Brown's problem in a nutshell.

A story on the BBC News website really sums up the Prime Minister's problems. He handwrites person letters of condolence to relatives of servicemen and women who had died in Afghanistan or Iraq. This is undoubtedly a good thing for a PM to be doing in a limited war. Yet in the case of Jamie Janes, from the Grenadier Guards, the 'scrawled' letter misspelled many words including, unbelievably, the serviceman's name.

The original Sun article has more information, including the spelling mistakes that the PM made, and the poor quality of the handwriting. Misspelling 'colleagues' and 'condolences' in such a letter is not helpful.

This is, of course, a total non-story. The PM having poor handwriting is no problem - I can guarantee that it is not as bad as mine, and he is blind in one eye. Deliberately spelling a serviceman's name incorrectly would be political suicide. In short, I have no doubt that the spelling mistakes were just that - mistakes.

Yet these mistakes have become the number-three story on the BBC news website. If this had happened to Blair, or even Brown two years ago, it would scarcely have registered. Brown has lost all of his political capital. Like sharks circling an injured swimmer, the media sense blood. The story fits in with people's perception of our PM; uncaring (especially about our forces), messy, troubled, and mistake-ridden.

Jamie Jane's mother has a reason to feel aggrieved; she has just lost a son. But this is really a non-story. As much as I dislike Brown (and believe me, I do), I do not think that this was in any way deliberate. It does, however, detail the largest political problem that faces both him and his party. People are ready to jump on any mistake he makes, whether large or small.

My wife came up with an interesting (and, with hindsight, obvious) point that is more worrying: why is no-one in Number 10 checking these letters before they are sent out? Jamie's mother has evidently been upset by the letter; why was it not checked? All of this could have been avoided by just a few minutes work.

Crime and punishment.

Recently I was doing some editing of a story set in 1827. It is remarkably hard to get the voice and tone right for such a distant period, so I did lots of research; this included reading relevant books and novels that had been written at around that time.

Old newspapers are also a good source; both local papers from the time and the nationals. For instance, the Times has a brilliant if expensive online archive that gives lots of stories about what is going on in the relevant periods (or as long as the Times has been published).

I have, however, found another, free source. The Old Bailey Online Archive, which details proceedings of the court between 1674 and 1913. I started reading this a few months ago and found it absolutely fascinating. It details the cases that were held in the Old Bailey, and the results. As well as crimes, it gives lovely little period details; dialect, names etc.

For instance, here is a gentle description of a prostitute from April 1827:

" I sometimes take walks at night to maintain myself..."

Wouldn't that make a great line to use in a period book? It is both deep in meaning and sad. Another example is of hot to carry a sheep:

"...he had hold of the two fore-feet, the head hung before and the legs behind; "

Again, I would love to write that sort of detail into a book.

What is interesting is that in the nineteenth Century manslaughter may only get a three-month term in prison, whilst a crime that would be seen as being lesser nowadays, such as petty theft, could have the death penalty. Why this difference? Perhaps it is because, at least before the twentieth century, both the Jurors and the Judges would be from the propertied classes. A case of manslaughter amongst the working classes may have been seen as being morally reprehensible, but posed no direct threat the the jurors. However, theft was a threat. You can only steal from someone who has something to steal, and therefore cases of theft would be a direct threat to the monied classes.

Home-made spacecraft and the British technology industry

Here is a link to the latest video from Armadillo Aerospace:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/200 ... ndHeld.wmv

This shows a vertical take-off, hop to 200 metres, followed by a vertical landing. It is a very impressive feat by a small team who have only spent a few million dollars. They have managed a long list of achievements, including successfully completing both parts of the Lunar Lander Challenge - the hardest part of which involved being in the air for 180 seconds and translating to a landing pad 100 metres away. Masten Space Systems and the father-and-son team of Unreasonable Rocket deserve honourable mentions as well.

