We're standing on the shoulders of giants :-)

(Live stream is a bit shaky, wait a bit if it's not working)

A while back we got the news that the G8 was being moved from (I think) Sardinia, to l'Aquila inland. At which point what I'm told was a fantastic plan had to be scrapped. Because it required a coastline.,

But the new plan is pretty good too!

Update : Here's a link to the news, rather than the twitter feed. I swear I had nothing to do with that headline.

Palin's gone. Resigned, quit, walked away, flounced, I think is the best word, having just read the transcript of her speech. What's interesting is that Josh Marshall, writing at TPM last week suggested that the recent, unflattering Vanity Fair profile was just the tip of the iceberg

"I have little doubt and some direct knowledge that we'll be hearing new shocking details of who this woman is for months, perhaps years, to come"

and now she's gone. Apparently she told a reporter  "You are naive if you don't see a full-court press on the national level, picking apart a good point guard." I think somebody, somewhere has landed a story big enough to bring her down. I certainly don't think she's left our TVs for good.

Here's what I wrote when she first appeared.

"Karlovic is an enormous specimen, and not the kind of man you want to be drawn against in the first round of the table-tennis tournament down your local naturist club."

I have no idea whatsoever about what's going through the mind of whoever is writing the BBCs live coverage.

When I saw that some of the railways was due to be nationalised I was quite cheerful, but it turns out that it will only be held in public trust till it can be farmed out again.

Guardian piece here

The thing about railway lines, roads and fixed phone networks is that they're natural monopolies. Nobody is going to build a road to 'compete' with the A1, or an alternate railway line parallel to the London-Edinburgh line. That's why things like this should be owned by the state. By all means ask people to compete to provide services over the lines/roads, but handing them over to companies is just creating monopolies.

That successive owners misjudged the value of this particular monopoly is no reason to create it a third time...

Hat tip to the Boy McGuire

Remember I told you about putting babies in buckets? Here's a photo

Below is a picture of one of Lisa's favorite toys. But what is it?

Poll #1419871
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What is it?

World Not Actually Saved

Fate of Planet Back in the Balance as EU Leaders fail to deliver

It's today!

It seems that there's a special edition of the International Herald and Tribune running today.

It's particularly special because it's from the future.

It's got a website here.

Good day today, in that stuff got done. I've been meaning to write a bit about what I've been up to at work because it's been interesting. But it's also been tiring. Things I got done today included...

* Big schedule of the 49 projects I've got to see delivered before the end of the year complete. To my surprise about half are already adequately resourced.
* Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise heading to Greenland to rendezvous with some of the world's top ice scientists to
commence a three month expedition. Much interest from some big media. High hopes for this one. Today briefed our web producer for the trip, and sorted out our first media - an interview with kids radio in Sweden (it will get bigger, promise)
* Another Greenpeace ship heading to the Cook Islands and then further into the Pacific to document the impacts of climate change. Sorting out legal forms for on board journalists.
* Top secret briefing on exciting plan. Having secrets to keep is a definite perk of the job.
* Learn codename of secret project my team is supposed to support after team member told they're working on it. Now need to find someone who can tell me/them what the hell it is. Secrecy getting in the way is a definite downside to the job.
* German consortium announces 400 billion for solar power from North Africa. Massive coverage in Germany with lots of Greenpeace comment, concoct plan to repeat the trick in the rest of the world.
* Discover our nuclear campaign is getting good coverage in the FT. Try to find out who to congratulate.

And tomorrow we've got a really nice project rolling out, about which more later.

When it's in quotation marks presumably

"Analysis of chemical "isotopes" in the 60,000-year-old fossil suggest a carnivorous diet, matching results from other Neanderthal specimens." - full story

Are these fake isotopes?

Mostly a point to Juan Cole's excellent post on recent Iranian political history. His argument is that reformists* constitute a large majority in Iranian politics, so Mousavi's claims of victory are entirely credible.

One thing that does seem to be clear at this distance is that Ahmedinijad has engaged in massive and not very subtle vote rigging. Claiming you won in your rival's strongholds doesn't really add credibility.

* although we should all remember that Mousavi, while a moderately reform minding Iranian politician is extraordinarily conservative by our standards, and a paid up subscriber to Iran's theocracy...

Not much, but a little. The Obama administration has walked away from the most ridiculous of Bush's negotiating positions. This was the one which said developing nations had to make cuts in their absolute level of emissions in the next few years.

Right now the average Chinese or Indian emits a fraction of what the average American or European does. They're also, on average, a lot poorer, and those two nations have made relatively little contribution to the mess we're currently in. So by insisting they cut their absolute emissions any deal became pretty much impossible, you'd have been asking the developing nations to stay poor in order for us to stay rich. They couldn't agree, and thus the negotiations were effectively sabotaged.

