America exalts its military. And, in their private moments, neocons excoriate conservatives for their pacificism. They say that Americans are more realistic and know how to handle things like war.
Is that so? An article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books makes a convincing argument that it is because Americans do not have enough experience that they are so gung-ho.
In world war I, America lost 140,000 soldiers, France 1.4m, Germany 2m. In WWII, America lost 400,000 troops. Russia 10.7m. Poland lost 5.5m civilians, Germany 4m. The USA 2,000. The only other unambiguous victor of the war was Britain -but she was bankrupted and lost her empire. America had a "good war".
It is the only major nation, where apart from those who fought in WWII, there is no collective memory of wa, and thus the only advanced democracy where war is glorified, a sentiment unknown in Europe. American politicians surround themselves with the trappings of military prowess, and commentators do not hesitate to swoopdown on allies ambivalent about engaging in armed conflict.
It is the contrasting recollection of war and its impact rather than any structural difference between countries which accounts for differences between otherwise similar countries.
Most neoconservatives complacently claim that war and conflict are things only Americans understand - in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacificistic fantasies. This is completely wrong. It is Europeans who understand war; Americans who live in blissful ignorance.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Another Watergate?
There is a very interesting article here:
As I understand it, the main thrusts of the argument are. Rumsfeld signed a letter, the so called Haynes memo, (Jim Haynes was the Defemse depts lawyer) in November 2002 that permitted 15/18 types of physical coercion.
John Yoo and Jay Bybee of the justice department's legal counsel wrote a letter saying that anything that is short of the pain equivalent experienced in relation to extreme organ damage is not torture. Douglas Feith, no 3 at the Pentagon, said the Geneva conventions did not apply to Guantanamo; and the president signed an order to that effect. Even article 3, which gives basic rights to prisoners who are not uniformed prisoner's of war, did not apply because "this was not a war of national character," said Feith.
In the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations, the Justice Department was called upon to defend itself.
In June 2004 Gonzales, the attorney general, said that the Yoo memo was just stargazing and never made it into policy. "They were exploring the limits of the legal landscape. The memo did not represent the policy the president adopted," Gonzales said. His colleague said that general Delaney, chief of Guantanamo, made a request for stronger types of interrogation against suspect Al Qahtani because the anniversary of 911 was approaching and a spike in attacks was feared. Rumsfeld's approval was in response to this request, Gonzales said. A "tightly spaced" legal document prepared by a senior legal official at Guantanamo was the only legal memo cited by Gonzales as bearing on the aggressive investigations.
Philippe Sands's investigations find a different truth.
In late September 2002 a team of senior lawyers, Gonzales, Haynes and others descended on Guantanamo; Beaver (the legal official) said they told her "Do whatever needs to be done". This was before she had prepared her legal memo that formed the plank of Delaney's request. Earlier, in August 2002, George Tenet had sought legal advice on interrogation of prisoners picked up in Pakistan - that was the Yoo memo. Everyone senior whom Sands spoke to believes that, when the request came from Guantanamo to torture prisoners, Haynes had consulted the Justice Department and the memo. Also "Haynes and Bybee" were joined at the hip.
The rule lasted a year; it was withdrawn after a representation by the chief lawyer for the Navy. The FBI and naval intelligence had always opposed coercive interrogation. The final reckoning came in 2006 when the Supreme court struck down the idea that Guantanmo prisoners were not covered by Geneva. In his opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joining the majority, pointedly observed that “violations of Common Article 3 are considered ‘war crimes.’ ” A friend of Haynes having lunch with him that day when the news arrived describe him going completely pale.
In October 2006, Bush signed the commissions act that provided immunity against lawsuits for misconduct in the interrogation of aliens 2001 - 29005. Unfortunately, the law applies in the US. And with the Pinochet precedent in mind, one European judge Sands spoke to said the lawyers involved would have to be more cautious about international travel. One day they may face a tap on the shoulder.
As I understand it, the main thrusts of the argument are. Rumsfeld signed a letter, the so called Haynes memo, (Jim Haynes was the Defemse depts lawyer) in November 2002 that permitted 15/18 types of physical coercion.
