In 1918 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was given to Fritz Haber: he invented a method for synthesizing ammonia - that is, nitrogen 'fixed' with hydrogen - a chemical vital for organic life. The process was used during the First World War to make munitions: the allies got theirs from South American mines. Without industrial-scale production of ammonia, the war would have been considerably shorter. Verdun, for example - where a service took place today on WWI's 90th annivesary - was bombarded with a hundred thousand shells an hour - an hour! - at the start of the battle. (As well as a hundred thousand gas shells a day: Haber was instrumental in the development of gas warfare. Randomly, I now realise he was the subject of a brilliant Radio 4 play I caught the second half of. His scientist wife committed suicide. If the play is to be believed, this was to shock him into realising the monster he'd become. I buy that: radio 4 fiction will do for me as a factual source.)

Obama: vp, running mate, nation, biden, girl, antichrist, berlin, birth certificate, muslim

McCain: vp, running mate, ad paris hilton, paris hilton, paris hilton ad, mccain houses, mccain celebrity, vs obama

Biden: obama, vp, senator, wife, veep, abortion, voting record, israel, quotes, family

Palin: for vp, alaska, scandal, mccain, vice president, investigation, for america

US President, Andrew Jackson, speech to Congress, 1830:

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?

Heard this on Simon Schama's excellent first programme about the limits of US infinity - available online for a little while.

Was just reading this which is being discussed locally here and for some reason (probably my own common-or-garden liberal internal self-loathing I would imagine) I was reminded of the following from Waking Life. Youtube snippet here.

If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible. On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path to what we desire. The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market. A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness. We'll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We'll yank the social symbols through the looking glass. We'll devalue society's currency. To confront the familiar. Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence. Where there's fire, we will carry gasoline. Interrupt the continuum of everyday experience, and all the normal expectations that go with it.

To live as if something actually depended on one's actions.

To rupture the spell of the ideology of the commodified consumer society, so that our oppressed desires of a more authentic nature can come forward. To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of actions and know we're making it happen. There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life. To exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions.

An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.

(To man up telegraph pole) Hey, old man, what you doing up there?

I'm not sure.

You need any help getting down, sir?

No, I don't think so.

(quitely)... stupid bastard.

No worse than us. He's all action and no theory. We're all theory and no action.

Just updated my about page, thought I'd repost here:
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In the early 20th century, Ludwig Von Mises started off the 'socialist economic calculation debate'. He claimed that a planned economy was not only undesirable, but logically impossible. Friedrich Hayek - another Austrian economist - took up the argument and ran with it.

Hayek argued that society was just too complex to plan. Human minds - smaller, less complex systems - could never grasp the intricacies of the whole. For Hayek, this meant that all planning was the road to serfdom.

In the past ten to fifteen years, many people working on computation and society have found Hayek's writing prophetic. Whether or not you agree with his politics, Hayek made a compelling case for society as an evolving process, and of people as bounded in a 'sensory order' from which they must get all their information. He was, perhaps, an agent-based thinker - one who could see the limitations of economic theory at the time, but lacked the tools we have now to investigate these ideas robustly.


import uk.myGeography.*;
import uk.childhood.cycling.*;
import parents.washingRoutines.*;
import parents.larkin.*;
import uk.job.random;

public class Morning implements AlarmListener {

Life me;
int today;
boolean breathing;
boolean sleeping = true;

public Morning (Life alive, int today) {

me = alive;

this.today = today;

}

public void alarmGoesOff(MorningEvent m) {

breathing = (me.stillAlive(today) ? true : false);

while (breathing) {

wakeUp( me.initialAngst(), me.generalGuilt() );

goToSleep( me.checkCheeseLevels() );

}

system.exit( me.religiousBelief() );

}

If you need a story to keep the impact of global warming close to your heart, read this every day. (Here's a copied version in case the Indy's one goes behind a paywall.)

My, er, 'favourite' quotes:

From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility.

---

Bangladesh's Noah:

In the middle of Bangladesh, in the middle of my road trip, I tracked down Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan. He was sitting under a parasol by the banks of a river, scribbling frenetically into his notebook.

"The catastrophe in Bangladesh has begun," he said. "The warnings [by the IPCC] are unfolding much faster than anyone anticipated." Until a few years ago, Rezwan was an architect, designing buildings for rich people – "but I thought, is this what I want to do while my country drowns? Create buildings that will be under water soon anyway?"

He considered dedicating his life to building schools and hospitals, "but then I realised they would be under water soon as well. I was hopeless. But then I thought of boats!"

He has turned himself into Bangladesh's Noah, urging his people to move on to boats as the Great Flood comes. Rezwan built a charity – Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, which means self-reliance – that is building the only schools and hospitals and homes that can last now: ones that float.

---

The crowd says this mosque – like most fundamentalist mosques on earth – is funded by Saudi Arabia, with the money you and I pay at the petrol pump. As I looked up at its green minaret jutting into the sky, it occurs to me that our oil purchases are simultaneously drowning Bangladesh, and paying for the victims to be fundamentalised.

---

So if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame. "All the people who strain at this country's seams will drown with it," Anam says, "or be blown away to distant shores – casualties and refugees by the millions." The headstone would read, Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water.

Obama wins the democratic nomination and ends his first speech as nominee thus:

Now, the other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of policies and positions, and that is a good thing. That is a debate I look forward to. It is a debate that the American people deserve on the issues that will help determine the future of this country and the future for our children.

But what you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon. What you won't see from this campaign or this party is a politics that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to polarize, because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

I caught a programme last night on the beeb about property. Nothing new there - you can be guaranteed to find a property programme of some description 50% of the time the telly goes on: if the schedulers are to be believed, we're obsessed. (Indeed, there was another property prog on Channel 4 at the same time.)

But this one was a little more thoughtful. The last person to be interviewed was an estate agent based in Sandbanks, Poole - not too far away from where I used to live in Bournemouth. A few years back, one place sold for a particularly large amount of money, and worked out at something like £900 per square foot. This particular estate agent did a quick calculation and discovered this made it the fourth most expensive place to live in the world. The next step is brilliant: he then trumpeted the whole area as such. 'Sandbanks: the fourth most expensive place to live in the world!' Thus began Sandbank's insane rocketing into the property stratosphere, accompanied (as he notes) by developing new offices and a whole selling style suitable to people wanting to buy into the Sandbanks glow.

Over at Crooked Timber, there's a great post on the minimum wage where Kathy argues that 1) there are plenty of empirical reasons why increasing a minimum wage may not lead to higher unemployment and 2) that you'll get into trouble with the economic 'fundamentalists' if you try and work on this issue without concluding that it does.