The Bewilderness

Demented reality augments hype over hope

Augmented reality is on its way as a demented marketing label for new tech wizardry: the latest catch-all term for describing innovations on your telephone or trainers.

They're standard wearable sneakers, but with a little extra: each one has a code on its tongue. Show this code to your webcam to call up the 3D Adidas Originals Neighborhood through your browser.

At this point, your shoes are now game controllers, as your Webcam translates your shoes' movements into the virtual world. Walk the neighborhood and choose one of three games to play. A Star Wars storm trooper game, where you use your shoes to aim and fire paintball balloons, will launch February 10. Two more games, a skateboarding game and a DJ Hero-style game, will follow this spring

Not convinced by this trainer trash, then just begin to hear the rush of media releases on how their phone hits reality. The new Samsung will suffice:

However, Samsung has also added the Layar - yes, that's how it's spelled - Reality Browser app, which provides “detailed visual guides” of your current location using augmented reality technology and GPS.

The feature could be used, for example, to discover which nearby pubs are showing that all-important football match. Each drinking hole showing the match would instantly appear on your virtual map as you move the phone around.

That seems to be an all-singing and all-dancing map. The label precedes the magic, methinks.

Augmented reality is defined as the

the next big thing in the digital sphere, allowing computer generated images to be superimposed into real-life scenarios using camera technology.

We are in the initial phase where hype outruns hope and market errors funnel products towards a profitable demand space. Will it be as profitable and as disruptive as they hope? Only if it connects with the social net, but that will be another story.

Shooting up to low earth orbit

Jules Verne would derive some satisfaction from this new engineering project: a cannon to shoot payloads into low-earth orbit. As a proposal, the project requires financing, but is a valuable alternative to the current systems that we use: state backed and one time only:

Hunter's proposal is to operate the "Quicklauncher" from the ocean near the equator, where the Earth's faster rotation will help launch payloads into space. The cannon would float, with 490 m (1,600 ft) of it below the surface, where it would be stabilized by ballast. Operators would be able to swivel it as required to deliver the payload into different orbits.

Hunter plans to test a 3 meter prototype in a water tank in February, and a full-size cannon could be built within seven years, if Quicklaunch can raise the required $500 million. While this is a sizeable upfront cost, the potential savings in the long term are substantial, because the cannon is reusable. Its use would significantly reduce the cost of keeping the International Space Station in orbit.

For humans, the effect would be similar to benchpressing a falling house. Ebay tag is $500,000,000.

Incoherent Labour Politicians

Is this just nonsense?

In a separate television interview today, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, reignited the row over class-war politics by accusing the Conservatives of planning “the biggest redistribution of wealth to the wealthy in two generations”.

He said: "What do they actually stand for? Abolishing inheritance tax, bringing back fox-hunting and isolating ourselves in Europe. That’s not what the country needs. That’s not change. That’s driving with one eye on the rear-view mirror.”

The wealthy won't be redistributing wealth they already own. They will be retaining wealth that is no longer taxed. And abolition of inheritance tax by the Tories is a lie. As Miliband knows. I wish they would but they won't.

So incoherence and an untruth. Nice to know the future of the Labour Party lies in the hands of a politician who upholds its core values.

"Judge lest ye be judged..." by the Sentencing Council

The government cannot stand independent power or judgment, and its centralising policies continue apace. Whilst there has been a long struggle between the judiciary and the political class over financing and sentencing, the establishment of the Justice Ministry has seen further erosion of an independent judiciary.

The Ministry has set up a Sentencing Council that now sets out mandatory directives on sentencing to avoid the euphemism: 'upward sentencing drift', as criminal sentences lengthen. Given that longer prison sentences costs more as prison places increase, the Sentencing Council is accused of shortening prison sentences. Another example of a quango taking political decisions second-hand in order to defend politicians from being weak on crime. Of course, this also means that judges will have less space to show leniency or mercy.