John Yoo and Jay Bybee of the justice department's legal counsel wrote a letter saying that anything that is short of the pain equivalent experienced in relation to extreme organ damage is not torture. Douglas Feith, no 3 at the Pentagon, said the Geneva conventions did not apply to Guantanamo; and the president signed an order to that effect. Even article 3, which gives basic rights to prisoners who are not uniformed prisoner's of war, did not apply because "this was not a war of national character," said Feith.
In the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations, the Justice Department was called upon to defend itself.
In June 2004 Gonzales, the attorney general, said that the Yoo memo was just stargazing and never made it into policy. "They were exploring the limits of the legal landscape. The memo did not represent the policy the president adopted," Gonzales said. His colleague said that general Delaney, chief of Guantanamo, made a request for stronger types of interrogation against suspect Al Qahtani because the anniversary of 911 was approaching and a spike in attacks was feared. Rumsfeld's approval was in response to this request, Gonzales said. A "tightly spaced" legal document prepared by a senior legal official at Guantanamo was the only legal memo cited by Gonzales as bearing on the aggressive investigations.
Philippe Sands's investigations find a different truth.
In late September 2002 a team of senior lawyers, Gonzales, Haynes and others descended on Guantanamo; Beaver (the legal official) said they told her "Do whatever needs to be done". This was before she had prepared her legal memo that formed the plank of Delaney's request. Earlier, in August 2002, George Tenet had sought legal advice on interrogation of prisoners picked up in Pakistan - that was the Yoo memo. Everyone senior whom Sands spoke to believes that, when the request came from Guantanamo to torture prisoners, Haynes had consulted the Justice Department and the memo. Also "Haynes and Bybee" were joined at the hip.
The rule lasted a year; it was withdrawn after a representation by the chief lawyer for the Navy. The FBI and naval intelligence had always opposed coercive interrogation. The final reckoning came in 2006 when the Supreme court struck down the idea that Guantanmo prisoners were not covered by Geneva. In his opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joining the majority, pointedly observed that “violations of Common Article 3 are considered ‘war crimes.’ ” A friend of Haynes having lunch with him that day when the news arrived describe him going completely pale.
In October 2006, Bush signed the commissions act that provided immunity against lawsuits for misconduct in the interrogation of aliens 2001 - 29005. Unfortunately, the law applies in the US. And with the Pinochet precedent in mind, one European judge Sands spoke to said the lawyers involved would have to be more cautious about international travel. One day they may face a tap on the shoulder.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
innovation in finland
A look at innovation in Finland
LORD OF THE RINGS author JRR Tolkien discovered the Finnish language at Oxford and, because it had 15 cases, fell in love with it. A specialist in Old Norse, he quickly learnt it; and the Finnish epic Kalevala, which he read in the original, became a powerful inspiration for his work. The language, meanwhile, formed the base for Elvish, one of the many make-believe languages that he constructed in full that give his world of Middle Earth its depth, detail and believability.
In a letter to WH Auden in 1955, he wrote: "Finnish was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language'-or series of invented languages-became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure."
One wonders if Tolkien also took his inspiration for ways and manners of the elves, the superior race of his imaginary world, from the Finns. Although they have the highest incidence of blond hair in the world, many Finns have high cheek bones and slightly almond-shaped eyes. Like elves. They also tended to live in forest isolation, strong of character, and have a mysterious, detached approach towards the world. Like elves. But there is a difference. The elves had magic. The Finns have technology.
Actually they are not so different. Who was it who said that, from a certain perspective, magic and sufficiently advanced technology are almost indistinguishable? Here is a list of what the Finns are up to.
Nokia, which makes a million handsets a day, is developing three sensational phones.
Nano technology is producing miracles. The latest project is a shape changing handset that you flex from its candybar shape and wrap around your wrist or stretch to keyboard dimensions; a second handset under development will allow you to take a photo of an object that instantly gives you web descriptions about it; a third collects data about traffic flows based on the GPS satellite readings of the users’ movements; which are then collated with everyone else’s to build up a picture of the traffic situation – beamed back to the users, of course, who can avoid the traffic snarl ups that cost billions of dollars a year. And that’s just Nokia.. Linus Torvalds, a Finn from the Swedish minority, invented the open source Linux software that despite, or rather because, anyone can contribute has a stability and portability that makes it a favoured choice to run mobile phones, gaming consoles, and 85 percent of the world’s super computers. .