The new position is the right one. Developing nations like China will try and grow their economies in the cleanest way they can. This is referred to as a 'deviation from business as usual'. So you take IEA predictions of what emissions are likely to be if nobody does anything, and the developing nations aim to come in under that. At present there's no talk of these commitments being binding - for that to happen there should be money on the table from the developed world to pay for these cuts. By the time of the next commitment period (2017) nations like China and India should be crossing into the land of absolute cuts, just as nations like South Korea should be doing this time round.

It's not like these nations aren't already starting to try. China's new renewable target is a big step forward, and India's solar mission is equally impressive. These kind of economy wide programmes are just what's needed.*

* It's worth pointing out that the China one is what you'd expect, all central targets and state investments, while the India one will be more market driven, and is aimed at building up an export industry at the same time. It's the results that matter, not the mechanism.

I know very little about Iran. Still, here's what I think is going to happen in the election. I think Ahmedinijad will win, and do so on the strength of rural votes. And then I think a lot of people in Tehran will be furious, because if you're in an environment where the media isn't reliable, but everyone you know is voting for your guy then losing is going to be hard to take.

Seems like a recipe for trouble to me.

Reading this made me think that as assorted fiscal stimuli and rescue packages wend their way from legislature to reality it's getting increasingly hard to track what's actually going on with taxpayers money. Supposing the optimists are right and things really are stabilising it's not clear that the eyepopping sums being announced between October and January are actually going to be disbursed.

A lot of the money was in the form of guarantees, as governments underwrote banks which now seem less likely to fail. So - no need to pay out. The promise of support prevented the need for it.

Some of the money was in capital infusions which banks have started to repay. In this respect the limits on executive compensation and other restraints seem to have served one useful purpose - convincing executives to give the money back faster. The banks also seem to have been able to recapitalise more easily than most people expected.

Governments have also aquired a lot of assets, which may or may not be worthless. I suspect that the losses on these won't be total - just that they'll turn out to have been eyewateringly bad investments. Unless you believe this prevented the financial system from melting down - in which case they were a bargain.

A lot of direct stimulus spending has been announced and probably will happen. But if the recovery is strong some of that may find itself funding previously planned spending and so be 'saved'.

In the build up to the G20 I was trying to get hold of accurate numbers about how much was being spent, invested and so on in order to make comparisons. It was clear then that the press had long since given up distinguishing between real spending, guarantees, printing money (quantitative easing) and all the other instruments central banks were deploying. If they saw two numbers they just added them together even if they had no more in common than apples and hedgehogs.

Now the dust might be settling it will be even more important to let the public know just what was done, who it was done to, how much it cost and what we got for our money. It's likely to be a horrendously complicated exercise, but without it it's going to be very hard to work out just what happened.

Update : This represents both progress toward an answer and an illustration of the problem. It's a nice graphical breakdown of what has been made available in the USA. What it doesn't show is what was actually spent and who got it.

So it seems there is much support for the idea of a picnic. Sounds like a fine plan. Would people prefer Saturday or Sunday? I was about to say something about being able to shop on Saturdays, but of course England is a civilised place and you can shop on Sunday's too. (luxury, I'm telling you...)

Where do people picnic in London? Hyde Park springs to mind although is presumably full of (other) tourists, I've no idea what the other options might be.

The other question is would a picnic work for bateleur and lathany who have kids to wrangle - or should we meet up separately?

In just under a couple of months time we'll be back in England, enjoying the Yorkshire Dales, the Oxfordshire countryside and possibly old London Town.

We'll be in Oxford for a week starting Saturday 1st August. Well, technically we're in Witney, but we'll be visiting. After that - so 8/9th we're thinking of visiting London on a mission to see people I haven't seen in a long time. So - if you'd like to meet up and say hello to Lisa, my better two thirds, and myself, let me know. And, if you're in London, let me know where in London. I have no memory whatsoever for the various manors people have decamped to, but I'm well aware that if we stay on the wrong side of town we're facing a two hour trek with a tired baby to reach you. That's something we'd like to avoid.

Then we're off back to Holland via the Harwich Ferry, which might be a chance to see undyingking ?

The Dutch press are more surprised than anything else about their team's victory over the English at Lords. They can't convey how shocking it is, simply because they have to start their articles by explaining about Cricket, 20/20, the World Cup and so on.

Last time the Dutch cricket team were in the news it was for registering one of the worst performances in history. Including conceding 36 off an over to Herschelle Gibs, so you can forgive them the confusion.

On the plus side, I watched the highlights of the India and West Indies matches yesterday and got my first taste of 20/20. It's a very different game to even the one day stuff, and looked very entertaining.