The Sentencing Council will become the body providing sentencing guides for judges and magistrates when it replaces the Sentencing Guidelines Council and Sentencing Advisory Panel. It has greater powers because legislation says courts “must follow” guidelines and have a “duty” to impose sentences within an identified range. Under the previous bodies, courts needed only to “have regard” to any guidelines.

An “impact assessment” for the new council drawn up by the Ministry of Justice said a “closer adherence to sentencing ranges could arrest historical trends in upward sentencing drift”.

“Arresting sentencing drift could potentially mean avoiding the need to build some 1,000 additional prison places,” it said.

The problem is that this defence does not work any longer. Political expediency for short-term avoidance of poor headlines gifts greater power to a quango (aided and abetted by civil servants) over the judiciary. The whole cycle of this political economy: exacerbating political weakness to obtain further power, must be broken.

Judges are there to judge. Sentences should be their prerogative. After all, if sentencing is so sensitive, how can one trust juries to come to correct conclusions. Oh you can', and that is why habeas corpus is gradually being erased.

US regulation may again save the City

Inflation is up, car production is down and living standards are now declining. It is a measure of the government's failure that the scrappage scheme has lifted car production in December, bringing forward future sales. Car production rebounded by 15.7% in the second half of the year and commercial vehicle output rose 15.6% in December. After the fall in sterling and the savage decline in production, it would be astonishing if there was no rebound to a level of growth.

One bright spot on the horizon is the debate about banking reform begins to steer away from peremptory and savage regulation undertaken for populist support by the Americans. A moronic hitch on the Obama bandwagon was soon abandoned by the Conservatives after they realised the level of economic damage attached to the proposal. Whilst politicians cluck in public about the need for international agreement, the inaction of the G20 is becoming a useful figleaf to lever regulatory arbitrage for Britain's advantage. Such profitable opportunities would only be enhanced if we took a semi-detached view of the EU.

The Linguistic Niche Hypothesis

Some work on linguistic evolution reveals that processes similar to biological adaptation may be at play, overturning an emphasis on randomness and historical drift:

The researchers found striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language — such as its population and global spread — and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages having the most speakers — and those that have spread around the world — were found to have far simpler grammars, specifically morphology, than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. For example, languages spoken by more than 100,000 people are almost six times more likely to have simple verb conjugations compared to languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people....

Applied to English....

"English, for all its confusing spelling and exceptions — if a baker bakes, what does a grocer do? — has a relatively simple grammar," Lupyan said. "Verbs are easy to conjugate and nouns are mostly pluralized by adding 's.' In comparison, a West African language like Hausa has dozens of ways to make nouns plural and in many languages — Turkish, Aymara, Ladakhi, Ainu — verbs like 'to know' have to include information about the origin of the speaker's knowledge. This information is often conveyed using complex rules, which the most widely-spoken languages on earth like English and Mandarin lack."

Languages, spoken over wider populations, tend to become morphologically simpler, is the base of their thesis. It is a statistical study, with many exceptions, that reveals certain social factors have an influence on linguistic development. It also pins down the myth that English is one of the more difficult languages to learn.

'Green Readings' of the apocalypse

The Guardian Book Blog looks at apocalyptic fiction in its slight and whimsical way. An unnecessary survey is used, less than convincingly, to argue that current fictional apocalypses based on environmental disasters, are used to promote the theme that “we are all to blame”.

Today, of course, the big fear is environmental. And this seems to have had a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) effect on our bards of the apocalypse. Put simply, the difference between the current threat and older ones is this: we are all, personally, to blame. Almost everyone (especially in the well-read west) is doing their bit to make the world a warmer place, and thus we are all implicated in the calamity that will this time surely spell the End. Previously, we could blame naive scientists or tyrant villains, world leaders or fickle fate; and though there is an argument for collective culpability in the Bible (in which case, we've come full circle), it did at least offer us the option of throwing our hands up at a cruel and vengeful God. Now we're all directly responsible and I think the bleakness of recent books reflects this.