And there’s more.
The country awards the Millennium Prize in Technology, which has been sarcastically called the Nobel prize of Finnish Vanity, and whose first recipient Tim Berners Lee admitted he first heard of it when he received it. But its one million euros are not to be sniffed at. There’s Fogscreen, the world's first walk-through projection screen made of "dry" fog, which allows you to project images onto it. They will seem suspended in
mid-air, “a bit like star wars”, Fogscreen was invented by two virtual reality researchers from the university of Turku. There’s Habbo Hotel, one of the largest social networking sites, where teenagers use avatars to furnish their rooms, gossip, play games, say bubba to each other (sexual words are bleeped out) and spend their parents’ money on intra website credits. It too is Finnish.
Finland had the most boring television outside the east bloc in the 1970s. They seem to be compensating by inventing Floobs, which allows anyone to set up their own television channel on the internet.
On a more serious note, there’s Fiinnvoice, the electronic invoicing system which will be the model for the Single European payment area due to come onstream in 2010, facilitating and harmonising and making electronic the way European firms and individuals bill each other. Finland’s Neste’s biodiesel, NExBTL, is the perfect biofuel. Finally, there’s Finland’s RFID revolution, where patients are not restricted to the waiting room as they have electronic tags and nurses download data straight to a computer from the sickbed.
Backing examples with figures, Finland is the world’s leading patent applicant per capita, the second most competitive economy (and its greenest one) in 2006; ;second most innovative in Europe.
Why are the Finns so successful? British educators take note.
Tolkien used the prerogatives of a writer to invent a favoured race; The Finns have had to resort to hard work, native sisu (guts), and recently, a fortunate turn of events But, above all, its comprehensive education system has long been the best in the world. In the OECD rankings, Finland came first by a long way in science, and narrowly beaten to second in reading and maths by Korea and Taiwan: overall first, way ahead of other European countries. It’s achieved this feat not through throwing money at schools – the Finns spend less than theUK – but old fashioned virtues. Teachers are respected, entry to the profession is competitive. The weak students are marked out early and looked after. In fact, the difference between top and bottom students was lowest of all countries surveyed. Communications between parents and teachers is good; society is homogenous. Finland always had a free peasantry; and Lutheranism placed a premium on literacy even among the poor.
Add to the educational achievements, a slow increase in liberalisation and deregulation, which a tough recession in the early 1990s helped focus into a political consensus about refocusing the associated economic policies. The collapse of the Soviet Union liberated the national spirit.
The Finns have had a tough time from their neighbours: the Orcs to the elvish Finns. The Soviets invaded in November 1939 with an army five times as large possessed of 100 times as many tanks. The Finns had advantages in the celebrated Winter War: they knew the terrain, were experts on skis and wore white smocks.
. Their opponents had khaki uniforms and clung to the roads,. The Finns ambushed, splintering and isolating Soviet units, and targeted their soup kitchens. It was the coldest winter in memory. They chopped trees and left the stumps and logs as tank traps, covered cellophane over their frozen lakes to make the lakes seem free of ice to discourage crossing. They made uninhabitable their farmsteads as they withdrew and mined the saunas and latrines. When the war ended.a Russian general said: “We have gained just enough territory to bury our dead.” While a Finnish general said; “The wolves will eat well this year.” The Finns killed 10 Russians for every one of their own; but the Soviet Union was just too big. The Finns made peace with honour, with some concessions. But they lost the continuation war; when they joined the Nazis in a revenge attack. A price, though, was subservience to the USSR in foreign affairs, This ended in 1991; and the salutary recession shortly after. Their flourishing of the last decade could begin.
But there are dangers ahead. They never cease. Again, we can dip into Tolkien. One of the motifs running through his books is hatred of industrialisation and its consequences. The peasant goodness of the Shire contrasts with the industrial might of Mordor. In a key turning point in the story, the treacherous wizard Saruman embarks on a crash course of industrialisation, turning the countryside around his castle into a hellish landscape of mines and foundries.. Later, he attempts to do the same to the Shire. Perhaps the greatest threat the Finns face is not a resurgent Russia, again interested in its western, more prosperous neighbour, but the consequences of industrialisation: this winter, temperatures were six degrees above normal. A Met office map over global climate fluctuations this year marks out the Baltic sea in warning signal red. The university of Tartu in Estonia estimates that summers are a month longer than twenty years ago; winters in those days saw the whole 500,000 square kilometres of Baltic freeze over, as far west and south as Denmark.
