December 2002 Archives

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Sunday, December 29, 2002

Personal Dec 29, 2002

We made it! And here I am! Currently working night shifts, 8pm-8am, hauling cargo. Boxes and barrels and containers and food and drums and drums and drums of fuel. Hard hats and big machines. Cranes, skidoos, snowcats. The cleanest construction site in the world!

Occasionally I look up, look around me and see white. White, white, white, as far as the eye can see. Sometimes, that's not very far at all. Other days, it's miles and miles. And a streak of blue on the sky perhaps. Or the water-sky effect where clouds reflect what's below them so they're darker above water than snow. Clouds. So much sky. Clouds and clouds of sky. No wonder the meteorologists like it here so much. There's not a lot else to focus on. Except the man-made features. Straight lines, randomly placed. Why can't they be spirals? Why can't we spell something creative out to the sky above? Straight line of cargo here. Fuel depots. Shipping containers. Buildings, widely spaced apart (why?), on legs. My new lab, off in the distance, still just a platform. The containers which will go up there have, however, arrived.

This is my new home. To my surprise, it feels very normal. The wonder and beauty that has struck me every day on this voyage is less apparrant. It's kind of as I expected, but in every direction. And bigger. It's right somehow. Maybe it's because we're busy, maybe because I have plenty of time ahead of me, maybe because, unlike the other places on this trip, I've heard a lot about Halley already.

Whatever the reason, it's good to be here. And it's been a good laugh so far too. Everyone takes part in the relief operation, ship side, base side, in between. It's about 13km between ship and base and we're operating for 24 hours. There's bound to be more about this written in the official site (remember to look for Halley now, not Shackleton!) This is just a quick entry, before I return to the fuel drums, to say I'm here, we made it and it's good.

Thanks also to everyone who sent me a christmas email, thanks for the pressies, cards and letters that I got to open on christmas day and Happy New Year to you all! (Also, my email address book was wiped upon moving up here so if you want a personal email from me back, please just drop us a quick line – either leave a comment here, or email Felix.)

Posted by Rhian at 22:27 EST | Comments (1)

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

Personal Christmas in Halley

Dear All... Thank you for the wonderful, wonderful christmas emails that have been coming in..and sorry for not replying individually: I am busy stuffing stuff into bags that are stuffed. Rhian style. It's mayhem. We arrive this afternoon, christmas eve. Relief begins tomorrow. But what I really, really need you to know, more than anything, is that I have just seen Antarctica for the first time, up close and personal, I could almost touch her. And she is beautiful. So very beautiful. My breath was taken away. I am in love with this landscape. I am in Antarctica. Happy christmas to you all, and thankyou from the depths of my heart for always encouraging me to follow this dream. xx

(On an aside, upon moving to Halley this afternoon, I have to set up a new email account. The address will be the same for you but the reality for me is that I lose your addresses in the system. So please drop me a quick line, either by leaving a comment here, or by emailing Felix.)

Posted by Rhian at 5:57 EST | Comments (4)

Sunday, December 22, 2002

Personal: December 22 2002

Okay, I'm bundled up to the nines (?!*$!), feel like the Michelin man, look like the Michelin Man, look like everyone else on this ship. Identikit. Purple reversible fleecy jacket thing, huge overalls and coat with reflecty strips, beige steel toecapped fur lined boots (nice), green heavy duty moleskin trousers, thermals under all of this when it gets colder,gloves, scarf and hat are still my own in a vague attempt to retain some individuality. Won't last though I'm sure. And for recreational gear? We're all wearing Ernest Shackleton polo shirts and jeans. A far flung cry from the world of New York that occupies most of this website I'm sure. Back to the days of not thinking at all before getting dressed in the morning. Morning, afternoon, well, whenever you wake up really. Midday today I think it was. But then, we were partying hard last night. Cabins small, bag explosion, pity my cabin mates (those of you who know me, know). Random socks in random pockets. Names written on every piece of clothing. Apple pie and custard. Bad eighties music. This is school.

Just so you know it's not all a deep spiritual journey into the last unexplored wilderness. I mean it is, but it can't be the whole time. It could be I guess, but that would actually physically blow my mind into too many pieces to be healthy. Still recovering from South Georgia I think. We left land a week ago and boarded the ship a month ago. It's been great. Yesterday, we finally crossed the Antarctic Circle. Amazing. A great thick red line painted across the icebergs with "Welcome to Antarctica" embellished in the walls. We've crossed a 'polynya' too which deserves a mention because it truly is a wonderful word. Affectionately called Pollyanna by those who know her. A polynya is a huge area of open water that is surrounded by sea ice. So munch, munch, munch, through the ice for days and suddenly, it's like being in the open sea again. Bizarre. Rocky ship, no ice for as far as the eye can see. The occasional berg ofcourse though. Like being sent back to two weeks ago! We've been probing the sea here too..throwing 'XBTs' off the back of the ship to get temperature/depth profiles. Think there might be a few pics on the latest Shackleton diary page so have a look at them, makes it look like I've been ever so busy on the ship...there's even a pic of us circuit training on the after deck!

So what have I been seeing lately? Ice, ice, ice. Floating ice. Ice floating. Bergs, ice, thick viscous ocean with ice floes floating on it. It's magnificent. Not too much wildlife..this will probably increase again as we approach more solid land/semi- permanent ice. Did I say we saw a whale after leaving S Georgia? Two of them. Seems like months ago! The nights are also like day now, there is a vague darkish period around 9pm but the sun hasn't been seen setting for a while. Magnificent long, long (hours long) sunsets are a thing of previous latitudes. And next to come...Halley. Due on christmas day I think but that'll depend how difficult it is to crunch through the next lot of ice. Have been having lots of training sessions on the ship too: first aid, manual handling, cargo logistics, vehicles (how to start a skidoo), clothes etc. And we've been allocated jobs for the relief when we get to base. That was an immediate morale booster in the bar. People have a purpose again. Night shift? Day shift? Driving the snowcat? Tallying boxes? Seaice relief? In the kitchen? Operating cranes? You could taste excitement in the air. A 24-hour relief operation is about to begin that may take two weeks. We'll all be exhausted and very cold. What a change from the luxury of the ship. Our bodies won't know what hit them! Back to the sauna now I think...I must enjoy every luxury while they last!

