Via Deejbah I found this “what kind of postmodernist are you” quiz. Of course I’m no kind, but if I were one, this would be pretty much spot-on

You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the
postmodernists, you collect avant-garde
Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal
articles for breakfast. You positively live
for theory. It really doesn’t matter what
kind, as long as the words are big and the
paragraph breaks few and far between.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

We’ve been discussing speed quite a bit lately, and this story about the end of Concorde illustrates a point I’ve been making for some time. On most of the obvious measures, technological progress in transport stopped sometime in the late 1960s and, at the frontiers, we are now seeing retrogression.

In 1970, we had regular visits to the moon, and supersonic passenger flight via Concorde was on the way. Now we have neither. Even the space shuttle, designed as a low-cost “space truck” to replace the expensive moon program, is now headed for oblivion, with no obvious replacement.

At a more prosaic level, the 747 jumbo jet, introduced in the late 1960s, is still the workhorse of passenger air transport. Boeing’s attempts at producing a new generation of passenger planes have failed, and the likely replacement for the jumbo jet is the Airbus A380 – essentially just a double-decker jumbo. In all probability, this will be the standard for the next thirty or even fifty years. Of course we don’t have flying cars, or even personal helicopters, as most projections from 50 years ago supposed.

On the ground, cars are safer and more comfortable than they used to be, but the rate of innovation has slowed substantially, and as we’ve discussed, there’s been no increase in the average speed at which we travel – if anything the opposite. Here, for illustration are specs for the 1962 Holden EJ released just over 40 years ago. There are some obvious differences from the cars of today, but they are pretty minor. Go back another 40 years and you’re looking at this. Forty years more and even the bicycle is still is in embryo (the first modern one was made in 1885, predating the first Daimler and Benz cars by four years)

There are a couple of points to make here. The first is that, outside the areas of information and communications, technological progress has generally slowed. All the easy stuff (penicillin, jet aircraft, skyscrapers) had been done by the late 1960s. Only in IT and telecom does anything like Moore’s Law work in our favour.

The second is that while the relationship between transport and communications is complex, in the long run they are substitutes. We don’t need to send humans into outer space to tell us what’s there, because we can send cameras and telescopes and download the results. We don’t need to fly from London to New York in five hours when we can make a phone call for a few cents a minute.

Interestingly, this logic hasn’t prevented some industries, notably financial services, from clustering ever more closely in a handful of ‘global cities”. As I’ll argue in a later post, this says more about the dominance of crony capitalism in the financial sector than about the technological requirements of doing business.

Stanley Gudgeon, aka Professor Bunyip, aka Imre writes

Being of the left, it goes without saying that John Quiggin is an enemy of pleasure — at least those that don’t involve curtailing the not-good-for-you joys of others.

(Link via Ken Parish who points out some inconsistencies in the Professor’s own position.)

On the contrary, what I want to curtail is the bad-for-me pleasures of people (speeding drivers, gun fans etc) who are happy to say I should take some risks to facilitate their fun.

As I mentioned quite a while ago, if we could find a suitable location for gun fans and speedsters to act out their Grand Theft Auto fantasies away from everyone else, I’d support it*. In fact, I’d sign up for pay-TV to watch.

*James Farrell made a similar suggestion in the comments thread

One of the striking features of the debate over road safety is the extent to which the opinions of blogosphere residents can be predicted on the basis of political affiliation. Rightwingers, both libertarians and law-and-order types, are in favor both of soft laws (high speed limits etc) and weak law enforcement, and leftwingers the opposite. A number of commentators on both sides have made this point.

So I was interested to see this pro-speeding site [thanks to TJW for the link]. The main argument is fairly standard (everybody speeds, so travelling at the speed limit is dangerous so speed limits should not be enforced). But what’s interesting is this para

In the United States, just two speeding tickets can increase your insurance premiums by 50%! In BC, the penalty points from two speeding tickets will cost you $300.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a powerful lobby group funded by the US insurance industry, has been the chief opponent of moves to raise speed limits.

