A visit to Bologna

I have just returned from spending a few days in Bologna, staying at the excellent 4 Viale Masini Design Hotel, near the Railway Station. I have seen some European hotels charge ten euros per hour for Wi-Fi but it is free and fast at the Design Hotel. A good breakfast is also included in the room price.


Bologna has excellent train connections and I was able to take the train out to Parma, Padua, Modena and Ferrara. 

Padua is two hours away but Parma and Ferrara are only an hour journey and Modena is just 20 minutes. 

I had visited Bologna before, but none of the others. I was most impressed by Ferrara. It's a World Heritage site and fully earns the designation. The picture is of the huge and impressive Castello Estense.


The area is  flat and cycling is very popular.  I had never seen an electric bike before but there were lots about.  One surprising thing was that I did not see a single person wearing a cycle helmet, even in really dangerous traffic. In some countries [e.g. New Zealand] they are compulsory. I have started wearing one after someone I know suffered a serious head injury. It made me cringe to see people cycling through heavy traffic totally unprotected.


All the towns, except Bologna, had created extensive pedestrian areas that were a delight to walk through.  It is not until the motor car is removed that you realise how much it spoils the environment.


Bologna has a real traffic problem, and is not doing much to solve it. 

Sometimes, walking down its narrow medieval streets filled with roaring cars is like walking through a motorway tunnel; noisy, stressful and  and stinking.

However, it does have the worlds best gelateria [btw - gelato is not the same as ice cream, certainly not the same as what we know as ice cream in Anglo Saxon countries]. 

Read this post on gelaterias in Bologna. 

Buchenwald

President Obama recently visited the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. I was there a few years ago. It had been heavily sanitised. There were quite a lot of Germans walking around and you could see them thinking, 'this is not so bad, it just looks like a tough prison or an army camp. Why have people been making such a fuss about these places and what we did in the war?'

However, there was one place that gave the game away. The crematorium block was a two storey building. The ovens were on the top floor.

 

You had to ask what kind of place needed such facilities, but it was the level below that revealed that this was not just a tough prison but a place run by murderous bastards.

Take a look at the picture  below. Bodies were stored in this lower room before being taken by lift to the ovens above.

If you look closely you can see that there are hooks all around the room. Prisoners were executed by being hung from these hooks.

A prisoner would be brought to the room and a noose put around their neck. They would then be lifted up and the rope fastened to a hook. They would then be left to slowly choke to death.  They would be able to see the piles of bodies and, perhaps, other prisoners hanging from hooks, also slowly choking to death. The Wikipedia article on Buchenwald contains an estimate that 1,100 people were executed by hanging at the camp.

I wonder if they took Obama into that room.

 

Quiz 1- what series

To increase audience participation I am going to post a series of five quizzes. This is the first one.

The question is - what number series is illustrated by this image?

 

Hint - the series is named after an Italian mathematician. 

Isn't this fun? 

The Palazzo della Ragione, Padua

The main hall of the Palazzo della Ragione, completed in 1219. Thought to have the largest unsupported roof in Europe.

 

The giant wooden horse was built in the 15th century and given to the city in the 19th century. Nobody has been able to decide what to do with it ever since.

 

iPod Touch software update to 3.0 killed my wi-fi

I have just paid to upgrade the software on my first generation iPod Touch to version 3.0 and it has completely killed my wi-fi access. I cannot connect to any wi-fi point.

From postings on discussion boards it seems like I am not the only victim.



Update

Just visited an Apple Store and talked with a 'Genius'.  That was a waste of time.  I think the problem is a bug in the version 3.0 upgrade but Apple are not admitting that.

On my way home I called in a bar that has an unsecured wi-fi point. Others could connect to it but I could not.

Michael Jackson's death

There is far, far too much media fuss about Jackson's death. It is not as if he was anybody important.

The BBC, in particular, has has gone on and on about the story. Of course, talking about Jackson's death removes the need to properly report on the scandal of the BBC's expense claims.  How convenient for them.

Airliner body

Scottish National Museum of Flight

Can you identify the aircraft below?

Venn Diagrams

 

 

Not so secret killing

Do states carry out covert murders? Do they go around knocking off people in undetectable ways.

Apparently they do. This is how the State of Israel planned to murder Khalid Mishal -

"Mishal’s murder had to be discreet and, if possible, invisible.The attack would take a matter of seconds – so quick he wouldn’t know it was happening. 

One agent would shake a can of Coke and pop it open to distract Mishal while another would spray levofentanyl, a chemically modified painkiller, in his ear. 

He would feel as if he’d been bitten by an insect; 48 hours later the drug would kill him, leaving no trace."

The Prime Minister of Israel agreed to this but the murder attempt was botched and subsequent events did not go well for Israel. Bill Clinton got involved, bottoms had to be kissed, they had to provide the antidote to their poison and Khalid survived and became a Hamas hero.

Link

 Of course, you will not have read about this in the British media.

The only other covert assassination attempt that I have heard of was the murder of Georgi Markov by the Bulgarian secret police. The British media found itself able to report that attempt because it was done by communists and the there are not many Bulgarians in the higher ranks of the British media.

When I read " 48 hours later the drug would kill him, leaving no trace" it makes me wonder how many other people have had an umbrella or ear spray moment.

UK electoral reform is not going to happen

It sounds as if Brown and Cameron are not keen on reforming the UK's highly dysfunctional electoral system. Cameron has  said so. Brown is pretending to be interested in reform, but clearly intends to do nothing. Egos are more important than reform.