It didn’t snow in Helsinki this year. The ice breakers have been lying idle; the crocuses flourished in February. There was no ice, even in the inlets of the jagged coastline, or in the archipelago. How times have changed. This is the British academic Arthur Reade writing of Finland in 1917:
When the sea is frozen the real joys of winter
begin. The ice becomes the scene of a vigorous life.
Roads marked by fir-trees are staked out on it be-
tween the town and the neighbouring islands, and
carts, cabs and automobiles make a lively trafific
upon them.. This is the ideal time for skating,
for then one is not confined to a rink but can range
at will among the bays and islands and enjoy a
delicious sense of freedom. Then, too, one may
see people practising the perilous art of
sailing on skates.
Even more delightful than skating, on account of
this very freedom, is ski-ing. he people of Helsingfors are very fond of
ski-ing over the frozen sea. There is something
most exhilarating in going forward across the vast
shining plain of snow and ice, with a cloudless sky
above one. Good ski-runners can go at a consider-
able pace across the level, and if they find it mo-
notonous can make for some of the numerous islands
for variety. But few things call up the sense of
infinity so strongly as leaving the islands behind
one and ski-ing across the open sea.”
Compare this to a comment in a Helsinki newspaper this winter: “All our winters are now going to resemble Belgium in November.” Anyone who has experienced Belgium in its so-called winter realises what a terrible future they face; at least they will still have the Northern lights.
Pragmatic as they are, Finnish companies are developing the world’s most advamnced biodiesel; and Wartsila, the engneering company, is a world leader in ships run on liquefied natural gas – ships are highly CO2 emitting. With the Northern Route opening up across the Siberian coast to Japan and China, the Finns are developing cargo-ship ice breakers, to deal with remaining ice cover. Several years running, the country has won Yale university’s awards for running an environemtally sustainable economy.
But its fate, in this sense, lies with larger, more polluting nations. Against global warming, advanced mobile phone technology is not going to be of much help.
Lord of the Rings ends on an elegiac note: the age of magic and elves has ended; those that remain “go across the sea” to the land of immortals. The age of prosaic men has begun. Here the game of facile comparisons peters out. The Finns are here to stay. Moreover, unlike the elves, who could hide from Middle Earth’s greatest travails, Finland must face them full on.
I have a suggestion. It’s based a little on a quid pro quo: not everything on the Finnish scene is bright. They haven’t won a Nobel prize in 40 years. Their 20 universities spread to ensure universal access divide resources. Timo Kekkonen, an economic adviser at the Finnish CBI, wishes that more foreign students, hi skilled tech workers, and foreign lecturers came. Finland needs more churn, suffers a labour shortage, needs more international stimulus of ideas across the board (there’smore to academe than engineering and technology). Finland needs more friends, and a bigger network: people who will say, oh, I lectured in Finland, why don’t you go and work there for a while. It needs to diversify/
So the suggestion is this: Finland ought to become the planet’s coordinating centre for global warming: just as Vienna in the cold war bagged the International Atomic Energy Agency, because of its strategic yet neutral location,, Helsinki ought to be awarded a similar body, close as it is (flying over the poles) to the Japan, China, the arctic itself, the rest of Europe, and, above all Russia, that closed country yet one which has a longer coastline than anyone else. Relations have improved since the Finns mined their latrines and saunas, and starved the invading Russians to death by shelling their troop kitchens in the winter war of 1940: as delicate interpreters of Russian intention for decades of the cold war, they can mediate between Russia and the arctic nations, loosely the West, at a time of difficult relations. Finland, with its talent for looking at the future, would keep larger nations focused on the long term role of dealing with the arctic: there are delicate issues of who owns what mineral resources under the ice. And in the long run, the world, let’s face it, is going to see massive population transfers to the Northern Regions..
Academics, policy makers, diplomats and environmental scientists wouldl all come through Helsinki giving Finland and its universities the international exposurer that they need. The climate will be warmer too, so the cold winters will be less unbearable. For foreigners, though, the 15 cases won’t go away.