Happy Christmas to all, especially those in Trafalgar Road. I'll be thinking of you, wherever and whatever our operations are that day.xx

Posted by Rhian at 19:23 EST | Comments (3)

Friday, December 20, 2002

Feyerabend and philosophy

A long back-and-forth I was having at 2Blowhards the other day prompted Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata to nominate one of my postings as "the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog comment of the year 2002". His problem was that I suggested that Michael Blowhard read more Feyerabend, and he considers Feyerabend (or me, it's not entirely clear) to be an "anti-philosopher of anti-science".

At the same time, I was having a hard time with the Blowhards. Friedrich seemed to be lumping Feyerabend in with Nietzsche, while Michael went one better and started comparing him to Foucault, of all people. Then, a few days later, 2Blowhards printed a guest posting by the more philosophically adept Chris Bertram, who mentioned Feyerabend in the same breath as David Hume.

Now it's unclear whether Mr Bertram considers Feyerabend to be a philosopher in the same tradition as Hume, or whether he believes the opposite. But certainly there seems to be a general perception that Feyerabend is a crazy continental type who doesn't belong in the tradition of analytic philosophy. And I just wanted to use my baby pulpit, here, to assert that he is, indeed, a very rigorous analytical philosopher, who very much works in the tradition of Hume.

The reason I say this is not necessarily because I agree with everything he says, and it's certainly not because Feyerabend was a very good physicist before he became a philosopher. (Many physicists display distressingly woolly thinking when it comes to disciplines outside physics.) Rather, I consider Feyerabend to be at the forefront of the single most important project in philosophy: to defeat skepticism.

What I'm talking about here is philosophy in the tradition not only of Hume, but also of Descartes or Wittgenstein. Each of these people carried the skeptical position further than it had been taken before, in attempt to find out exactly what we can be sure we know about the world. Hume addressed inference: how can we know the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, because it always has in the past, and the future will be like the past. But how can we know the future will be like the past? Well, because it always has been in the past. The question just circles back onto itself, and never gets answered. So far, no one has managed to really solve this paradox which lies at the heart of all science, and indeed of all our everyday behaviour.

Descartes addressed not our expectations of what will happen in the future, but our experience of what is happening in the present: what if all our senses were being tricked by some evil demon? What if this is all some kind of dream? Can we really trust the evidence of our senses?

And Wittgenstein addressed not what we perceive, but how we think: since we think in language, and no one can be entirely sure exactly what we mean by anything, can we even rely on our own thought processes as Descartes proposed?

OK, these are Philosophy 101 oversimplifications of great philosophers. Wittgenstein, especially, is a lot more complex and nuanced than I'm giving him credit for here. (If you want, you can dump the "real" Wittgenstein for Saul Kripke's "Kripkenstein": he fits my thesis a bit better.) But you get the general idea: the way that philosophy is advanced is by philosophers setting out a skeptical stall, and then trying to find solutions to how we can still arrive at life and knowledge despite the nihilistic attraction of the skeptical position.

And Feyerabend fits very easily into this tradition. For sure, he attacks science as we know it, and sets out a position which basically says it's no better than witchcraft. But that's what philosophers do: they advance the skeptical position so that those who believe in science (which is most of us) are forced to construct with much more rigor and clarity the argument for exactly why we do.

So feel free to disagree with Feyerabend: most of us do. But don't dismiss him as an "anti-philosopher": he deserves a lot more respect than that.

Posted by Felix at 13:54 EST | Comments (4)

Thursday, December 19, 2002

The New York Times hikes its price

The New York Times announced today that it's raising its newsstand price in its home city by 33%, to $1. (Sundays will stay at $3.) The price jump comes on top of a 15-cent price hike in September 1999, bringing the total rise over the past three years to 67%. The Times is now, for those of you keeping score at home, fully 400% of the price of the New York Post.

As we all know, the main development over that time has been the growth of the internet, where nytimes.com is one of the leading news websites. Just about every article the New York Times publishes is available for free on the web, and you don't need to schlep to the newsstand or wait until it's delivered to your door, either. By the time you're reading Paul Krugman, Andrew Sullivan's rebuttal is already up on the web, posted within an hour or two of midnight.

The decision to price the paper at a buck an issue can't have been easy. It's not pocket change any more: you now need folding stuff if you want to read Monday's Metropolitan Diary on folding stuff rather than on the internet. It's a big psychological barrier, and places the New York Times solidly as a premium, luxury product, as opposed to something you might pick up on your way into the subway.

(Talking of the Metropolitan Diary, by the way, can somebody out there with Nexis do me a favour? Find out (a) the percentage of Metropolitan Diary columns which include at least one instance of the phrase "without missing a beat"; and (b) the percentage of New York Times stories featuring the phrase "without missing a beat" which are Metropolitan Diary columns. I'd be most grateful!)

Certainly the price of newsprint has been going up in recent years, but I have my doubts that paper prices alone could justify newsstand price raises of this magnitude. The New York Times has also made large investments in colour presses, which are expensive things, and which in the present advertising climate might not have generated the extra revenue that was originally projected.

The official reason, or at least the only justification in the press release, is the addition of "several new features and sections, including the Friday 'Escapes' section". Since these sections are wholly advertising-driven, I'm not convinced: if they weren't profitable, they wouldn't exist. The release also mentions that the metropolitan edition is merely coming into line with the national edition: that would be more convincing if it wasn't for the fact that the New York Times is making a big push to become a national newspaper, bringing down distribution costs around the country. If anything, one would think that national prices would come down, rather than metropolitan prices go up.

I think the real reason for the hike is twofold. On the one hand, costs and revenues are moving in opposite directions: post September 11, the Times has devoted a lot more resources to expensive international reporting, while ad sales continue to be in the doldrums. More importantly, however, the Times can do what it likes. It's a monopoly, and people will pay whatever they have to.

But I think the internet is having an effect as well. People who buy the Times will continue to buy the Times, and continue to pay whatever it costs. But they will also die off steadily. People who have never bought the Times will be increasingly likely never to buy it, working out, quite rightly, that all the same information is right there on the web should they ever be interested in it. So to keep revenues up, the Times is going to have to keep on increasing its price. It's a curious inversion of the normal law of supply and demand: here, as demand decreases, price goes up.