The Westminster system has some strange effects

"Labour’s electoral majority has always been misleading when it comes to assessing Blair’s actual popularity. He won his stupendous 179-seat majority in 1997 on the basis of 13,517,911 votes – which is a lot, but not as many as the 14,093,007 votes John Major won in 1992, and Major’s Government quickly became the most unpopular in modern British history. Blair’s 2001 majority of 167 seats was won with 10,724,895 votes, which is fewer than Kinnock’s losing total in 1992 (11,560,484). Labour’s huge majority is attributable to low turnouts and to the fact that the British electorate has finally twigged the point about tactical voting..."

Link

We have a much better system in Scotland. It is designed to prevent any party gaining an overall majority. Things can only be accomplished with consensus.

The first past the post system used for Westminster elections is damaging the political process and the country. Once a party has a working majority the Prime Minister becomes an elected dictator and can do what he want, no matter how crackpot or discreditable.

The solution for Scots is clear. We need to get full independence and leave the English to sink further into the mire.

Assassination Tags

RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] tags are usually used for stock control. Marks and Spencer put RFID tags on their clothing and some supermarkets tag their stock.

Now it appears that the Americans have found a way to use them for assassinations.

Active RFID chips contain a battery and can transmit a radio signal. Passive RFID chips can be much smaller because they do not have a battery. They remain inactive until ‘tickled’ by a radio wave. They then send back an identification code. The smallest RFID chips can only be read from a few feet away.

An article in Wired suggests that the Americans have created passive RFID chips capable of being read from up to a mile away.

If this is true, and not just disinformation, they are giving these chips to local agents in Afghanistan, who are paid to plant them next to buildings used by the Taliban

Then a drone comes along, scanning the ground. When it detects the tag it delivers a 500kg bomb. Of course, the tag only identifies a building, it does not show who is in the building.

These assassination tags appear to be perfect weapon. They are low cost, highly targeted and effective. Supposedly, the Taliban are so alarmed about the tags that they have shot over 100 people they have suspected of being taggers.

What could possible go wrong? Let me suggest a few possibilities.

The agent plants the tag next to  the houses of people he doesn’t like, or a competitor in the drug business.

The Taliban get their hands on a tag and put it on the roof of a girls school.

Killing people from a place of safety may cut the casualty figures but it does not win wars. At some point the poor bloody infantry has to go in with a bayonet, even if some of them get killed.  As Kipling said, ‘Blood is the price of admiralty.’ 

 The Song Of The Dead - by Rudyard Kipling

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strewn our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

Val Gardenia, Dolomites

 

Val Gardenia is very popular with tourists and rather overdeveloped. The best high level walks and via ferratas are the other side of Gruppo Sella Gruppe.

Where the minerals are

A visit to Stanley Mills

This post is based on a visit to an old cotton mill in Scotland.

Stanley Mills is located just north of Perth in Scotland. The mills were constructed in 1785 to harness the fast flowing Tay to mill cotton. Richard Arkwright was one of the seven founders.

 

The mills operated until 1989, though they were occasionally closed, including during the Cotton Famine of 1861 to 1865, occasioned by the American Civil War. After closure the buildings rapidly deteriorated.

At the end of 1995 the site was acquired by Scottish National Heritage and restoration began. The site is now open to visitors. Many of the original buildings remain. The East Mill and the Mid Mill have been converted to private housing. The oldest mill, the Bell Mill, has been converted to an exhibition centre.

The photograph below shows the East Mill and part of the Mid Mill.

 

The Tay is Scotland's fastest flowing river and there was never any shortage of power for the mll machinery. Even so, nobody appears to have made much money from Stanley. One factor may have been transport costs. Until the railway came to Stanley in 1948 raw cotton had to be carted form Port Glasgow in a ten day round trip.

  

In the photograph above you can see the mill buildings that remain and the line of the lade that brought water from the Tay to the mill wheels. The channel on the left uses Tay water to power a  recently restored hydro electric station.

The Bell Mill above, with mixed stone and brick construction.  

The photograph below shows the Mid Mill facing out onto the Tay. 

 

The History 

  

The history of the site is very well presented in the Bell Mill with models, prints and interactive dsiplays. The audio visual display below is particularly well done. 

  

In this print you can see the relationship between Stanley village and the mill site. 

  

Stanley and New Lanark 

Stanley and New Lanark are the two best preserved cotton mills in Scotland. David Dale was involved with both [see my earlier post on Dale's Five Mills] and Robert Owen, the social reformer, was one of the managers of both. There are significant differences between the two sites.

-  New Lanark is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Stanley is not.

-  The village of Stanley was founded to house the mill workers but it is separate from the mills. Not much of the housing remains in its original state. In New Lanark the mills and the tenements are very close together and there is more of a sense of a community.

-  New Lanark was the site of highly significant social experiments by Robert Owen. For example, Owen was able to demonstrate, supported by books of account, that workers would produce more cotton goods and profits if they were treated well. This contradicted the current view that ill treatment was a necessary motivator to higher productivity.  

In modern parlance, the dominant paradigm before Owen's experiments was extreme Theory X. Owen showed that Theory Y could work as well.  Owen's experiments at New Lanark were important for all of us; though, human nature being what it is, many still find Theory X more attractive.

The Technology 

  

  

  

Stanley also has some very well done hands on displays of technology. The device in the photograph above allows visitors to see the different ways in which power can be extracted from rushing water. 