Armadillo Aerospace have been so successful that they actually developed a test liquid oxygen / methane engine for NASA. It sounds as though they are revenue positive, and are working towards manned space flight up to 100,000 feet. They are doing this by throwing the old rocket design methodologies out of the window - instead of designing and building final hardware, they are building many test rockets cheaply. It is an iterative process, and one that has given them a great deal of knowledge and experience very quickly. They have occasional spectacular crashes, but the costs are so (relatively) low that each crash is hardly a disaster, and each enhances their knowledge.

I would love for there to be a British team attempting this sort of thing (aside from Starchaser which, unfortunately, I do not hold out much hope for). AA have found the legislation and permit aspects difficult; I think they would find it next to impossible here in the UK. There are other groups as well, from those with small but remarkable aims - like Cambridge University Spaceflight, to the grand and potentially world-changing projects - Reaction Engines.

This really makes my blood boil. UK space is worth £5.8 billion, mainly in the form of services - this is not to be sniffed at. The PDF above shows the sectors that UK space operate in; not launchers, but satellites, support services and component supply. In comparison, the European Heavy Launcher Ariane 5 cost $7 billion over ten years to develop.

Yet instead of shouting our achievements from the rooftops, we mumble and act as though we are half embarrassed about it. Instead of showing the brilliance of British science and engineering, we show the X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and Big Brother. Even science television on the BBC has gone downhill - Tomorrow's World has been replaced with the risible Bang goes the Question.

Şencan is deeply concerned about the lack of women going into science and engineering. I agree, but expand the concern - the lack of people graduating in the hard sciences is a massive problem. We should be encouraging people to be doing insanely great things here in the UK, yet the entire system appears to be designed to actively discourage it.

So I would like to make a proposal. Set aside £100 million a year, and set it into 17 grant chunks :
3 £20 million chunks,
2 £10 million chunks;
2 £5 million chunks;
10 £1 million chunks.

These grants will be awarded to small- and medium-sized companies in order to help them develop certain projects. the £1 million grants would go to companies with less than 20 employees; the £20 million chunks to those with less than 100 employees. The money must be spent on specified projects over a two-year period. All research should be publicly released at the end of the 2-year period, and the British Government has a share in patents and other rights for the technology.

An example would be a company wanting to develop a new type of generator for wind turbines. they may have a working prototype or a potential, workable design, but not have the funds for development of it. The grant would be given towards a set project, and the Government would also help with other items - for instance putting the company into contact with manufacturers of components, or giving them access to Government wind tunnels, test areas or other resources.

Once a company has been awarded a grant, it cannot reapply for at least two years (i.e. at the end of the two years of the previous grant). The company will give full access to a small team of scientists and experts who will report on progress and check for wastage of money. £5 million a year should be able to attract a small, focussed team that contains good general specialists. Hopefully such a role would become very prestigious. Additionally, the Government team will help with legal aspects (everything from permits to patent law).

The technology areas that could be targeted are many:
*) Space-related (satellite systems, communication systems, launchers)
*) Engineering-related (carbon nanotubes, new construction techniques etc)
*) Green and environment (wave power, wind power, turbine tech, carbon capture etc)
*) Medical (new drugs, new uses of existing drugs, water cleansing techniques, field medicine)
*) Safety related (car safety research, food safety research etc)
*) Communications (new mobile systems, new radio systems, new TV systems etc)
*) Far-out pipedreams (new energy techniques, bubble fusion etc). However, the potential pay-off of these should be correspondingly large.

The sorts of people who I see benefiting from such schemes are the traditional British backroom boffins - people like Dyson in his earlier days and Trevor Bayliss. Some of the people helped will achieve insanely great things.

There will be some key aspects to make such a scheme a success: Firstly, the selection of projects will need to be handled with care and without political interference. A longshot project with only minimal chances of working may get a £20 million grant, but only if the potential rewards are great enough. Secondly, the companies will need to be watched carefully to ensure that the money is only spent on the defined projects. Strangely, this should be easier with small companies than with larger ones.

Some money will undoubtedly be wasted. But the resultant knowledge will not be wasted, and the calculation is simple. One successful project alone may earn the country billions of pounds.

