Larger version here.
Is the Euro doomed?
So the Irish government has published its €15 billion ‘austerity programme’ — 10 billion in public spending cuts and 5 billion in extra taxes. Since the Irish economy is a tenth of the size of the UK’s, multiply those numbers by ten to put them into a British perspective. The standard media narrative is that the cuts are the price to be paid for being ‘rescued’ by the EU and the IMF. But you could read it another way: that Ireland is rescuing the Eurozone by stopping the bond markets going for Portugal and, after that, Spain. The strange thing is that this is, almost by definition, a doomed enterprise. There is no rational way of appeasing markets when they are in irrational moods. As Keynes observed, markets can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.
The more sinister possibility, of course, is that there is a semi-rational element in the nervous instability of the bond markets. Could it be that the reason they believe the bailouts won’t work is because the currency markets have decided that there’s a sporting chance of bringing down the Euro, and that significant players have begun to bet on that, in much the same way that George Soros started betting against sterling in 1987?
Tim Wu on Net Neutrality
Terrific interview which provides a really good explanation of neutrality and how it should apply in the wireless world — and how Google is beginning to think like a Telco. Suddenly made me wonder if Google was more badly burnt by its failure to run a phone shop than we had believed. I’m currently reading Wu’s new book
Happy Birthday ORG!
The Open Rights Group is 5 today!
How golf ought to be
Having been brought up in Ireland, I love links (i.e. sandy, windswept, seaside) golf courses. I particularly like the way these courses can humble even golf’s most prominent billionaires whenever a major championship is held on one.
This is the view from the fifth tee at Sheringham, a lovely links course in North Norfolk.
Workspace
Sometimes, you just can’t beat an olde-worlde paper notebook. Highly portable, great screen resolution, excellent, intuitive user interface and infinite battery life.
Only problem: it’s hard to back up. On the other hand, it’ll still be readable in 200 years. Which is more than can be said for any of my digital data.
Where the computer went
This Google video provides a company-approved tour of one of its data centres (aka server farms). I’m writing about the environmental impact of cloud computing at the moment, and rediscovered it when going through the research files for my book. It provides an interesting glimpse of the heavy engineering that lies behind cloud computing.
Toolbox
So were the Israelis behind the Stuxnet worm?
According to the NYTimes, it’s beginning to look that way.
Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.
Their conclusion, while not definitive, begins to clear some of the fog around the Stuxnet worm, a malicious program detected earlier this year on computers, primarily in Iran but also India, Indonesia and other countries.
The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.
The new forensic work narrows the range of targets and deciphers the worm’s plan of attack. Computer analysts say Stuxnet does its damage by making quick changes in the rotational speed of motors, shifting them rapidly up and down.
Changing the speed “sabotages the normal operation of the industrial control process,” Eric Chien, a researcher at the computer security company Symantec, wrote in a blog post.
Those fluctuations, nuclear analysts said in response to the report, are a recipe for disaster among the thousands of centrifuges spinning in Iran to enrich uranium, which can fuel reactors or bombs. Rapid changes can cause them to blow apart. Reports issued by international inspectors reveal that Iran has experienced many problems keeping its centrifuges running, with hundreds removed from active service since summer 2009…
More detail here.
“Balliol College, Cambridge”
This is the old Spillers flour mill next to Cambridge station. The buildings around it have been razed for housing ‘development’ — ie hideous apartment blocks. But the mill itself is a listed building & so the developers have to keep it. The caption comes from a speech Ronald Knox made at the Cambridge Union, when he referred to the building as “Balliol College, Cambridge” — a jibe at Oxford’s most intellectually distinguished – but architecturally jumbled – college.