Fire was aways a problem at cotton mills. Both Stanley and New Lanark had serious fires, and in both places  a large mill was destroyed and never rebuilt. 

Workers Benefits? 

Providing toilets for the workers meant that they needed to spend less time away from their machines and their breaks could be better supervised. 

 

Scotland can get very cold and having central heating might seem like an employment benefit. In fact, cotton can only be worked at 70 Fahrenheit. 

  

Water from the Tay first flowed though a 244 meter tunnel and then through the lade shown below.  

Stanley Mills are well worth visiting if you are interested in industrial history.  Stanley village can safely be skipped. There is free parking at the mill site and a £5 fee to enter the Bell Mill.

How we liberated the French

Antony Beever's book on D-Day.

"Altogether, 15,000 French people were killed by the bombing of early 1944 with which the Allies softened up Normandy before D-Day. After the landings, 19,890 French civilians were killed during the battle for Normandy. In the département of Calvados alone, 76,000 people lost their homes in the fighting.

More French people died in aerial bombardment by the Allies in the second world war than British people died in aerial bombardment by the Germans."

Link

The Scottish Labour party

The Sunday Herald investigates Jim Devine.

Finding the world's best gelateria with Google Street View

Last year I found this superb ice cream shop in Bologna. The quality and variety of the ice cream was far higher than anything I had previously experienced.


A relative is going to Bologna in July and I suggested they visit this gelateria. The problem was that I could not remember the name of the place, or its precise location. I decided to try and find it with Google Maps.

Step 1 - first did a Google Maps search for gelaterias in Bologna. I knew the one I had visited was in the centre of Bologna, but not precisely where and there are a lot of gelaterias in the centre of Bologna.

Step 2 - the next step was to use Google’s Street View. After a bit of roaming around I found a wall close to the gelateria where we had sat to eat our ice creams.

Comparing the location of the wall in Street View with the map of gelaterias showed that the place I was looking for was

It is very close to the Two Towers.

Unfortunately, the Google camera car had not passed directly by the gelateria so I could not see the precise location in Street View, but it lies within the red square shown on the aerial view.

Added July 2009

 I have just returned form a second visit to Bologna. While there I took the photograph above and had a chance to visit three other superb gelaterias.

Il Gelatauro at Via San Vitale, 98.

Stefino at Via Galliera 49/B

La Sorbeteria at Via Castiglione, 44


Stefino's is close to the city centre. The other two are a little further out. All are extremely good.All three appear to be family owned and all make their own ice cream. In the case of La Sorbeteria you can see into the preparation area and the ice cream making machines.

Some people consider Il Gelatauro supplies the best gelato in the world.  I thought they were all of about the same standard but preferred Il Gelatauro because it is also a cafe and you can sit inside at a table to eat your ice cream in comfort.




See a review of all three gelaterias. It would be nice to have places of similar standard in the UK but , as a general rule, we are not willing to pay for quality.  I do not know of a single place that makes its own ice cream. Everything comes from factories owned by big companies and appears to be made to a price rather than a quality standard.  In the case of ice cream the Italians clearly are willing to pay what is needed to sustain quality producers. In two gelateria I saw locals come in and pay 15-20 euros for a carton filled with a selection of ice creams, obviously for their evening meal.

Walking the John Buchan Way

The John Buchan Way runs 13 mile [22km] across the Scottish Borders, from Broughton to Peebles, via Stobo.

The route is named after the British politician and auther. Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, most of which is set in the area. There is a John Buchan Centre in Broughton.

I walked the Way in two stages; Stobo to Peebles, and then Stobo to Broughton. Each stage took about three hours. The route offers some very pleasant walking over remote countryside.

The route is very conveniently served by bus 91 [Brougton – Peebles – Bigger], operated by MacEwans Coaches. A timetable can be downloaded from the SPT website. The bus route passes through Stobo.

The path is easy enough, though the total ascent is about 800 metres. Most of the walking is on well surfaced hill tracks. The signposting is very good.

There is a brochure which you can download from here.

 

  

  

  

When I look at the photo below what I see is a devastated industrial landscape. The industries that did the devastating are sheep and shooting. Commercial forestry hasn't improved things.  The land would once have been forested and full of life. It can still support trees as can be seen in the photo above. It is just that they would not survive the sheep, deer and heather burnings.

Most of Scotland isn't picturesque. It is a wasteland.

 

Google Reader adds some more useless features

Google has just been boasting about some 'improvements' they have made to Reader.

As usual, I do not see anything that I am likely to use.

What I want is

1.   OPML Reading Lists

2.   Filters - both watch and block filters.

Offline readers like Blogbridge provide these but I want to see them in an online RSS reader.

It would be nice if Google spent less time trying to make Reader more social and did more to make it more useful.

Bloggers can replace journalists, Not

The exposure of MP's expense claims has been a triumph for the Telegraph newspaper. The story is one of the most important that has appeared in recent years. It is also a clear demonstration that bloggers cannot replace journalists.

For a start, bloggers do not have the resources to handle such stories.  I understand that the Telegraph has twenty five journalists working full time on the story. There are two million PDF documents that have to be analysed and then double checked.

In addition, the journalists have been able to publish their stories because of the support of the newspapers legal team and the backing of the Telegraph's financial resources.  What blogger would have the nerve to publish some of the material that has been appearing in the Telegraph? Especially not with the libel laws we have in Britain.

Newsprint may be dying but we are still going to need professional journalists and news organisations. We just need to find some way of paying them.