Of course, if there was an alternative, the New York Times could never get away with this sort of behaviour. But there isn't. So we remain at the mercy of the benign patriarchs of 43rd Street.

Posted by Felix at 1:21 EST | Comments (4)

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

The new WTC designs

I went to the unveiling of the new plans for the World Trade Center site this morning, and they're miles ahead from the vague and unimaginitive plans we saw five months ago. There are nine plans in total, from seven architectural teams, and between them they have a lot of excellent ideas.

There are some definite surprises, chief among them that the dream team of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl – New Yorkers all – should have come up with the worst design of the lot. SOM, as well, the most experienced skyscraper-builders in the world, fell flat on their face.

A notch up in quality are the teams who had some but not all of what was needed. The urban planning duo of Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg came up with a very workable but completely unimaginative design. The team calling itself Think had no fewer than three ideas, all of which are quite clever, but none of which stand up to much scrutiny. And Norman Foster, although he does have a wonderful skyscraper, has little else.

The best designs came from Daniel Liebeskind, who stunned with a coherent, realistic and highly imaginative plan; and United Architects, with an idea which reimagines just what urban design can be all about.

The one thing which everybody did, however, was present skyscrapers as public spaces. Something's going to go up on the site, and whatever it is will have much more public access than any other tall building in the world. That's certain, now, and it's welcome, too.

At the risk of getting blogged down, so to speak, I'm going to run through each in turn, since I think it's important to point out the bad things as well as the good.

Meier et al first, then. Richard Meier was very cocky in his presentation: "We're the New York team," he said. "Some say we're the dream team." But what this team came up with looks like a classic case of design by committee. They put reflecting pools on the footprints of the twin towers, which let light through to a memorial space below – so far, so normal. Then they took the shadows which the towers cast (to the west) on September 11, and planted them with trees. One of the shadows went into the river, so that area becomes a "floating memorial plaza" which 5000 people can fit onto should they so desire. It's one of dozens of different memorials which they're dotting around Lower Manhattan, in a kind of distributed remembrance which I don't think really works. You don't want to keep on bumping unexpectedly into another memorial as you go about your daily life.

The main problem with the design is the skyscraper portion, however. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), as part of its excellent brief, told all the competing architects that "a restored skyline will provide a significant, identifiable symbol for the residents of the metropolitan area". Well, this symbol looks like nothing so much as a pair of tic-tac-toe games set at right angles to each other. Peter Eisenman tried to liken the buildings to "the fingers of two hands embracing the site," but they aren't. Rather, they block off the site (and Battery Park City) from the rest of Manhattan, reading more as barriers than as entry gates.

Next Skidmore Owings & Merrill, who teamed up with four artists, including Jessica Stockholder, to create what they call "a dense grid of vertical structures that support multiple strata of public and cultural spaces". What that means in practice is a set of no fewer than nine more-or-less-identical skyscrapers shoehorned into a very small area, with the occasional sky bridge connecting one to another. They all have sky gardens on the top, which is nice, but no matter how airy they are, street level will become dark and permanently in shadow, and it's not going to be a nice place to be.

There's also an element of the Jetsons in the way that SOM has designed the transit hub with two roads as well as the 1 and 9 subway trains running straight through it in glass tubes. The whole presentation, in fact, feels much more like the conceptual projects we all saw in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and far from anything which could ever be constructed in reality.

The odd team out of the seven is Peterson/Littenberg Architecture and Urban Design. It's a small partnership which impressed the LMDC with its approach to the site and somehow made it, as architects, to the final round. It's one of the few teams to break the rules: while the LMDC said that it didn't want to build on the footprints of the original towers, Peterson/Littenberg put an amphitheatre in one of them.

This team was also one of the prime movers beind opening up West Street into a tree-lined promenade which stretches all the way down to the Battery. It's a great idea, and one which the LMDC has adopted, but it was specifically exluded from this particular brief. Again, Peterson and Littenberg ignored the brief.

As urban planners, rather than architects, this pair spent a lot of time designing a lovely garden, and constructing a pedestrian-friendly street grid. They're the only team which not only extended the original streets into the World Trade Center site, but also added a brand new street as well. The final plan is certainly a nice place to be, but it shows very little in the way of boldness or imagination. And the new skyscrapers aren't imagined at all, beyond the fact that their height is limited to 55 stories (roughly the height of the existing American Express building). Two of them will have 35-storey campaniles on top (one a hotel, the other residential); these will serve to replace the lost elements of the New York skyline. There's very little mention of public access to the new buildings, something that is at the forefront of the other schemes.

Think, a huge team including Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Viñoly, Shigeru Ban and David Rockwell, couldn't come to any decisions at all, and instead presented three different designs. The first, called Sky Park, floats a 16-acre park into mid-air, with various buildings huddled in the darkness below. The last, called the World Cultural Center, is a crazy idea to build a latticework around the footprints of the original towers, and then slap various cultural institutions (schools, theatres, whatever) inside the latticework at various different heights. At the exact points in midair where the planes flew in to the World Trade Center would be a memorial linking the two structures. Whatever. This is a flight of fancy, it could never happen.

Think also proposed what they call a Great Room, which basically comprises enclosing most of the site in a huge 30-storey glass plaza. The roof would be held up by office buildings around the perimeter, as well as by another pair of latticework columns surrounding the footprints. Next door to the site, where the Deutsche Bank building currently sits empty, the tallest building in the world would be constructed to help out on the skyline front. The whole thing is less bad than the other two ideas, but I'm not sure there would be too much demand for offices which front straight on to a memorial, or even for any new structure of this magnitude.

Foster and Partners is definitely an improvement on the previous four. Lord (Norman) Foster knows his onions when it comes to monumental architecture, and he's designed a beautiful twisting "twinned tower" which would be a welcome addition to any city's skyline. He calls it "the most secure, the greenest and the tallest in the world," and there's no reason not to believe him. It will be filled with high tree-filled public atriums at various levels, which will provide stunning views over the rest of the site as well as far beyond. There could even be funiculars sweeping us all up the side of the building at high speed – what an attraction, and not just for tourists.

Foster has kept the footprints as voids, and placed high walls around them to set them apart and intensify the memorial experience. You can't go into them, but you can go around them, and then up a ramp into a huge green park which stretches over the top of West Street and all the way to the river. (In this way, Foster avoids the huge expense of burying West Street, freeing up those funds for other transportation or infrastructure projects.)

