High Speed 2

Rory Sutherland, in the Spectator, gets it right again:

"I think it says something about the priorities of the UK’s financial sector that you can take flights from London City airport to Jersey, Zurich (and Liechtenstein), Bern, Basel, Geneva, Nice (i.e. Monaco, a ‘sunny place for shady people’) and the Isle of Man (a rainy place for shady people). But not to Britain’s third city.

It says something too about the priorities of Mancunians that you can fly direct from Manchester airport to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Las Vegas and Barbados but not to Luton, Gatwick, Stansted, London City or Southend.

And all this also says something about how much importance people attach to getting between Manchester and London half an hour quicker. Not much.

There are two million people who live in Kent and Sussex and another million and a bit who live in Essex. All these people might find it takes half the time to fly to Manchester via a nearby airport than to get there via Euston — London’s nastiest and worst-connected station by far. I’m sure that, if offered £40 billion, Michael O’Leary would agree to operate these routes. Yet currently it seems demand isn’t there. Perhaps people are perfectly happy with the current speed."

I went to Leeds a week ago. There was a socket on the train so I could plug my phone in. I could send emails. Another half-hour in bed would have been nice (not that HS2 would help with Leeds, would it?) but it's not the top infrastructure priority for Britain.

Sutherland continues: "You see, in technical terms, a business trip between Manchester or Birmingham and London involves that unit of time which we businesspeople call ‘a day out of the office’.
And 20 years hence, after £40 billion pounds has been spent, that same trip will involve, um, ‘a day out of the office’."

I was in Leeds Court from 9 to 10.30 and back at my desk around lunchtime.

Ed Miliband

The chances are, as things stand at the moment, that Ed Miliband be running the country after the next election. Ukip splits the Conservative vote while, "When Clegg jumped into bed with Cameron, just under half of his erstwhile supporters leapt into Labour’s arms," the Spectator tells us.

The Economist's correspondent takes up the theme with an interesting analysis of exactly who Miliband is appealing to and why. The aim is to "unite Mr Miliband’s coalition while driving a wedge between parts of the Conservative coalition", so "Freezing energy bills ... divides free-market Tories from blue-collar conservatives. Building houses ... drives a wedge between Tory NIMBYs and those who are (or whose children are) struggling to get on the housing ladder. Extending the school day ... splits modernising “One Nation” Tories from more libertarian or socially conservative ones" but at the same time each policy unites various actual and potential Labour voters.

I would add two things. First, since Miliband only needs 35% and has no party to his left, there is a lot to be said for following a core vote strategy.

Second, the freezing energy bills policy is a monstrously stupid piece of economic illiteracy. It may therefore be aimed at those Ukip voters who defected from Labour. (For details of Geoffrey Bloom's economics, see this piece he apparently wrote recently. Actually don't. Just this bit is enough: "It is my belief low flat tax with high thresholds will either flat line or increase revenue". Or this: "To those who criticise Ukip, always anonymous for some reason, for “back of an envelope numbers” - let me argue they work better on the back of an envelope than reams of Government statistics which never add up.")  Note that, so Wikipedia tells me, "UKIP finished in second place in the 2012 Rotherham by-election ... second in ... Barnsley Central in 2011. UKIP also came second in 2012 in the Middlesbrough by-election and third in the Croydon North by-election, which were held on the same day as Rotherham" - that is a lot of ex-Labour voters who might be tempted back by new idiocies. On the other hand, perhaps Nick Clegg is trying to woo them with his moronic 'free school meals for millionaires' children' idea.

Random links

1. Oswin Beingsick, personal trainer. Nominative determinism?

2. You have to take pleasure where you find it with Windows: apparently, there is "in many cases a sense of satisfying sword play in executing the two-handed finger strike of Ctrl-Alt-Del." The BBC is to thank for finding that apercu for us.

3. Fancy being an MP? There is no charge for pre-registering for the open primary for this safe Conservative seat. You don't even need to be a member of the Party.