I will not be sorry to see newsprint disappear. The technology had too many limitations.  Electronically delivered news and comment is much better. For example, electronic news can

- include video, audio and graphics. The NY Times has been particularly good at producing informative graphics.

- be sold worldwide at no extra cost.  For example, British e-news can be sold to our large expatriate community.

- can include links to other content. The BBC is very good at linking to their own past stories and external sources.

- can include unlimited large high quality pictures.  For example, see The Big Picture and The Frame.

- use archived material. No longer is yesterdays news just chip wrapping paper. It can be commercially exploited for years. It is often conveniently forgotten that while electronic news  has reduced some revenue streams, it has also eliminated some costs and created  new sources of reenue.

- eliminates paper, printing and delivery costs.

- provide much better management information. Editors can see what people are actually reading.

There are many other advantages. At the moment newsprint is more portable. As electronic paper improves even this advantage will disappear.


Though we need news organisations, we do not need as many as at present. Many newspapers have little social or political  value. Who would miss the Sun or the Mirror if they  disappeared? Many local newspapers have just been exploiting their local monopoly to overcharge for advertising. Who needs them?

The market will settle the question on newspaper survival.  Many will go under and most of those will not be missed. The ones that best adapt to the new technology, provide quality journalism and develop a viable business model will survive.

Aranjuez and Alcalá de Henares

Aranjuez and Alcalá de Henares are two world heritage sites a short distance from Madrid. If you are in Madrid they can easily be visited  by train.

We visited both of them in the same day by taking trains from Madrid’s Atocha Station.  You can buy tickets from machines with cash or credit card and the trains are frequent, modern and fast. Return tickets to each town were 10-12 euros.

Aranjuez

Aranjuez has a population of about 50,000. The world heritage parts are the Palacio Real de Aranjuez, its vast gardens and a number of buildings in the centre of town. Because it was Monday the palace was closed so we were reduced to following some of the marked tours around the world heritage buildings in the town center. I thought these were undistinguished and, in many cases, rather dilapidated. Most of them were associated with the palace. Some had been built as  servants quarters, stables or the houses of nobles.

 

  

  

  

 

Alcalá de Henares

The historic center of  Alcalá de Henares is about a twenty minute walk from the railway station.  The newer part of the town is just like any moderately prosperous modern town. The historic part of Alcalá de Henares is much better than that of Aranjuez and well worth visiting. The buildings have been well preserved and you could easily spend a full day going around them.

 

  

  

Guess which author was born in  Alcalá de Henares?

 

A visit to Catrine

Catrine in Ayreshire used to be a cotton milling town. The mill was one of those built by the Glasgow entrpreneur David Dale and partners [see previous post].

Catrine was a tiny village until 1787 when Dale and Claude Alexander built the Catrine Cotton Works. There was soon over 1600 people in the town, many from the Highlands, and most employed directly by the works, or dependent on it.

The works closed in 1968 and little now remains  apart from some of the workers housing and the reservoirs [called the Voes] that were built to ensure a constant supply to the mills giant water wheel.

In the photograph below the Voes are in the top right hand corner. The large building just below is a bonded warehouse.

 

The mills 

  

Mill Square as it was 

  

Mill Square as it is now 

  

  

  

  

One of the mill reservoirs 

  

Unlike New Lanark, which remains pretty much as it was in Dale's day, there is little  left to see in Catrine.  Apart from three information boards in Mill Square there is little to indicate that the town was once part of Scotland's industrial revolution.

David Dale’s Cotton Mills

David Dale was a Scottish entrepreneur who was instrumental in establishing Scotland’s cotton milling industry. He was born in Ayreshire in 1739. In 1783  he met Sir Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning frame, at a dinner in Glasgow. Next day the pair went to the Falls of Clyde to see if the power of the Clyde could be harnessed to power a cotton mill.

Their visit led to the building of New Lanark, with four mills and housing for workers. The mills operated very profitably. Later they became famous because of the social experiments conducted there by Robert Owen, who was Dale’s son in law. They closed in 1986. New Lanark has been designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Dale was involved in a number of other mills.

Blantyre Mills were established in the 1780’s by David Dale and  James Monteith.  The mills continued in operation until 1904. Now, all that remains is a single housing block. This was the birthplace of David Livingstone and the building now contains the David Livingstone Centre and some reconstructed mill workers accomodation.

Catrine was a small village in Ayreshire until Dale and Claude Alexander built a cotton mill there in 1787[see the separate post on Catrine].

Spinningdale was a small mill built by Dale, in partnership with George Dempster, in around 1790. It was intended to relieve local unemployment but the highlanders employed in the mill kept going off to work on lambing, harvesting and cutting peat. When the mill burnt down in 1806 it was not rebuilt.

Stanley Mills had been built in 1784 by Richard Arkwright to harness the power of the Tay. Dale only became involved later and supposedly lost a lot of the money he invested in the mill. Stanley Mills continued in in business until 1989, latterly as a jute mill. The buildings are now being restored. See my post on Stanley Mills.

All the mills had three things in common.

Highlanders - At the time that Dale was building his mills people were very reluctant to work in factories and a lot of Dale’s workers were highlanders who had been dispossessed by the The Clearances.

Water Power - The situation of the mills emphasises the importance of water power. New Lanark and Blantyre were built by the Clyde, Stanley by the Tay, Catrine by the Ayre.  Spinningdale harnessed a burn. With the exception of Spinningdale all the mills were inland and in remote locations. Raw cotton would have had to have been shipped to a Scottish port, unloaded and carted to the mills. Then the finished products who have to have been carted away, some back to ports for export. The shipping costs must have been enormous, but insignificant compared with the benefits of water powered milling.