What keeps Foster out of the top two, however, is a certain lack of imagination. His plan is workable, and strong, but it's not really bold. Daniel Liebeskind, however, has a wonderful central idea (you can read his statement here) which he's managed to turn into a compelling architectural concept.

It all starts down in the dirt, by the huge slurry walls which stop the Hudson River from rushing in to the site. These were and are true engineering marvels: as Liebeskind says, they "withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destuction and stand eloquent". He keeps them exposed, 70 feet below ground, and then spirals up and out, into the rest of the site and beyond.

At the bottom is the museum and the memorial; at the top is a vertical "gardens of the world", rising in a glorious spike well above the rest of the skyline. The buildings in the rest of the site are extremely strong as well, especially the ones which border on what Liebeskind rather unfortunately calls the "wedge of light". This is a triangular plaza which will have no shadows each year on September 11 between the hours of 8:46am and 10:28am. It's mirrored by the Heroes Park, one of three or four green spaces in the plan. Finally, symmetrically opposite the gardens of the world is the transit hub, a center not only for PATH and subway trains, but also the point to which the "paths of heroes" – the routes taken by the fire and police forces on September 11 – converge. Everything, down to the parking area for tourist buses, has been carefully thought out and put in what feels like exactly the right place.

Finally, there's United Architects, a group including Foreign Office Architects, Greg Lynn, Kevin Kennon, RUR Architecture, and UN Studio. Somehow, they've managed to transcend all the problems which faced the other large groups in the competition, and come up with a very strong, simple and new idea.

United Architects, just like Liebeskind, go down to bedrock and build vertical sacrosanct areas around the edge of the footprints. Looking up from the bottom of their voids, however, one sees not just sky but skyscrapers too: "the memorial and the development are not divided, but linked," in the words of Greg Lynn. The effect is a cathedral-like space, where the buildings carve out a volume of light.

One enters the space walking down a sprial from Greenwich Street, passing various cultural institutions on the way; to go back up, there are elevators back to ground level and higher still, up the sides of the new buildings.

There are five of them altogether, each at least 65 stories tall, and each touching on the next at least once. At street level, there will be huge gaps between the buildings, maintaining street grids and view corridors. But 60 stories up in the air, they converge onto a minimum of five stories of contiguous space: a whole new public area, 200,000 square feet in all, high in the sky.

The buildings would all be self-standing, and could be designed by different architects, within the basic constraints of the overall plan. But they would all support each other, too, both architecturally and structurally, creating an incredibly strong and safe set of skyscrapers. They would have 29 exiting cores between them, all accessible from any building, and 43 areas of refuge, combining to create thousands of different exit routes. The tallest of the buildings, at 1,620 feet, would be the tallest in the world, but would also be much safer than the twin towers were. (Liebeskind's tallest tower, by comparison, is a more symbolic 1,776 feet. Its top, however, is filled with plants rather than offices.)

The way the five towers link to each other would create, in the words of the architects, "a new symbol of unity and interdependence"; it would also be a very impressive addition to the skyline.

Of all the plans, it seems to me that the last two are easily the best. It's hard to choose between them: they're both bold and exhilarating, but in different ways. Liebeskind creates an exciting new area of New York City; United Architects limn a whole new way of living, based as much in the air as on the ground. Of course, neither of these two visions is going to make it into reality: there will be committees and compromises and revisions galore before anything even starts getting built. And a lot of them will be for the better. But at least now, unlike five months ago, I can hope that what we will end up with at Ground Zero will be a truly wonderful piece of first-rate architecture, something the rest of the world will envy us for generations to come. Those who died on September 11 would want nothing less, for us and for them.

Posted by Felix at 18:47 EST | Comments (15)

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Broadband's killer app arrives

A standard lament in the communications industry is that American consumers have been slow to adopt broadband internet connections. DSL and cable modems have been around for years now, but the vast majority of internet users continue to stick with dialup accounts rather than upgrading.

The reason that people don't upgrade is that they consider a high-bandwidth connection to be a luxury, not a necessity. Faster web browsing is nice, as is the ability to download pictures, MP3s and applications in minutes rather than hours. But it's not a reason to spend an extra $25 a month or so – $300 a year.

In most of these cases, the reason why they're on the internet at all is email. Even web access is, for most people, a luxury: the reason that they're coughing up $20 a month to be online is that email is a necessity. And email, of all internet applications, is the one least improved by upgrading to broadband.

Now, however, Vonage has arrived. Broadband providers should be ecstatic, dialup providers worried, and traditional telecommunications companies terrified. Finally, there's a reason for just about anyone to upgrade to broadband.

Vonage is basically a way of plugging your phone into your cable modem or DSL connection rather than into a phone jack. Peter Rojas, in Slate, has the goods:

For $40 a month, Vonage gives you unlimited local and long-distance calls, along with free voice mail, caller ID, call forwarding, and call waiting. A cheaper version of the service costs $25.99 a month and includes just 500 minutes of long distance. (It's 3.9 cents a minute after the 500 minutes are used up.) With the average American household paying about $36 just for local phone service, Vonage looks like a pretty good deal.

In comparison, I'm paying Verizon $50 a month, plus $16 in taxes, just for the local component of Vonage's service. (Tax on Vonage is only 3%, or $1.20 a month on the premium package, since it's classed as a data service.)

The great thing about this service is that you don't need to plug anything into your computer. In fact, you don't even need a computer! The router plugs straight into your broadband connection, and your standard home phone plugs straight in to the router. (You then need to plug all the other phones in your home into the same router: this might involve a trip to Radio Shack and a little bit of time, depending on the size of your house. If you're in a New York apartment, it's not an issue.)

What Vonage has done is make local phone service more or less obsolete. Vonage makes no distinction between local and long-distance calls, and offers competitive rates on international calls as well. The baby bells – the companies which provide the copper wires into your home – used to have a complete monopoly on local calls. Then other companies were allowed to offer local phone service too, but still using the baby bells' copper wire, and still paying them for that service. Mobile phones offered the first opportunity to lose local phone service completely, but you couldn't dial up to the internet on them, and international calling rates remain appallingly overpriced. Also, you had to change your phone number.