LORD OF THE RINGS author JRR Tolkien discovered the Finnish language at Oxford and, because it had 15 cases, fell in love with it. A specialist in Old Norse, he quickly learnt it; and the Finnish epic Kalevala, which he read in the original, became a powerful inspiration for his work. The language, meanwhile, formed the base for Elvish, one of the many make-believe languages that he constructed in full that give his world of Middle Earth its depth, detail and believability.
In a letter to WH Auden in 1955, he wrote: "Finnish was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language'-or series of invented languages-became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure."
One wonders if Tolkien also took his inspiration for ways and manners of the elves, the superior race of his imaginary world, from the Finns. Although they have the highest incidence of blond hair in the world, many Finns have high cheek bones and slightly almond-shaped eyes. Like elves. They also tended to live in forest isolation, strong of character, and have a mysterious, detached approach towards the world. Like elves. But there is a difference. The elves had magic. The Finns have technology.
Actually they are not so different. Who was it who said that, from a certain perspective, magic and sufficiently advanced technology are almost indistinguishable? Here is a list of what the Finns are up to.
Nokia, which makes a million handsets a day, is developing three sensational phones.
Nano technology is producing miracles. The latest project is a shape changing handset that you flex from its candybar shape and wrap around your wrist or stretch to keyboard dimensions; a second handset under development will allow you to take a photo of an object that instantly gives you web descriptions about it; a third collects data about traffic flows based on the GPS satellite readings of the users’ movements; which are then collated with everyone else’s to build up a picture of the traffic situation – beamed back to the users, of course, who can avoid the traffic snarl ups that cost billions of dollars a year. And that’s just Nokia.. Linus Torvalds, a Finn from the Swedish minority, invented the open source Linux software that despite, or rather because, anyone can contribute has a stability and portability that makes it a favoured choice to run mobile phones, gaming consoles, and 85 percent of the world’s super computers. .
And there’s more.
The country awards the Millennium Prize in Technology, which has been sarcastically called the Nobel prize of Finnish Vanity, and whose first recipient Tim Berners Lee admitted he first heard of it when he received it. But its one million euros are not to be sniffed at. There’s Fogscreen, the world's first walk-through projection screen made of "dry" fog, which allows you to project images onto it. They will seem suspended in
mid-air, “a bit like star wars”, Fogscreen was invented by two virtual reality researchers from the university of Turku. There’s Habbo Hotel, one of the largest social networking sites, where teenagers use avatars to furnish their rooms, gossip, play games, say bubba to each other (sexual words are bleeped out) and spend their parents’ money on intra website credits. It too is Finnish.
Finland had the most boring television outside the east bloc in the 1970s. They seem to be compensating by inventing Floobs, which allows anyone to set up their own television channel on the internet.
On a more serious note, there’s Fiinnvoice, the electronic invoicing system which will be the model for the Single European payment area due to come onstream in 2010, facilitating and harmonising and making electronic the way European firms and individuals bill each other. Finland’s Neste’s biodiesel, NExBTL, is the perfect biofuel. Finally, there’s Finland’s RFID revolution, where patients are not restricted to the waiting room as they have electronic tags and nurses download data straight to a computer from the sickbed.
Backing examples with figures, Finland is the world’s leading patent applicant per capita, the second most competitive economy (and its greenest one) in 2006; ;second most innovative in Europe.
Why are the Finns so successful? British educators take note.
Tolkien used the prerogatives of a writer to invent a favoured race; The Finns have had to resort to hard work, native sisu (guts), and recently, a fortunate turn of events But, above all, its comprehensive education system has long been the best in the world. In the OECD rankings, Finland came first by a long way in science, and narrowly beaten to second in reading and maths by Korea and Taiwan: overall first, way ahead of other European countries. It’s achieved this feat not through throwing money at schools – the Finns spend less than theUK – but old fashioned virtues. Teachers are respected, entry to the profession is competitive. The weak students are marked out early and looked after. In fact, the difference between top and bottom students was lowest of all countries surveyed. Communications between parents and teachers is good; society is homogenous. Finland always had a free peasantry; and Lutheranism placed a premium on literacy even among the poor.