It is not clear to me that environmental concerns have suggested a trend towards bleakness and shared responsibility. Such 'green' readings tell us more about the blogger than about the books. The anti-humanism supporting this reading is hardly inferred:

In these three very different books, greater spiritual redemption is seen as a hollow illusion. The moments of warmth are fleeting and individual. The world seems better off without us.

Yes, the cold mudball in The Road is so attractive. With The Road, the setting is almost magical in its realism: a contrivance to reflect the psychology of suffering in its crucified family.

Of more interest is the representation of the end: once swift and universal, now slow and decaying, like age. The tempo of the apocalypse has slowed with the aging of the baby boomer.

The crisis has not gone away....

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, spoke last night at the University of Exeter on the subject of the Great Recession. His orthodox answer to current problems was globalisation: the entry of new mercantilist powers into the world trading system with resulting imbalances. He called for a quick reduction of the budget deficit and the role of the state as a domestic answer to the crisis. Most ominously of all, and in line with other commentators, he recognised that the underlying macroeconomic causes of the crisis have not been resolved.

Now that inflation is rapidly rising, and quantitative easing is running out, will King be caught on the horns of Labour's dilemma: public expenditure and money supply out of control...

That Gordon Brown shaped hole dug out by repeated use

The drip-drip series of revelations only serve to hurt Brown's standing as Prime Minister. All those who have publicised these damaging facts place personal satisfaction above party interest. Much as one enjoys the internecine pain of a dying government, what compels them to throw one more knife at their hapless leader?

This is the question that will haunt analysts long after Gordon Brown has gone. For even as he explores the walls of his political grave, our Prime Minister cuts his cloth as Banquo rather than Macbeth. Some may say that he made too many enemies, though the reverse may be true. Perhaps if Brown had been more ruthless, more savage, the Blairites would have been too cowed to undertake serial acts of revenge.

Others may decide that his personality is to blame. The rages, the odd lapses, the lack of empathy all conspired to test his ties to voters unto destruction. There may be something in this, although Brown's personality was stable enough to get him to Number Ten.

My pennorth just states history and the simple morality tale. Brown sets much store on representing rectitude. Like 'back to basics', he is weighed and found wanting. For whenever a situation arose that Brown could take the right path for himself, he forsook difficulty and damned the consequences. These were not trivial decisions and the path taken now returns to haunt him:

Gordon Brown tonight faced demands to give evidence to the Iraq Inquiry before the election after the former Defence Secretary said the Armed Forces were starved of cash in run up to the war.

Geoff Hoon said he feared that Britain would struggle to take part in a full-scale land invasion and admitted delays in ordering equipment led to shortages of armoured vests and desert boots and clothing.

The military required emergency Treasury funding to prepare soldiers in the months before the invasion because the Ministry of Defence had previously been told to reply on “efficiency savings” to buy new equipment, he told the inquiry.

However, Mr Brown, the then Chancellor, only approved the additional money five months before the start of the war.

Starving soldiers of supplies, as the headlines portray, is the worst outcome for Brown. It need not have been, as the facts show that Blair was just as, or even more culpable, than the Chancellor. But Brown was there, unlike the money, and people died. Now he is damaged and even less likely to appear before Chilcot.

Tales from the VAT frontier

Sometimes a VAT case can shed light on some of the most extraordinary questions that plague us. Tax is a boon to semantics, especially as the added incentive of money bestows split ends.

The Belgians are debating what makes a cinema. The question is as follows:

Should a cubicle consisting of a lockable space where there is room for only one person and where this person can watch films on a television screen for payment, where this person personally starts the film projection by inserting a coin and has a choice of different films, and during the time paid for can continually modify his/her choice of projected films, be regarded as a 'cinema' as referred to in the Sixth Council directive No 77/338/EEC of 17 May, 1977, Annex H, category 7 (subsequently: Annex III, No. 7, of Council directive 2006/112/EC of 28 November, 2006)?

Methinks there is some confusion on the technology here as the films can't be projected onto a television screen. They rely on video technology, surely? Especially when doubt about the type of cubicle is dispelled by the applicant: Erotic Center BVBA.