With Vonage, I can keep my phone number. I can even travel with it: if I hook up my computer to a hotel's dataport, plug in the Vonage router, and plug the hotel phone into that, it's automatically become my home phone, wherever I am in the world. I could be in Moscow or Buenos Aires, and I would receive phone calls for free, and make calls to the US for free, all from my home phone number. Just think – no more overpriced hotel international phone calls! And at 10 cents a minute to Argentina, even local calls in Buenos Aires might be better placed through Vonage.

I've already persuaded my friend Stefan, in Stockholm, to sign up for the service. Even when it doesn't cost very much, people often think twice about calling internationally when it's not necessary. Now, if anybody wants to call Stefan, they can just dial a New York number, and it will go straight through to him. This is a godsend for ex-pats, even though for some reason Vonage will only post the necessary router to a US address.

I think that Vonage is going to revolutionise telecommunications. It's got good pedigree: Jeffrey Citron, the chairman and CEO, also founded Datek Online Holdings, the fourth largest US online brokerage, and Island ECN, the second largest global financial exchange. Pretty soon, competitors will spring up, and prices will come down further, to the point where Vonage plus a broadband connection will cost less than the combination of your monthly ISP charges and your monthly phone bill. At that point, it will actually be cheaper to have broadband than to have dialup.

My only worry is that the FCC, which is the creature of the baby bells, will cave in to them again, and somehow come up with regulations and taxes which put Vonage out of business. I hope it doesn't, though. There's a lot of excess bandwidth in the US, the product of wildly overoptimistic investment by telecommunications companies who thought the internet was growing much faster than it actually was. Vonage could be the perfect application to eat up that bandwidth and get the telecoms industry going again. Except for the much-hated local phone companies, of course.

Posted by Felix at 17:22 EST | Comments (2)

Sunday, December 15, 2002

The soft racism of high expectations

Community standards exist in even the largest of cities. Discussions about them tend to concentrate on whether they're good or not – whether they're epitomised more by friendly neighbours looking out for each other, or by redneck homophobes beating up guys they suspect of being gay. But there's another, less dramatic, side to community standards: an unthinking assumption that everybody else in my community is basically just like me.

Living in New York, for instance, I generally assume that anybody I meet is going to be broadly liberal and broadly secular. Every so often I'll meet a Republican, which is fun in a kind of "fancy that" kind of way; very rarely do I meet people who take their religion very seriously and who go to a house of worship on a regular basis. On the other hand, I make no such assumptions if I travel down to, say, Washington DC.

Right-wingers are often highly attuned to these kind of assumptions: they say that since journalists are generally liberal, and they generally hang out with other liberals in liberal media enclaves, there's going to be a low-level seepage of liberal bias into the news on a regular basis. They might be right. Certainly, anybody who thinks it's the job of journalism to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted (and that's a lot of journalists) will probably have something of a liberal bias in their work.

Dig down a bit deeper, below the assumptions about political leanings, and there's another assumption which I think most of us make: that the people we meet are not racist, or at least are very uncomfortable around any kind of overt racism. Whether we live in New York or Washington, we might meet people who react differently to a black kid approaching them to ask the time than they would to a white kid asking the same question. But we generally assume everybody agrees that such reactions are a bad thing: something it's right and proper to feel bad about having.

William Saletan, the chief political correspondent of Slate, is a white guy in Washington who's surrounded by a lot of other white guys in Washington who all basically believe the same thing about racism. He has a general assumption that anybody he's likely to meet isn't a racist, and he's carried that assumption all the way through into an astonishing article which gets prime placement in the e-zine over the weekend. Trent Lott isn't a racist, says Saletan: he stands up "for the autonomy of neighborhoods, states, and religious schools," and gives speeches to racists "because he wanted to be nice".

This goes way beyond the standard contrarianism we've learned to expect from Slate. Because he wanted to be nice? This is willful blindness of the first order. Saletan should read the front-page history of Lott's racism in the New York Times today by David Halbfinger. It's a great piece of reporting: Halbfinger went down to Mississippi and found out all about the kind of person that Lott used to be: his racist mother and father-figure, his racist political mentors, his racist campaigns against desegregation of his fraternity.

Lott now says that he repudiates such things – of course he says that, he's a national politician. But we've seen precious little evidence, beyond the simple fact that he says he's done it. He's had a great deal of electoral success by pandering to the white racist part of his constituency, and his response to the recent calls for his resignation seems to have followed the pattern of saying as little as possible, seeing if that will do, notching up the apology a little bit, and repeat. And he still hasn't answered the question of when, exactly, he changed his views. It can't have been easy, making a 180-degree U-turn on what was probably the single most important issue in Mississippi politics, especially considering the large number of close friends and family he would have disappointed in the process. But somehow Lott seems to have done so effortlessly, to the point at which he can barely remember it any more.

"If politeness to bigots, comfort with principles congenial to them, and amnesia about struggles for equal rights are now crimes worthy of ending people's careers, then let the inquisition begin," says Saletan. "Lott's accusers will be sorry they started it." In doing so, he seems to imply that Lott's resignation as majority leader of the Senate would be the end of his career. Far from it: he would remain senator for Mississippi, in an august institution which has happily housed the likes of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and Robert Byrd.

More interestingly, however, Saletan shows the depth to which community standards can seep into commentators' views. Anti-racist sentiment is so ingrained that Saletan simply takes Lott's latest repudiation at face value, without seemingly ever even considering the alternative hypothesis – which has been well supported by Josh Marshall, among others – that Lott is, in fact, a racist.

The fact is that just as there are church-goers in Manhattan, there are racists in Washington. Does Saletan really believe that of 100 senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives, precisely zero are racists? Especially considering the number who, like Lott, are 60-something white men who grew up in areas where, as one resident puts it in the Times article, "everybody's racist, black and white"? Or is he simply giving in to a quirk of probability theory? Let's say there's a 5% chance that any given senator is a racist. Confronted with a specific senator, the responsible journalist then gives him the benefit of the doubt, 95% certain that he's not racist. And the five racist senators continue to serve unchallenged, safe in their minority.

To assume that everybody shares one's anti-racist views is easy. But although it's not racist in and of itself, it protects racists and makes it less likely that they will be held to account. It's wrong to assume that blacks won't be able to perform as well as whites academically; it's also wrong to assume that all senators, by virtue of their position, are anti-racist. Both assumptions serve to perpetuate institutionalised racism, to use the term which was applied so famously to the Metropolitan Police in London. In general, thinking well of others is a positive trait. It's less positive, however, in journalists.