To put it simply: The Olympics is costing £9.3 billion for something that will (despite what the Government says) have negligible 'legacy'. That could fund the above scheme for nine years.

So let's do it.

Summer Glau

I showed Şencan this link on the BBC website. I thought that it may be of interest to her; a radio-nuclear power source that may be small enough to be used to power MEMS and NEMS devices. We are both fairly fascinated by MEMS (Şencan as she works in RFIC (*) design, myself because I'm fascinated by cool tech), so I thought that this would be of interest.

Her reaction:
"That's it! Terminator! Yummm, Summer Glau."

Sometimes my wife scares me. No, scratch that. She frequently scares me.

(*) Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits. Basically analogue silicon chips that are used for various radio functionality. RFIC chips will be in virtually anything modern that needs to use radio signals in digital chips; radios, TV tuners, mobile phones, sat-nav's etc. When I went to QMW 18 years ago, I used to hang around the VLSI design lab marvelling at the brains of the people who designed digital chips. Frankly, to design a digital chip you need a brain the size of a planet. Then I met a few analogue chip designers. If digital chip designers do braniac-boffin stuff, then analogue chip designers are high priests and priestesses (***) who invoke weird black magic (**) - and sometimes the magic black smoke.

(**) Seriously. Digital, in theory, is simple. Imagine a switch; it can go on and off. Put in a few logic gates, OR, AND, NAND, NOT, etc, and you can design a circuit. There are complexities, but you could easily teach an interested ten-year old the basics. Analogue is different. Analogue varies, interferes and generally screws with your mind. Which is good, because a screwed-up mind is perhaps the main reason why Şencan asked me to marry her.

(***) We were lucky enough to have some of the top RFIC designers in the country at our wedding. For a horrid moment, whilst the photographs were being taken, I was worried that they were scheming out some new chip. Fortunately they were just trying to calculate the draught of the ship. If HMS Warrior had sunk that night, then radio design in this country old never have been the same again.

25 years of Elite.

The BBC website has a page dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the computer game Elite.

This game, created by Ian Bell and David Braben in 1984, has to be one of the best games ever. In it, you play the captain of a Cobra Mark-III spacecraft, flying around space either trading or fighting. The 3D-wireframe graphics were very advanced for the time, and had a definite wow! factor. A novella, 'The Dark Wheel', was released with the BBC version by science fiction author Robert Holdstock - this was virtually unheard of for a computer game.

The game was revolutionary in several aspects - most games before Elite were heavily scripted, with linear game flows. Instead, Elite was open-ended. You could fly around the star systems of eight massive galaxies, either trading or shooting other ships. There were various upgrades that you could buy for your ship, including items such as fuel scoops or the near-obligatory docking computer. All of this was fitted into just 32kB on the BBC B. It was a superb feat of programming by Braben and Bell.

Unlike most games of the time there was no score - instead, the aim was to become 'Elite'. Initially you started off as 'Harmless'. As you destroyed other ships, your ranking would grow, through 'Mostly harmless' (a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy, perhaps?), to dangerous, and then finally Elite.

I dread to think how many hours that I have spent playing the game. I became Elite on the BBC Master 128, and also on the superb Archimedes version, ArcElite. Over the years I must have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours have been spent pretending that I am some superb space-trading pirate.

It very much got me into programming - I remember programming spinning wire-framed 3D objects, initially in BBC Basic and later 6502 assembler. It also gave my imagination a spur - my friend, Jamie, and myself would pretend to be spacemen whilst it loaded off tape. I doubt any children would do such a thing nowadays, if only because most games now load almost instantaneously.

Last year Şencan and I attended a meal celebrating the 30th anniversary of Acorn. It was good to see so many old faces, including some people that I had not seen for many years. David Braben was there, and he gave an impromptu demonstration of docking on a BBC B that had been put on display. It is a sign of the almost mystical aura around the game that he had a large crowd around him as he did it.

If you wish to give it a go, have a look at Oolite, which is heavily based upon the original game. I deliberately do not have it installed to avoid wastage of too much time.