At New Lanark and Catrine reservoirs were built to store water so that the mills could continue in operation even in summer. Long tunnels were cut through rock at New Lanark and Stanley to carry  water to the mills.

Social Conditions – The conditions in some cotton mills were appalling. Many employed child labour and treated the children very badly. There were high death rates. Dale cared about his workers and provided good accommodation and decent working conditions. New Lanark had particularly good housing, the first working class school in Scotland and The Institute for the Formation of Character.

Dale's mills started the industrial revolution in Scotland.   They also introduced the factory system and changed the ways in which people lived and worked.

Eli Whitney and his cotton gin


In the late 18th century America had a lot of land which was suitable for cotton growing but the only plant variety that would grow in America had a serious disadvantage, a lot of seeds were mixed in with the cotton. So much so, that plantations had to employ fifty people on seed extraction for each person who picked the cotton.

Whitney invented a simple but effective machine which stripped out the seeds so readily that one person could complete the work that had previously required fifty. [read more]

Cotton growing suddenly became very profitable and the South went from exporting 487,000 pounds of raw cotton to England's mills  in 1793 to exporting almost 128 million pounds in 1820. This availability of cheap cotton lead to a great expansion in cotton milling.

A side effect of the cotton gin and the expansion of  cotton growing was an increase in the demand for slaves to work the plantations.

Selectively unscrupulous?

There is a great scandal at the moment about MP's expenses. Many Members of Parliament seem to have been unscrupulous in their claims. A few look to have been downright dishonest.

As usual, MPs are letting themselves off lightly.  In the real world, repaying money you have stolen is not usually considered an adequate penalty.

Judge: Norman Stanley Fletcher you have been found guilty of stealing a great deal of money. However, after you were caught you repaid what you had stolen [or, at least, what the police knew you had stolen]. Consequently,  you may now go free.

At the moment it seems that it is being assumed that expenses are the only problem.  That some Members of Parliament might have been unscrupulous when claiming expenses, but otherwise they are fine, upstanding ladies and gentlemen.

I doubt it.

If somebody is dirty they rarely confine themselves to one form of dishonest. People are not usually selectively unscrupulous.

I suspect that some of those who have made dishonourable claims have had their hands in other tills.

I think the following needs to happen.

- There needs to be a wider investigation by an external body [possibly by the National Audit Office].

- The police need to investigate those claims that might be fraudulent.

- There needs to be a strong legal penalties for corruption in public office. Parliament needs to stop handing out mild scoldings and some people need to go to prison.

Third ATM non-dispense in less than a year

An ATM non-dispense occurs when you put your card and pin into an ATM and the withdrawal is charged to your bank account, but the machine does not give you any cash. They can also occur if you abort a transaction before any money is dispensed.

I have just had my third one in less than a year. All with the same bank. I have never had any at all before the current run.

A few nights in Madrid

I recently spent a few nights in Madrid. A place I had never visited before.

Madrid has one of the best city centers I have seen, with many fine and very well kept buildings. The city obviously exercises close control over the design and upkeep of buildings. It also restricts the number of advertising hoardings that can appear. Something that other cities could copy.

 We were there as tourists and tried to visit some of the palaces, monasteries and museums. This was made hard by all the museums closing on the same day [Monday], and having very short opening hours on other days. This makes it difficult to see as much as one might like, and makes Madrid poorer value as a tourist destination.The ones we did try to see were


Reina Sofia – a modern art museum in the centre. I was very unimpressed. A nice building but a poor collection.

Prado – I did not visit the Prado but my companion did and was very impressed. Be prepared to queue for a long time.

Palacio Real – the royal palace.  It costs 8 euros to visit. Our tickets were not checked for the two most interesting parts, an apothecaries museum and an armory. They were checked for the royal quarters. These were very dull. Lots of gold paint but poor internal design and mediocre furniture. My advice would be to either skip the Palacio Real or just visit the [free] apothecaries museum and armory.

Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales – this is where  the Spanish aristocracy dumped inconvenient daughters. We would have liked to have visited but you can only go around in a guided party and these soon book up.

Naval Museum – this is in the same building as the Spanish Armada [or Naval Department]. It is a real gem, with the best collection of naval artifacts I have ever seen. We British think of ourselves as the lords of the sea, but the Spanish were going around Cape Horn and up the coast of Chile whilst we were still trying to master rowing. I visited the museum twice and would have liked to spend longer there each time.  Entry is free but you have to show your passport [WTF?]. There is a small shop with some excellent prints and souvenirs at very reasonable prices.There is a brochure in English but it would have been nice to see some  exhibits with captions in English. Unfortunately photography is forbidden.

In addition to the super clean city centre there is an old quarter with lots of narrow streets, and bars, restaurants and shops. This is not so clean but is more interesting. We went in search of the Tapas lifestyle. Supposedly the Spanish do not get as drunk as we British when they go for a night out because they go from bar to bar, eating tapas with each drink.  Well, perhaps this is true, but I saw very little evidence of this happening, or even of many bars serving tapas.

Spanish coffee is very good and cheap. Why is it weak and expensive in Britain?

Thanks to Gordon Brown's mismanagement of the British economy the value of the pound against the euro has fallen by one third. The euro countries are now damned expensive.  If you go to a euro country take a banjo. You may be able to raise some money with a bit of busking.