4. Peter Oborne continues to be readable. This piece, about Lord Finkelstein embodying "the collapse of boundaries between the media and politics", is interesting and revealing. Some of the comments describe it as mean-spirited or unpleasant. I don't think it is meant that way. Oborne says that "Mr Finkelstein is a decent, highly intelligent man, who lacks an ounce of malice". Oborne is just bloody-minded, in my view, and if he thinks that Finkelstein's way of life is an affront to media ethics then the fact that Finkelstein is not a bad person won't stop him saying that. That said, the tone of this sentence is not the nicest: "Meanwhile, we should all thank David Cameron for recommending his old chum to the peerage and finally making an honest man of Lord Finkelstein of Pinner, who will fit in well at the House of Lords: there are a lot of people in there just like him."

Nuclear near-misses

Some scary stuff from the New Yorker, including this: "In 1960, the computer at the North American Air Defense Command (norad) in Colorado Springs warned, with 99.9-per-cent certainty, that the Soviets had just launched a full-scale missile attack against North America. The warheads would land within minutes. When it was learned that Khrushchev was in New York City, at the United Nations, and when no missiles landed, officials concluded that the warning was a false alarm. They later discovered that the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Airbase, in Greenland, had interpreted the moon rising over Norway as a missile attack from Siberia." A reminder that human judgment is not always worse than computer analysis.

10 email commandments

Some good stuff from Tim Harford (although badly formatted - I suspect it looked better in the FT).

This is one I do already: don't file emails. "A fine research paper with the title “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?” by Steve Whittaker and others at IBM Research concluded that, broadly, yes, you are. ... They found that an email search typically takes about 15 seconds, while a hunt through folders takes about a minute. (Some users also just scrolled up and down their inboxes; typically it took about 30 seconds to find an email!) Just to be clear: it took four times as long to find emails using the painstaking-to-set-up system than it did using the “archive and forget” system. Nor were “filers” any more likely to find the email they were looking for than “searchers”."

I have sympathy with this one too: "If you’d like to really aggravate a busy person, send them an email with an attachment saying “please see the attached letter”, and add no elaboration. This is a three-for-one communication catastrophe. First, you are impersonating the behaviour of someone trying to spread a virus. Second, your message is hard to read on a phone and, on some systems, is not searchable. Third, you’re slowing everything down. This isn’t a children’s treasure hunt, where each message points to the next message. It’s a failed attempt to communicate with a busy person."

And one to remember: "Be nice. You never know who will get to read your email – the jury at your fraud trial; the NSA; your partner; your boss."

The Amplituhedron

This is an article which gives one the pleasant but illusory sense of being just on the verge of understanding something quite important. It starts "Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality" and carries on from there.Here are some bits I liked:

"The positive Grassmannian is the slightly more grown-up cousin of the inside of a triangle." I liked '"slightly" and the idea that there might be family gatherings where positive Grassmanians just manage to pull rank on the insides of triangles.

"They have also found a “master amplituhedron” with an infinite number of facets, analogous to a circle in 2-D, which has an infinite number of sides. Its volume represents, in theory, the total amplitude of all physical processes. Lower-dimensional amplituhedra, which correspond to interactions between finite numbers of particles, live on the faces of this master structure." One can just imagine the stunted minor amplitudehra clinging on to the surfaces of their majestic master for dear life.

"The discovery of the amplituhedron could cause an even more profound shift, Arkani-Hamed said. That is, giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry.

"“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless.”" To the layman, this all sounds very much like theology, except that Mr Arkani-Hamed would have said "in a very real sense" instead.

Prince Philip: big in Japan

Back in the 1980s, the Economist tells us, Japan was importing a lot of ivory. The future for elephants was looking bleak. What could the world do to save the elephant?

Efforts were made to change Japanese tastes. But you need a major cultural icon to effect a major cultural shift. Luckily, the Royal Family's top diplomat took charge: "the big breakthrough ... came when Britain’s Prince Philip gave a rousing speech at an event organised by the World Wildlife Fund, which encouraged Japan’s crown prince to speak out. ... Ivory became uncool."

Good old Prince Philip.