Utter madness

The Times has an article that claims the Government is considering changes to the civil law so that, in the case of a traffic accident, the person who drives the more powerful vehicle is seen as being the guilty party. It is then up to them to prove otherwise. This has mainly been introduce with respect to cyclists on the road.

According to the article, the reason for this bizarre proposed change is:

The move, intended to encourage greater take-up of environmentally friendly modes of transport ...

I am a walker, and I also do some cycling (as the weather was nice we both cycled to the Hiltingbury fair today). As such, I have got a great deal of experience on all of the main forms of road transport. My over-simplified summary of what I have see: There are terrible cyclists, pedestrians and drivers on the road. However, there are also thousands of brilliant ones as well. In this area of North Baddesley, children on those small-wheeled bikes ride on and off the pavement, sometimes jumping off the kerb into the path of traffic. Then again, there is also some interesting driving exhibited as well, from the minor infractions (failure to indicate) to the serious (exceeding the speed limit).

Unfortunately, at times I am guilty of all of these (as are most drivers, probably). It is so easy to let your speed creep up to 35 MPH in a 30 MPH zone, or just run a light that is changing to red as you are a few yards away. However, I see a difference between occasional, accidental incidents such as these and the people who routinely drive badly.

This proposed change is vastly unfair. My dad (a pensioner) driving his Range Rover will be judged guilty by default in any collision against a boy racer in souped-up hatch. The assumption that the size of your engine has a relationship to the cause of an accident is, frankly, a vast over-simplification. I drive a 1.4-litre automatic Honda Jazz, so am hardly a boy racer ;-)

There is also the question of how people will take advantage of this. There is a scam where some drivers brake suddenly and heavily at junctions, causing the car behind to crash into the back of them. They then claim that they are injured, and get very large compensation awards from the insurance of the driver of the rear car. This was because the assumption by insurance companies was that, in the case of a read-end shunt, it was the fault of the driver of the rear car. This fraud was so widespread that insurance companies were considering changing this assumption. I can see this new change giving fraudsters a whole new area to exploit.

I think the main reason that I dislike this proposed change to the law is that it confuses two issues. The first is nominally a 'green' issue - that more powerful cars cause more pollution. The second is the responsibility for an accident. Since there is no causal connection between the two things, then it is wrong to make a connection.

There is a connection between the power of the vehicle and the damage that can be done by it. But since you can be driving a powerful car perfectly safely and still have an accident that is not your fault, under this change you will have to prove that it was not your fault. Quite simply, this is not right.

A much better job would be to further strengthen the application of existing driving laws in two areas:

1. Uninsured drivers. The number of uninsured drivers has increased by 33% over the last year, up to a fifth of all drivers. It is illegal to drive without insurance, and this should be stamped down on, hard.
2. Drug driving. This is a massive problem. From the BBC News website:

   The Department for Transport (DfT) estimates that one in five drivers or riders killed in road accidents may have an impairing drug - legal or illegal - in their system.

Additionally, I would stamp down on cyclists riding bikes on pavements on roads with a 30MPH speed limit. It is done all the time, and is dangerous for pedestrians (I have nearly been hit on several occasions). However, I would also allow cyclists to ride on the pavement in 40MPH zones or above. The traffic speeds are so much higher in these zones and the consequences of a cyclist being hit so much the greater. In my experience, the pavements are also less used. It would be the responsibility of the cyclist to ensure that they ride safely.

These are, in my opinion at least, much more important areas to be looked at before this fraudulently 'green' policy.

The unexpected consequences of doing great things

Sencan and I went to the Southampton boat show today to have a look around. I went there on my own last year, and ended up signing onto a tall ship sailing to Dublin. I think Sencan came along this year to prevent me doing the same thing again...

The show was absolutely bustling, and there was lots to see and do. It was also fairly hot, especially in the oven-like temporary exhibition halls, and we eventually left after four and a half hours because we had started wilting.