We stayed at the Hotel Agumar. I would stay there again. It is close to the centre and the main railway station. Our room was nice, the staff spoke English and were helpful, and it was reasonably priced. Our room had very good air conditioning [Madrid gets seriously  hot in summer]. However, they overcharge for internet access.

Will Phorm kill the UK’s TV and newspapers?

Phorm plans to team up with UK internet service providers [ISPs] such as British Telecom to intercept your web browsing traffic as it passes through your ISP.  They will analyse which sites you are visiting and then serve up highly targeted advertising in your web browser.

Criticism of Phorm has concentrated on privacy issues. TV and newspaper companies do not seem to have realized just how much Phorm threatens them.

Phorm’s technology will make internet advertising an order of magnitude more effective.  Instead of the haphazard shotgun approach of newspaper and TV advertising Phorm will allow advertisers to precisely target an audience.

Newspapers and commercial TV companies are already suffering a loss advertising revenue to the internet. They may think they are experiencing a perfect storm  but what is happening now is nothing to what will happen when Phorm and similar systems start operating. Advertising money will be spent in the most effective manner, and that is going to be via Phorm. 

Of course, newspapers will be able to use Phorm to display advertising on their web sites, but how many of them will be willing to kiss goodbye to newsprint advertising revenue and take the chance that they can live off their web sites?

If they have any sense the newspaper and commercial TV companies need to use every ounce of influence they have to get the government to kill Phorm. If they do not Phorm will kill them.

The BBC cannot afford to be complacent either. They might not rely on advertising revenue but misery loves company and as the commercial companies start to sink rapidly they will ensure that the BBC’s licence revenue is cut to ‘equal the playing field’.





Read more about Phorm here.

Forgotten Genocides

We hear a lot about the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War but many other equal or much worse genocides have been forgotten.

Cerro Rico

I had never heard of Cerro Rico until I came upon a reference to it in Niall Ferguson’s book ‘The Ascent of Money’.

Early in the 16th century the Spanish were told about the vast silver deposits in the mountain of Cerro Rico, near Potosi in Bolivia. These became a source of fabulous wealth for the Spanish Empire.

Between 1556 and 1783 they extracted  45,000 tons of pure silver. Some 7,000 tons of this went to the Spanish monarchy. At first they used Indians as miners. When this source of labour dried up they imported slaves from Africa.

It has been estimated that some eight million miners died in extracting and processing the ore.

Mining continues for tin, zinc and a little silver. The mountain also continues to kill miners.


Belgian Congo

Between 1884 and 1908 the Congo was the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. His genocidal exploitation of the territory caused many deaths and much suffering.

After an international outcry Leopold was forced to hand over his territory to the Belgian Government. They controlled the Congo until independence in 1959.  The number of murders diminished but mutilations and exploitation continued.

In ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’ Adam Hochschild estimates that over ten million Congolese died during the years that Leopold and the Belgian Government controlled the country.

The Belgians left the country in such a state that after independence many millions more died in a series of wars and because of government incompetence.

Newspapers, trees, electronic paper and the tipping point

Newspapers which are suffering from the effects of the internet may be saved by electronic paper. Instead of being in a long term death spiral it may be more accurate to view newspapers as living through a  period between the introduction of the internet and the adoption of the more benign technology of electronic paper.

The costs of newsprint

This site claims that each Sunday issue of the New York Times requires the newsprint from 75,000 trees.
That is 75000 x 52 = 3,900,000 trees per year for just the Sunday edition of one newspaper.

[BTW - That sounds a lot but at a planting density of 2,000 trees per acres it equates to 1,940 acres or just over 3 square miles of forest cleared per year. A forest area 10 miles square would provide enough wood pulp for the Sunday edition from now until 2042.]

Even if vast areas of land are not being clear felled handling all this wood and converting it to newsprint is a very expensive business.

This post pointsd out some of the other constraints imposed by newsprint.

"Readers expect a daily paper to be a certain size every day, and to arrive on their doorstep at a certain time every morning. Meeting those requirements involves a ton of infrastructure and personnel: typesetters, printing presses, delivery trucks, paper carriers, and so forth. To meet these infrastructure requirements, a paper has to have a minimum circulation, which in turn requires covering a wide geographical area. All of which means that as a daily paper's circulation falls below a certain threshold, it can lead to a death spiral where cost-cutting leads to lower quality, which leads to circulation declines and more cost-cutting."

Electronic paper

E-paper technology is advancing very rapidly. I do not think it will be very long before we are able to buy A4 or even A3 size sheets of flexible e-paper.  We will be able to use e-paper to read our newspapers [and lots of other stuff]. Hearst Newspapers are developing an e-paper reader and were early investors in one of the main producers of e-paper.

Newspapers are having a tough time at the moment as they are abandoned by readers and advertisers. However, in the long term they stand to save huge sums if journalism is read on e-paper rather than newsprint. Just think of the savings in newsprint, printing and physical distribution.

At the moment newspapers have to cater for readers who want a paper copy of their paper and those who are content to read on a screen. They cannot make money from either group and many are closing or cutting staff.

Eventually they will come to a tipping point where the number of e-readers equals the number of paper readers.  After that I suspect that buying a paper newspaper will become more expensive as newspapers try to move all their readers to e-paper.

Not only will delivery through e-paper greatly reduce newspaper's cost, it will also provide a charging mechanism. Though people are unwilling to pay for content on the internet they do seem ready to pay for it if it is delivered through a mobile device. Witness the sale of newspaper subscriptions on Amazon's Kindle and software on Apple's Apps Store.

