuttle) so we can be sure they will support it. The CEO of Space Adventures has said that there is "no shortage" of people willing to shell out £20 million for a suborbital flight. Any company with a product for which there is effectively unlimited demand can be expected to grow fast.

Between 1957 & 1969 humanity went from never having sent anything beyond Earth's atmosphere to putting men on the Moon. It is true that in the subsequent 37 years we have partly reversed the process but if space development is now commercially feasible development could be astonishingly swift. We are on the verge of a human development that will make Columbus look small.

The development of the upcoming free enterprise spacecraft was kick-started by a $10 million prize put up for the first such successful flight. the idea was taken from the prize Lindbergh won for crossing the Atlantic which kick-started commercial transatlantic air flight. I have no doubt some forward thinking government somewhere will put up similar prizes in future. After all while the route is clear only the very first steps have been taken. Perhaps one of the forward thinking governments will be ours. Any bets?
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig

PS this is partly inspired by a piece by Dr Madsen Pirie on the Adam Smith Institute website today http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ (you will have to go to the archive for 17th April)

PPS 4 years ago I proposed to the Liberal Democrats, of which I was then a member, that we debate putting forward a very small long term x-prize but they were not interested in talking about it. - see http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_a-place-to-stand_archive.html Dec 20th entry.
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I am sorry this didn't get used. I had just recently had letters in the Scotsman & Herald so I can't blame them & may well cannibalise it for future use. The fact that the relatively respectable ASI are writing about this is a very good straw in the wind. Space travel may be the most important human activity since Man left Africa.

Space Adventures site

Original article the ASI piece was based on