If you have never been, the show is massive. it was a bit smaller than last year's show (part of the land has been earmarked for development), but the temporary marina built into the Solent seemed as large as it had been last year, and was filled with lots of shiny boats. This in itself must be a massively complex thing to set up, yet it only lasts for the nine days of the show.

Neither of us saw much sign of the recession there - with high-end boats selling at well over a million euros, I would reckon that some money is spent during the nine days.

A small, ocean-going rowing boat was moored at the end of one jetty, and a very tanned, muscular young woman stood alongside it. She was Sarah Outen, and she had just completed a 4,000 mile, 124-day row across the Indian Ocean from Fremantle in Australia to Mauritius. In the process she broke three world records. The boat had literally only arrive back in its container the previous day, and she still appeared to be more than a little overwhelmed.

I can only sympathise. Although my walk around the coastline of the UK amounted to not even a quarter of what she has achieved, it still took me two or three months to really get back into normal life. I still had a vacant, far-away look in my eyes when I joined Frontier three months after the walk finished, and being around so many people felt strangely enclosing after a year walking the coast. Yet I had the wonderful Sam to keep me company during the walk, to be my friend and spur when I felt down. Goodness knows, she did a great job for me, and I'm not sure I ever thanked her enough.

Sam's companionship each night (and her wonderful cooking) helped me through the walk. Although she rarely walked alongside me, her care and attention made it possible for me to finish the walk. Before I set off, I told BBC Radio Cambridge that such a walk was 20% physical effort and 80% mental effort, and it is true - it is all too easy to mentally give up. Having someone there with me each night made all the difference. Then I think of Louis, who walked the coast a couple of years after me. He was eighteen when he did it, and he camped for most of the way, doing up to 30-miles a day with full kit. He had incredible mental strength, and I am in awe of him.

Yet Sarah went through so much more. She rowed on her own for four months, spending days and nights alone on the turbulent seas. There was no-one to give her a massage when her muscles were aching, and no-one to give her a hug when she was feeling down. Her own mental strength made up for that deficiency and kept her going. Talking to her proved to be a humbling experience.

During our chat I asked her what she wanted to do next. As I asked her the question her eyes flicked out into the Solent. Something tells me she may be voyaging out again sometime.

The thing is, I feel the same. I am just raring to do another walk, to go out for two or three months on my own, to explore and see the world; to push myself to my limits. I have spent much of my life being told that I cannot do things, and, now that I can, it is so tempting to do what I can. When I go to the coast (and it is not easy to avoid here in Southampton) I get this creeping urge to keep on walking, to 'do another lap', as I call it. I stare out at the breaking waves, and my mind wanders to the sights that I saw in that year. It is the same thing with television - I see places and I wish I was back there once more. Even seaside postcards in the local library can set me off; whether they depict the majestic Lulworth Cove or the beautiful, rugged Northumberland coastline.

In the sequel to her excellent book, "Two feet, Four Paws", Spud Talbot-Ponsonby says that she managed to put her walk around the coast into a handy mental container labelled 'the walk'. I have never managed that; my walk permeates through my mind and body, ready to jump out at the most inopportune moments. Yet I would not have it any other way. Like an aged general talking about famous battles, I cannot let it go.

Yet I have a beautiful, loving wife, and I just cannot bring myself to think of being without her for such a long time. Being apart from her would literally break my heart. So I get my maps out and look at Land's End to John O'Groats; the Pacific Crest Trail and the various GR routes in Europe and dream. And that is all they will be; dreams. There is a good chance that we may be blessed with children, and that would be another excellent reason to stay at home. Maybe when I'm sixty and the kids have all flown the roost I will put my walking boots on once more, lug a large pack onto my back and head out once again. It is something to look forward to.

Part of the problem is, I did my walk when I was thirty. I did the most amazing thing I will ever do when I was relatively young. Sarah will have the same problem. Most people wait until retirement and then do something like Land's End to John O'Groats or a sail around the world; something that they have dreamt of for all of their life. I know that there just has to be another challenge awaiting for me out there, and it has to be bigger than the one I did previously. So I dream. And there is no harm in dreaming... Is there?