Once the costs of printing disappear newspapers will have very different economics. The ones the survive these transition times may find themselves profitable again. Especially since some of their competitors will have disappeared and they will be able to sell their e-paper editions on a global scale in a way that was not possible with paper newspapers. They will probably also have to sell off office blocks and convert to virtual newsrooms, and rely more on occasional contributors. The end result will probably be something closer to the model of the Huffington Post than the current New York Times.

 Unwanted forests

There will be victims of the move from newsprint to e-paper.

During the First World War Britain ran very short of trees for pit props and trench supports. To prevent this problem arising again the government planted lots of quick growing evergreen trees. However, the Second World War was not a trench war and all over Britain there are these WW1 woods that do not have much economic value. I live near one.

If newspapers stop needing newsprint what will happen to all the forests that have been planted to provide trees for newsprint?  What will happen to all the small communities that depend on logging to survive? What will happen to those countries who export a lot of paper?

Living in Svenborgia

Years ago, before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I was taken to a nomenklatura shop in Moscow. The nomenklatura were the ruling party elite in Russia and they had their own chain of stores that stocked stuff you could not find in ordinary Russian shops.

These nomenklatura shops were well hidden, no shop windows or signs to advertise their presence and arouse envy in the proletariat. My companion and I entered a nondescript office building and went down a grubby tiled corridor. A plain wooden door gave no indication of what was within. The person I was with showed a special card and we went into the nomenklatura store. To me it looked like a typical Western department store but it would have been wonderland to the average Russian, full of stuff they could never buy, no matter how long they queued.

I was reminded of this experience whilst watching a recent episode of 30 Rock; the one with Jerry Seinfeld.

Jerry tells Jack Baldwin’s character that he has just been vacationing in a European country that only the rich know about. Jack asks if Jerry is referring to Svenborgia.

Though you will not find on a map there is a Svenborgia and it is a country occupied by the very rich. Geographically it is like the Maldives. Not a contiguous area but a series of islands spread over a large area.


Monaco is part of Svenborgia, so are tax havens like the Channel Islands. Private islands in the Caribbean are part of Svenborgia, and so are many large private estates dotted across the world. Large yachts and luxury hotels are Svenborgian territory.

Svenborgia has its own school and university system. In the UK it includes schools like Eton and Harrow, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Private clinics provide the Svenborgian health system. Private jets move Svenborgians about the world, delightfully remote from the rest of us.

In the past a nation’s rich had to stay home so they could manage and protect their wealth. That meant they had a vested interest in keeping their country a reasonably safe and habitable place. If the country went under so did they and their money.

Now they do not need to stay home. Modern communications mean that the very rich can manage their empires from anywhere in the world, including from aboard their private yachts. They can easily move their money about the world and pay tax nowhere. The rich have gone to live in Svenborgia and they no longer need to worry about the country of their birth. It is just another place to be exploited, as their ancestors exploited colonial empires.

Britain, the USA or any other country can sink or swim for all they care [unless there is a profit in having it sink]. They are safe and happy in Svenborgia.


Note - the photograph at the start of this post is of Hamilton Court, a gated community in India. It has its own water and power systems, its own schools and shops, and, most importantly of all, a security force to keep out the poor.   Read NYT article

Bribes not bombs

Ken Macdonald, the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions from 2003 to 2008, writes that “Our system for regulating markets and for prosecuting market crime is completely broken”.

He points to all Labour’s anti-terrorist legislation whilst the City of London has gone unregulated. He want something done about it.

“Forget the paranoiac paraphernalia of national databases, identity cards and all the other liberty-sapping addictions of the Home Office. Forget the rhetoric and do something useful. If the Government really wants to protect people beyond armoured-vest posturing, here is the opportunity.”

He also says “Let's have fewer terrorism acts, fewer laws attacking our right to speak frankly and freely. Let's stop filling our prisons with junkies, inadequates and the mentally damaged. How apposite in 2009 to have, instead, a few more laws to confront the clever people who have done their best to steal our economy..”

[just as an aside, it is rather surprising when a former Director of Public Prosecutions turns out to be more liberal and more angry with Labour than I am.]

What he does not explain is why Labour was so keen to legislate against civil liberties, but remains so very reluctant to regulate The City.

Let me suggest a reason.

The City offers juicy directorships to retired politicians and senior civil servants, terrorist organizations do not. 

I have always argued that if terrorist organizations really want to achieve their political objectives  they should be employing bribes, not bombs.

Forget blowing people up. That will never work. It just increases Halliburton’s profits and gives politicians an excuse to rant and rave.

Instead, Al-Qaeda should be employing well established methods for influencing political debates. They need to give lots of money to important politicians. Admittedly, this is not the best time for employing this tactic in the USA, but Labour clearly has lots of people who appreciate a nice earner.

I suggest Al-Qaeda set up a foundation [tip: do not include Al-Qaeda in the foundation’s name] and do the following –

1.  establish a big prize [say, about one million pounds] that can be awarded to a politician who has furthered the cause of world peace [i.e. has done as they were told.

2.  appoint politicians who have been ‘helpful’ to the board of the foundation. A salary of £100,000 a year for one days work a month would be about right.

3.   arrange a series of speaking tours that pay £50-100,000 per speech.  Hire lots of unemployed actors to make up audiences.

4.   start a book publishing firm [Jehad Books would not be a good name for the firm] and pay, say, £20 million for the rights to publish a politicians memoirs.