Posted by Felix at 21:01 EST | Comments (1)

Personal South Georgia

We have been in South Georgia for the last few days. I had no idea. No-one ever told me. Did you know? This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Possibly the most,- but then, how to rank? Mountains. Mountains, huge and white, loomimg, soaring out of the ocean, blue and cold. It sounds so simple but it is breathtaking, I don't have the words or capability I'm afraid, to explain it better. This is where Shackleton came to search for help after a year and a half of being stranded on a floating ice shelf. You know the story. And at the very end, the bit with the best bumslide in history, it says 'they landed on the wrong side and so had to climb across S. Georgia to get to the whaling station'. They didn't say how huge and impossible and breathtaking a hike that would be. Or that no-one has ever managed to repeat it. Forget the miraculous journey that got them this far, I don't care what you say, Shackleton was a hero. On the back of his grave is a quote by Robert Browning:

"I hold.... that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life's set prize".

I am in love with the landscape here. Truly, I think I could live here. And you could even visit me (and I could leave to visit you) as there are fishing and tourist boats coming and going the whole time (during the summer). So it's not that remote. Really.

After an inital stop off at King Edward Point to pick someone up, we went to the other side of the island, to Bird Island, a "site of special scientific interest" (SSI) so has restricted access ...certainly no access for cruise ships. It was a real honour to be allowed to visit (we had cargo to offload and there was some building work to be done too). The smell is horrible. Really awful. Fur seals. They stink. It's rank. Beats smelling salts for waking you up. Yuk. The island, however, is gorgeous. Nesting albatrosses (wanderers and black-brows), so beautful, peaceful and enormous. And a penguin colony on the side of a majestic crevasse... with 35000 nesting PAIRS. That is, 80,000 macaroni penguins at the height of the season. Breathtaking. And no fear of humans. You wouldn't ofcourse, but you could, get close enough to touch them. With their funny bright yellow head embellishment. Amazing. It is said that David Attenborough came here and said "wow". Praise indeed!

Penguins and albatrosses appear unthreatened by humans which is more than can be said for the fur seals. Territorial. And so many of them that it's impossible to not be in someone's territory. So we were armed with sticks upon arrival. Back on King Edward Point however, there is more space and are more elephant seals. These ones are beautiful flobbedob creatures with large round eyes and peaceful mongolian faces. They're territorial too I guess but not very scary. The fur seals are scary and bite people. They look more like city traders with stuck up noses and long chinese emperor whiskas. In the water, however, they are sleek and beautiful.

Travelling between the two bases was also breathtaking (I need another word I know. Sorry.) In the water, seals everywhere, playing. And penguins! Loads of them flying through the air, it's called 'porpoising'. They were porpoising. That's when they fling themselves in the water and fly upstream like a skimming stone. So contrary to their land-style. Penguins are the comedy relief when it all gets a bit too much, too astounding, too enormous, too, takingawayofbreathlike. Nothing like a comedy penguin to remind you that you're still on planet Earth after all.

We also had the amazing opportunity to sail close to the shoreline, past a number of old Nowegian whaling stations. Like abandoned shanty towns, rusting and forgotten, falling into the sea. A reminder of days when the sea around here was very red. And not so long ago either. Discarded towns hidden in bays defined by glaciers, mountains, wildlife, rock formations, icy sea.

So that's where we've been, we are in the sub-Antarctic here, the 'banana belt' but are headed back to the colder regions now. First east for a long way to avoid sea ice and then south-west, crawling in along the coast towards Halley. Sea ice conditions look great for our purposes and I think everyone is optimistic that we'll make it in with good time. I think the current arrival date is estimated to be around christmas time so the big festivities may have to wait until New Year after most of the cargo has been unloaded. Time is still flying by on the ship, much to my astonishment and enjoyment. I wonder how there can be enough minutes in the day at home to achieve anything at all! Love to you all. This place has been calling me for so long and it's all my dreams coming true. xx

Posted by Rhian at 12:33 EST | Comments (2)

Monday, December 09, 2002

Three To See The King

Magnus Mills, Three To See The King:

How indeed was I to pass the time until Simon left? Before now I'd seldom been concerned with such questions. Existing in a house of tin was an end unto itself, a particular state of being, and time didn't come into it. You did not need to know what time it was, for example, to witness dry lightning as it flashed across the plain at dusk. Or to feel the threat of an approaching storm. These things occurred independently of time, which was why there was no clock in my house. I simply had no need for one. Nonethless, as I led Simon back inside for breakfast, I realized that time was already beginning to slow down.

Rhian Salmon, South Atlantic:

Days on the ship are defined by meal times. In between, we have conversations, play games, write, read, think and watch the wide ocean from the deck of the ship. It's like summer camp. It's beautiful. There is time for everything: to get to know people slowly, to be lighthearted, to socialise, to dissappear on your own. It's the perfect life in many ways since we also have a destination and a purpose.

Read this book. It's short and sweet and was recommended to me by two friends whose opinions I don't take lightly. I met Magnus Mills once on the stairwell at Anna's old place. He won't remember me and I don't suppose he'd want to be remembered either. There's a thread of that in this book too. The peace in solitude, the timelessness. With little to do, my days are filled frutifully and with satisfaction. I do not have the sense of Time pressurising me continually. However at home, in the evening, I don't know what to do with myself in an empty house. I rattle and fuss and reach for the phone. What is different here, where there is nothing I can do?

Posted by Rhian at 11:33 EST | Comments (6)

Personal December 6: Falklands - Signy

(Note from Felix: This is being posted on December 9 as email somehow doesn't seem to get through BAS on weekends. So the first update has already arrived, and is sitting in the comments section.)

Thanks to all for jumping on the website comments boxes... it's great to have the feeling of a conversation from such a remote place! Days have actuallly flown by since my last entry and there's no chance of boredom setting in. Out on deck, sea birds, also saw some dolphins and then today, my first icebergs! Fantastic!

