Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Category: Diary (Page 147 of 300)

Things that happen to me, or things I do

Disconnect

8 September 2010 / / 0 Comments

This week I’ve read a couple of articles that discuss the ennui of the Internet age.  The first is a Salon profile of the hip New York writer Tao Lin, which features an excerpt from his book Shoplifting from American Apparel:

Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen … About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.

Daniel Roberts discusses Lin’s style of prose:

[The] term, “depression,” is a bit too clinical in this context. Where Lin is coming from, and what his readers share, is a sense of loneliness. The malaise is not specific to New York, of course, but it is typical of a certain ilk of detached 20-somethings across the country.
The loneliness could be attributed to the Internet. Lin and his literary peers spend hours and hours online, and although doing so fosters a sense of connectedness, it is equally isolating. No matter how many fans or fellow writers Lin “meets” online, at the end of the day it’s still him, sitting at his laptop alone. Any moments of delight or engagement that the Internet prompts are separated by longer stretches of boredom, as implied by the title of a short story by Brandon Scott Gorrell, a member of Lin’s online literary gang. The story is called “Minimizing and Maximizing Mozilla Firefox Repeatedly.”

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books blog discusses China’s One Child policy, and the detached scions it has produced:

The more he spoke, the more anguished he sounded about losing his son in other ways, too. Even as a youngster the boy would stay in his room glued to his computer avoiding human contact, rarely going out with his few friends. Other Chinese parents I spoke with said similar things about their children, complaining about their remoteness, their social isolation, and their obsession with technology. They seem an alien race of free-floating individuals.

Night lights Kyoto

Night lights Kyoto by my friend strangerpixel, whose images you should really check out on Flickr by clicking the image

Chimanmanda Adichie's Single Story

1 September 2010 / / 0 Comments

An interesting TED talk by the novellist Chimamanda Adichie on the power of stories, and how a multitude of stories are required in order to fully understand other people.

Key quote is thirteen minutes into the speech:

I have always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person, without engaging with all the stories of that place and that person.  The consequence of the Single Story is this: It robs people of dignity.  It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.  It emphasises how we are different, rather than how we are similar.

That’s my kind of multiculturalism.

Lost Moon Technology

31 August 2010 / / 0 Comments

The website TopTenz.net lists 10 Lost Technologies such as Damascus Steel and the Antikythera Mechanism (via Kottke). Incredibly, the technology used to bake the Apollo programme lacks any meaningful record of its construction:

The Apollo and Gemini programs aren’t truly lost. There are still one or two Saturn V rockets lying around, and there are plenty of parts from the spacecraft capsules still available. But just because modern scientists have the parts doesn’t mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did. In fact, very few schematics or records from the original programs are still around. This lack of record keeping is a byproduct of the frenetic pace at which the American space program progressed. Because NASA was in a space race with the USSR, the planning, design, and building process of the Apollo and Gemini programs was always rushed. Not only that, but in most cases private contractors were brought in to work on every individual part of the spacecraft. Once the programs ended, these engineers—along with all their records—moved on. None of this would be a problem, but now that NASA is planning a return trip to the moon, a lot of the information about how the engineers of the 1960s made the voyages work is invaluable. Amazingly, the records remain so disorganized and incomplete that NASA has resorted to reverse engineering existing spacecraft parts that they have lying around in junkyards as a way of understanding just how the Gemini and Apollo programs managed to work so well.

I find this offensive. Lore has it that the Apollo programmeran off less computing power than your average mobile phone, and I repeat my generous offer to donate my iPhone – completely gratis, I might add – to any future moonshot.  Coupled with a Trident submarine turned on its end, I always assumed that this would catalyse our return to extra-terrestrial bodies.  And so its crushing to hear that most of the work would have to be done again from scratch.  What were you thinking, NASA?
Meanwhile, NASA joins the Flickr Commons, providing historical andiconic photography from the NASA space programmes.  The image below is the Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned oribtal flight, in 1962.

Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned orbital space flight. Astronaut John Glenn aboard, the Mercury-Atlas rocket is launched from Pad 14.



On Benefit Fraud

13 August 2010 / / 1 Comment

Now then.  Dave Osler has an interesting post about benefit fraud over at Liberal Conspiracy.  Apparently, only 1% of benefits paid by the state are wrongly claimed.  That still amounts to a billion pounds, but is obviously less than the billions spent on bank bailouts.
Crucially, it is also much less than the amount of benefits people are legally entitled to, but never actually claim (approximately £10.5 billion, points out woodscolt in the comments).  Double crucially, it is a fraction of the money lost to tax evasion (£30 billion).  Yet in our political discourse, it is benefit cheats who are blamed for the horrible amounts of money the government wastes.  Could this be because diddling benefits is a poor person’s game, while tax evasion is a middle- and upper-class pursuit?
During the election campaign, I recall more than one political debate I had with friends and passers-by, on this problem.  Like immigration, the issue is incredibly muddled.  People often equate benefit-fraud with the separate issue of the state giving people too much in benefits. A story about a woman who steals £60,000 from the state in a benefit fraud is equated with the story of a man who claims housing benefit of £2.1m a year to live in Kensington are seenn as somehow part of the same problem.  However, they are problems of a completely different order – The first is a case of someone breaking the law, who should be (indeed, was) caught and punished.  The second is someone acting perfectly legally and in their own interests, within the system operated by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.  We solve the first case by investigating criminality.  We solve the second problem by forcing the borough into building more and better social housing (if indeed you consider humanely housing a group of refugees to be a ‘problem’).  Housing policy, and the level of benefits paid to those not in work, seems to me to be an ideological argument, where Labour and the Tories have very different views.  Meanwhile, everyone agrees that benefit fraud is wrong and must be stopped.  Public discussion on benefit fraud doesn’t always make this clear… and the Left loses the argument as a result.

Quoted on Libel Tourism

12 August 2010 / / 0 Comments

Eagle-eyed commuters will have spotted a quote from yrstruly in the Metro this morning, on the all important topic of Libel Tourism.  Barack Obama has just signed into law some measures that will protect Americans from British libel judgements.  The protection will kick-in if the libel judgement is at odds with the First Ammendment.

Yesterday, campaigners said Mr Obama’s move was a clear indication that our libel laws were way behind the times in protecting freedom of expression.  Robert Sharp, of charity English PEN, said: ‘It’s a national disgrace and just shows how skewed and unbalanced our laws are.’

Read the whole article.  My longer rant about libel tourism may be found on Comment is Free.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Robert Sharp

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