Insurance companies in the US (and ICBC in BC) frequently purchase radar and laser guns for police forces to issue more speeding tickets.

which presents an obvious paradox for libertarian supporters of speeding. A fully privatised system would give more power to the insurance companies to impose their own conditions on insured drivers and, if this site is correct, the companies would be keen to tighten the rules.

In my experience, libertarians love the kind of intellectual gymnastics required to produce free-market solutions to puzzles of this kind, so I’m offering it for their enjoyment.

Like most academics, I’m somewhat ambivalent about strike action. On the one hand, given the nature of the work, a one-day or even a one-week strike would barely be noticed by the employers (and, as I’ll mention below, it’s not clear whether the employers are the universities or the government). On the other hand, the right to strike is an important one, that has been struggled for and defended for nearly 200 years, and we have plenty of reasons for wanting to exercise it.

In practice, there’s never been a national strike of more than one day, and my response has usually been to stay home and work there, occasionally turning out on a ‘picket’ (more accurately, ‘protest’) line. Even the loss of pay has been spotty. For the same reasons as strikes are somewhat ineffectual, it’s hard to verify who is on strike and who is simply out of the office for some other reason on a given day. So the university is generally reduced to asking people to dob themselves in and the old-style unionist in me objects to helping the boss in this way.

But on this occasion, I’ll be doing things properly. I’m going to spend the day catching up on non-uni jobs (including, I hope, polishing up the blog) and I’ve already advised the uni so they can dock my pay for the day. The issues are worth a strike

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The comments thread for the previous post raises the issue of tailgating. I’ve seen surveys in which the two most common annoyances are (1) tailgating and (2) slow drivers. Given that, in my experience, at least 95 per cent of drivers drive within a few k of the speed limit whenever they can, I’d guess that a large proportion of those giving response (2) are the people who annoy those of us giving response (1). Road safety would be greatly enhanced if these people could either be deterred or delicensed.

But there’s no obvious way of enforcing laws against this species of dangerous driving. I can think of various possibilities, but I can also think of technical difficulties with all of them. About the most promising would be a fixed video camera that would record all passing traffic. It ought to be able to infer both speed and distance between cars, and then prosecute tailgaters, but the computational requirements of recording this digitally and processing it automatically would be immense. Still, Moore’s Law is on our side, here.

I stayed at the Gold Coast last weeked, at Tugun Beach near Coolangatta. A nice enough spot, with miles of uncrowded beaches and not overdeveloped by Gold Coast standards, though the towers of Surfers Paradise in the distance produced a rather surreal effect. We stayed at a pleasant place called the Golden Riviera, and the neighbouring places had the usual names – Costa del Sol, Malibu etc. I haven’t been to the Riviera or Costa del Sol, but Malibu is not a patch on Coolangatta, and the pictures of European beaches I’ve seen don’t impress.

So the thought struck me – do villas on the Riviera have names like Noosa and Bondi? I doubt it. Still, Australia has at least advanced since the days when beachside locations were named after Brighton and Margate.

Over at Troppo Armadillo, Wayne Wood, discussing Beazley’s contribution to a defence conference, says

Well he would say that wouldn’t he ? (wasn’t that first said by someone else that had something to do with Profumo ?)

This immortal line was indeed first uttered by Mandy Rice-Davies, who is now, I discover, a grandmother living in the United States.

I’ve often thought that a great deal of space could be saved if utterly predictable false statements by politicians and others were replaced by the simple notation MRD. For example, when a political leader is asked whether they are concerned about his or her followers plotting a spill, any response other than “Yes, and I plan to get them before they get me!” could just be reported as “MRD”.

Get into the Western Plains Zoo. We turned up yesterday afternoon, but admissions had already stopped for the day. There was a big storm overnight, and the zoo was closed for repairs today. So we drove back to Brisbane, seeing most of the northern catchments of the Murray-Darling Basin in the aftermath of excellent and widespread rain. My back of the envelope estimate suggested that several thousand GL of water had fallen in a single day, but I’m glad to be corrected on this.

I also missed the Senate Committee on Telstra which, by a surprising coincidence, held its hearings in Dubbo yesterday. I’m appearing tomorrow in Nambour, a little way north of Brisbane.