The Falklands were surreal, well worth a visit were it not that they're so damn far away from everywhere. People say there's a similarity with the Hebrides and I believe it although surely I should have been to the latter first? Topsy turvey. Go to the Shackleton diary website for photos of the place. I don't know what I expected (Patagonia?) but not that. Long white sandy beaches on the edge of bleak and barren emptiness. Windswept, wild, more remote than remote but never far from a reminder of the huge military presence.

Penguins on the beach are as comical in real life as all the documentaries suggest and just inland we found them nesting, hundreds of them sitting on eggs, building up nests with pebbles, no fear, just metres away. The thriving metropolis of Stanley has a handful of pubs and great shops that specialise in unlikely combinations like carpets and cd players or earrings and tracksuits. The accent is some kind of cross-breed of kiwi, west country and south african with an unknown corner of Scotland thrown in for a giggle. Sounds great though; the chameleon dialect of english.

Back on the ship, we've been sailing for a couple of days and are due into Signy tomorrow morning. The sea there is too shallow for the Shackleton to get right up to land so unloading of cargo and people is usually carried out by boat. There's been a lot more sea ice than usual lately though so they were hoping be able to dock right up against the ice and walk/skidoo in. Difficulties have however already arisen as recent temperatures around +10C mean the sea ice is rapidly melting (so we can't walk/skidoo there) and there's also lots of ice floating around (so we can't get in by little boat). I have no idea what will happen but it sounds like getting ashore is unlikely for me. A shame since there's meant to be wonderful wildlife and walking to be experienced there.

Considering how little there is to do, time on the ship has been flying by. I described a typical day in the comments of the last entry but added to that tough life ofsleeping, eating, seawatching, eating, drinking and sleeping we have now started adding parties. Roger should also be bristling with pride knowing his daughter is playing backgammon and cribbage every night...all those painful nights teaching me game etiquette as a kid have paid off! I think there might even be a photo in the next Shackleton diary to prove it.

That's all for now. Summary is, I'm as happy as a kid in a bathtub (with loads of bubbles and icebergs and dolphins and flying things and friends).Rh.

Posted by Rhian at 10:51 EST | Comments (5)

Sunday, December 08, 2002

Heaven

Did you know that Krzysztof Kieslowski has a posthumous movie out? It's called Heaven, and it was slated to be the first in a new trilogy, called Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. It has the allegorical strength that we have come to expect from Kieslowski; indeed, its simplicity and directness represents something of a return to the Dekalog days. The director is Tom Tykwer, who doesn't quite have Kieslowski's sense of visual magic and wonderment, but who can craft some astonishing shots all the same.

Somehow, despite Cate Blanchett in the lead and distribution by Miramax, Heaven seems to have fallen through the cracks this autumn: I, for one, didn't even notice when it came out, and it's gone nowhere at the US box office. (Just as with All or Nothing, I owe my local rep cinema, the Pioneer Theater, many thanks for giving me the opportunity to see it.) Maybe the problem is that it looks like a classic europudding: a French-German co-production of a Polish script shot in Italian and English by a German director. But if you're a Kieslowski fan, you should definitely check it out.

The story begins when Philippa (Blanchett), an English teacher in Turin, leaves a bomb in the office of a local drug dealer who is responsible for killing both her husband and her pupils. The assassination attempt goes awry, however, and four innocents are killed instead. When Philippa learns this, her life loses all meaning, and only the love of the translator in her interrogation room, Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) saves her and redeems her.

Philippa doesn't even particularly want to be saved: devastated by the effects of her bomb, she agrees to Filippo's escape plan only so that she can have a second attempt to kill the drug lord. Once he's dead, she says, she will happily pay for what she has done, but of course by that point she's starting to reciprocate Filippo's love, and runs away with him instead.

Philippa and Filippo share not only their given names but also their birthday, and for much of the second half of the film they even look almost identical, with shorn heads, white t-shirts and jeans, angels with dirty faces. When they finally couple, at sunset, under a tree, we see them in silhouette, and it's not all that easy to tell which is which.

This is not a naturalistic film: while Philippa has a comprehensive enough forensic background to know that she can insist on giving her answers in English, it never seems to occur to her that as someone responsible for the deaths of four people, she might do well to ask for a lawyer. And by the end of the film and a final shot reminiscent of Breaking the Waves, all pretense at realism has been thrown to the skies.

For his part, Tykwer has gone to great lengths to get his film to look just right. The stunning shots of the Italian countryside in and around Montepulciano are matched only by some astonishing SpaceCam vertical photography of Turin shot straight down from above. The credits even said something about parts of the movie being filmed on location in Oxfordshire, as though Italy didn't look Italian enough for some scenes. In any case, I can't readily think of another film which has so many helicopter and crane shots: it's airborne not only in spirit. Even when the camera is very low, such as at the beginning, when it looks up past Philippa at the building she's about to bomb, or at the very end, it's focussed on the heavens.

He's less successful with the score, which is reliant mainly on excruciatingly dull solo-piano pieces by Arvo Pärt. And he only scores .500 with the leads: Blanchett gives her all in a performance of searing beauty and pain, stealing the film and leaving no oxygen for Ribisi to breathe. If we believe his love for her it is because of her, not him.

A word about authorship: I haven't suddenly joined the camp of the screenwriters, who think that they, and not the directors, should generally get the "a film by" credit. All the same, occasionally one comes across a film which is more writer than director. True Romance is one; Heaven is another. I would guess that if you like this film you'll say it's by Kieslowski; if you don't like it, you'll say it's by Tykwer. I'm one of the former.

Posted by Felix at 11:05 EST | Comments (0)

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

The point of tipping

I went upstate on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and stayed at the Hudson House in Cold Spring, "the second oldest continually operating inn in the state of New York". It's a pleasant enough hotel, a nice place to spend the night if you're travelling in the Hudson valley, but not the sort of place I'd normally be tempted to blog about.

But in this bucolic setting, proudly described as "quaint" in the hotel's promotional literature, I found something a little jarring. On entering the room, the first thing I noticed was a little envelope propped up against the mirror. Here's what it said:

Thank you for staying with us!
Your Housekeeper has been _________. We hope that everything done for you has met with your satisfaction. Your Housekeeper has tried to make your stay with us as pleasant as possible. If there is anything we can do to make your stay even more pleasant, please let us know.
If you wish to leave anything for your Housekeeper's effort, we are providing this envelope.
Please come back and stay with us again soon. It has been our pleasure to have you as our guest.
The Management

I hadn't seen anything like this before, but apparently it's quite common, since the envelope is manufactured by the American Hotel Register Co., of Northbrook, IL, which helpfully provides a reorder number on the front. My Housekeeper, Irene, had equally helpfully filled in her name in the blank provided.