Of course, all these are well established ways of making payoffs to politicians. They have worked well for many business organizations and other bodies. Zionism has been particularly handy with its cheque book.

Al-Qaeda will also need to remember the stick as well as the carrot.  Threats to fund electoral opponents has been particularly effective in intimidating many American politicians. And lets not forget the old standby of paying journalist to write smear stories about anybody who does not toe the line.

If Al-Qaeda could just employ these tactics in no time at all we would see Osama bin Laden dining at the White House and being ushered into Number 10.  Remember that nothing has been proved against him.  A bit of spin and any past unpleasantness will soon be forgotten. If this seems unlikely remember that when Britain was being forced to give up its colonial empire we branded a lot of people as terrorists. Five years later the same people were running our former territories and were popping into Buckingham Palace for tea and bikkies with the Queen.

Let us also remember the example of the convicted terrorist Nelson Mandela who is now a world saint.

Pope had it exactly right.

"In vain may heroes fight, and patriots rave;
If secret gold sap on from knave to knave.

Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!
A single leaf shall waft an army o'er,
Or ship off senates to a distant shore;
Pregnant with thousands flits the scrap unseen,
And silent sells a king, or buys a queen."

A few years of bribery, sorry lobbying, and we could see Osama bin Laden Drives and Osama bin Laden Roads joining Nelson Mandela Avenues all over Britain.

SNP opposed to identity cards

The BBC reports that the SNP is opposed to the lunatic Westminster ID card plan.

"The Scottish Government has told Westminster it remains "completely opposed" to its plans to roll out identity cards across the UK.

In a letter to the Home Office, Community Safety Minister Fergus Ewing said the cards posed an "unacceptable threat" to civil liberties."
The Labour Party's attempts to build a police state are another powerful reason for Scots to vote for the SNP and Scottish independence.

Refuge Nuvolau

 

Refuge Nuvolau in the Dolomites.  It is not by any means the most spectacularly situated refuge in the Dolomites, but its not bad. They offer accomodation and food. We had a nice lunch there. 

Access is by lift from highway 48 between Passo Falzarego and Cortina to Refuge Scolattoll, and then walking up past Refuge Averau.

There is a short via ferrata close to the refuge.

Royal Society Podcasts

The Royal Society is Britain's national academy of sciences, and is considered by some to be the oldest such society still in existance.

I recently discovered that they produce some excellent podcasts. You can find them here, or subscribe via iTunes.

I have just enjoyed listening to Lord Cable": telegraphy, empire and the making of Lord Kelvin PRS - Professor Bruce J Hunt   and Robert Hooke: the archival tragedy of dying intestate - Professor Lisa Jardine.

The Big Lie of Protectionism

Both the US and the UK have massive Balance of Payments deficits. The UK currency has collapsed against both the dollar and the euro. Both countries have seen much of their manufacturing industry move to the Far East and large numbers of their working classes have seen their high paying manufacturing jobs replaced by MacJobs.

Yet, in both countries politicians shy away from protecting their own economies. One reason why protectionism is a dirty word because politicians fear it will turn the recession into a 1929 type depression.

The Big Lie in all this is that the Great Depression was made worse by US protectionist measures, like the Smoot-Hawley legislation.

In fact, that is not so. There is no evidence that the US's protectionist measures made the depression worse.

"Politicians and commentators keep warning that "protectionism is what made the Great Depression Great". It's a good line. Pity it isn't true.


Protectionism didn't cause the Great Depression.


The US Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, agrees."  [BBC Economics Editor]


Nor is it true that the US measures encouraged other countries to do the same thing.

"But didn't protectionism help transmit America's problems around the world? Well, not really. Bernanke, Barry Eichengreen and other distinguished economists have established pretty convincingly that it was the gold standard that helped turn a mismanaged US stock market crash into a global slump - by causing a prolonged and devastating period of falling prices."

So what did cause the Great Depression?

In a classic work, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz say the US downturn of the 1930s was the Fed's fault, by failing to inject cash into a fragile banking system after the crash of 1929.

At a party for Friedman's 90th birthday, Bernanke (then a Fed Governor), said: " I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression - you're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

All this has been known in academic circles for a long time. So, why do politicians repeat the lie and why isn't the public being told the truth. Why are demands for protectionism being ignored?

Why are told repeatedly that globalisation is a very good thing.  So it is, but it is only a very good thing for the rich and multinational companies. They get to buy low in the East and sell high in the West. It has not been a good thing for the lower and middle classes. Look at the average income levels in the US over the past ten and twenty years. The working class are sinking quickly and the middle class are sinking slowly.

Given that a lot of the media are owned by the rich and multinational companies it is not surprising that the Big Lie gets repeated and the truth about globalisation gets concealed.

When UK and US companies with factories in the East can so easily buy our politicians it is not surprising that no action is taken.

Transferring manufacturing capacity and technology from the West to the East also has political and military implications.  I suspect that in a few years time, when China starts showing its strength,  there will be lots of long faces and little pink memos in Western governments over what we are doing now.

In the UK we stupidly thought that we did not need a manufacturing base. Why make things when we could live off banking and the City of London?  We can now see the reality behind that delusion.


Both the US and UK are in dire financial straights. Unless our currencies are going to continue to fall we need to manage our economies in the national interest. Not just in the interests of the very rich.


The fallacy is that it can all be left to the market. That has been shown to be untrue in the case of the financial markets. Leaving it to the markets has resulted in our present problems. Now the fallacy that globalisation can be left to the market must also be exposed.