The following morning, I went down to breakfast, which is for hotel guests only. At the bottom of the breakfast menu, a notice in block capitals said that although the cost of the breakfast was included in the room rate, a gratuity was not included.

Twice, then, I was hit up for tips by a hotel in a none-too-subtle manner. I can see why they had to be unsubtle about it, though: since most hotel guests consider both housekeeping and breakfast to be part of the service they're paying for in the room rate, they see no need to tip.

People don't customarily leave a tip when paying their bill at a hotel: I think it's assumed that service is included not only in the room rate but also in the inflated prices for things like the minibar. (At the St Regis in Manhattan, the New York Times informs us, room-service tea, including finger sandwiches, scones and a fruit plate, costs $102.17.)

At the Hudson House and places like it, however, there's no room service and no minibar. Even so, I was opposed to tipping. It's hard to decide to tip at the Hudson House, but not to tip at higher-end hotels or at lower-end B&Bs where the owners do all the work. And in fact it's extremely difficult to tip one's maid in the vast majority of hotels, since she obviously couldn't take any money you left out unless it was very clearly marked.

Also, it's impossible to calculate the tip using the normal percentage technique. Since the cost and/or value of the housekeeping and the breakfast are unknown, you can't divide them by five to get a tip amount.

All the same, it's hard to justify withholding tips from maids when one tips the surly barista at the neighbourhood coffee shop. I guess the difference is that the barista is basically just getting loose change, maybe the occasional buck on a big order, while if one places money in an envelope it'd better be something a bit more substantial.

In general, though, I'm sure that these envelopes and menu notices are a regressive phenomenon. Tipping is a bad habit, and one which society as a whole should be working to abolish: the more service compris restaurants the better. Service personnel should be paid a decent wage, and customers should be spared the difficulty of working out how much to leave: if you normally double the tax, should you tip 20% for really good service? How much should you deduct for bad service? Should you include the cover charge when calculating the tip? What about the tax? And that expensive bottle of wine? The situation of sitting in a hotel eating breakfast and being asked to calculate the tip on a nonexistent bill is just one of many decisions we shouldn't be asked to make.

All the same, I was overruled on the breakfast, and a tip was left. In fact, it had to be planned out carefully: after the meal was over, two of us had to stay at the table, while a third went up to her room, got some cash, and came back with it so that when we departed the tip would be there. I won on the housekeeper, however. She left a large piece of furniture blocking the window, and the duvet cover was upside-down, with the cold brass buttons up at the head of the bed rather than at the foot, where they won't be felt. No tips for that.

Posted by Felix at 15:29 EST | Comments (10)

Monday, December 02, 2002

All or Nothing

The great British film director Mike Leigh has come out with a new film – not that you'd be likely to have noticed if you live in the US. Despite critical and commercial success with his last three releases, Secrets & Lies, Career Girls, and Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing seems to have vanished without a trace, playing at 15 cinemas for two weeks and then disappearing altogether. I saw it at my local second-run art-house cinema (not too many of those to go round) only one month after it opened.

But in a way, it's more surprising that Secrets & Lies ended up with with more than $13 million at the box office and an Oscar nomination to boot than it is that All or Nothing has managed to pull in less than one percent of that figure. Insofar as UK films do well across the pond, they seem to be either costume dramas or comedies; Mike Leigh, on the other hand, specialises in the kind of closely-observed working-class kitchen-sink pieces which generally don't do well even when it's a big-name American helming.

And while Brenda Blethyn had a wonderful opportunity, in Secrets & Lies, to indulge in wide-barrelled melodrama, Timothy Spall, in All or Nothing, is quite the opposite: shut up, worn down, a man who essentially has the same expression on his face for 90% of the film. Here he shows nothing of the natural exuberance we saw in Life is Sweet: his south London minicab driver would consider liver in lager to be a depressing joke rather than an unmissable business opportunity.

The film is set over a long weekend on a typically bleak council estate, where we concentrate on three families struggling to keep things together. Spall has a common-law wife (Lesley Manville) who despairs of the situation she's found herself in, and eventually cracks; an overweight daughter (Alison Garland) who never even comes close to breaking out of her shell; and an even more overweight son (James Corden) who rages in a late-adolescent way against everything and everyone, especially his mother. Meanwhile, a single mother watches her daughter fall pregnant by an angry and abusive young man, and the daughter of a pair of alcoholics tries to demonstrate some degree of control over her life by teasing a shy young boy and stealing other girls' boyfriends.

But All or Nothing is not unremittingly bleak in the way that, say, Nil by Mouth was. In a rare case of directorial flinching, Leigh actually provides the film with two endings. The first comes at the emotional climax of the film, when Spall finally breaks down and Manville attempts to comfort him. Tellingly, however, Manville never requites Spall's declaration of love, and after they kiss, we get the following exchange (or something very like it):

Spall: Shall we go to bed?
Manville: Yes, we've got to get up very early.

We then fade to black, and enter the coda: an upbeat scene in a hospital, of all places, where everybody seems to have had an overnight spa treatment and laughter flows freely. The other story lines are forgotten: we leave the drunks passed out over each other, and the single mother and her single mother-to-be stuck on the sofa, with nowhere to turn. Only the drunks' daughter (Sally Hawkins, in a role which recapitulates that of Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet) seems to have learned anything, shocked into reality by the degree to which her teasing has been taken seriously. We only appreciate the power we have when we see it go too far.

One thing for which we really should be grateful is the way in which Leigh is attempting to break the mold of gritty, working-class filmmaking by spending a lot of time and effort lighting and framing every shot. No hand-held graininess here: Leigh is closer, in this sense, to Spike Lee than he is to someone like Ken Loach. The director of photography, Dick Pope, doesn't romanticise the housing estate, but he gives the characters dignity by shooting them all with the care and attention that he would give a king.

That said, All or Nothing will work very well on the small screen as well as in the cinema. If you've missed your chance to grab its theatrical release, I highly recommend you rent it when you get the chance.

Posted by Felix at 10:18 EST | Comments (3)

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