Add to the educational achievements, a slow increase in liberalisation and deregulation, which a tough recession in the early 1990s helped focus into a political consensus about refocusing the associated economic policies. The collapse of the Soviet Union liberated the national spirit.
The Finns have had a tough time from their neighbours: the Orcs to the elvish Finns. The Soviets invaded in November 1939 with an army five times as large possessed of 100 times as many tanks. The Finns had advantages in the celebrated Winter War: they knew the terrain, were experts on skis and wore white smocks.
. Their opponents had khaki uniforms and clung to the roads,. The Finns ambushed, splintering and isolating Soviet units, and targeted their soup kitchens. It was the coldest winter in memory. They chopped trees and left the stumps and logs as tank traps, covered cellophane over their frozen lakes to make the lakes seem free of ice to discourage crossing. They made uninhabitable their farmsteads as they withdrew and mined the saunas and latrines. When the war ended.a Russian general said: “We have gained just enough territory to bury our dead.” While a Finnish general said; “The wolves will eat well this year.” The Finns killed 10 Russians for every one of their own; but the Soviet Union was just too big. The Finns made peace with honour, with some concessions. But they lost the continuation war; when they joined the Nazis in a revenge attack. A price, though, was subservience to the USSR in foreign affairs, This ended in 1991; and the salutary recession shortly after. Their flourishing of the last decade could begin.
But there are dangers ahead. They never cease. Again, we can dip into Tolkien. One of the motifs running through his books is hatred of industrialisation and its consequences. The peasant goodness of the Shire contrasts with the industrial might of Mordor. In a key turning point in the story, the treacherous wizard Saruman embarks on a crash course of industrialisation, turning the countryside around his castle into a hellish landscape of mines and foundries.. Later, he attempts to do the same to the Shire. Perhaps the greatest threat the Finns face is not a resurgent Russia, again interested in its western, more prosperous neighbour, but the consequences of industrialisation: this winter, temperatures were six degrees above normal. A Met office map over global climate fluctuations this year marks out the Baltic sea in warning signal red. The university of Tartu in Estonia estimates that summers are a month longer than twenty years ago; winters in those days saw the whole 500,000 square kilometres of Baltic freeze over, as far west and south as Denmark.
It didn’t snow in Helsinki this year. The ice breakers have been lying idle; the crocuses flourished in February. There was no ice, even in the inlets of the jagged coastline, or in the archipelago. How times have changed. This is the British academic Arthur Reade writing of Finland in 1917:
When the sea is frozen the real joys of winter
begin. The ice becomes the scene of a vigorous life.
Roads marked by fir-trees are staked out on it be-
tween the town and the neighbouring islands, and
carts, cabs and automobiles make a lively trafific
upon them.. This is the ideal time for skating,
for then one is not confined to a rink but can range
at will among the bays and islands and enjoy a
delicious sense of freedom. Then, too, one may
see people practising the perilous art of
sailing on skates.
Even more delightful than skating, on account of
this very freedom, is ski-ing. he people of Helsingfors are very fond of
ski-ing over the frozen sea. There is something
most exhilarating in going forward across the vast
shining plain of snow and ice, with a cloudless sky
above one. Good ski-runners can go at a consider-
able pace across the level, and if they find it mo-
notonous can make for some of the numerous islands
for variety. But few things call up the sense of
infinity so strongly as leaving the islands behind
one and ski-ing across the open sea.”
Compare this to a comment in a Helsinki newspaper this winter: “All our winters are now going to resemble Belgium in November.” Anyone who has experienced Belgium in its so-called winter realises what a terrible future they face; at least they will still have the Northern lights.
Pragmatic as they are, Finnish companies are developing the world’s most advamnced biodiesel; and Wartsila, the engneering company, is a world leader in ships run on liquefied natural gas – ships are highly CO2 emitting. With the Northern Route opening up across the Siberian coast to Japan and China, the Finns are developing cargo-ship ice breakers, to deal with remaining ice cover. Several years running, the country has won Yale university’s awards for running an environemtally sustainable economy.
But its fate, in this sense, lies with larger, more polluting nations. Against global warming, advanced mobile phone technology is not going to be of much help.
Lord of the Rings ends on an elegiac note: the age of magic and elves has ended; those that remain “go across the sea” to the land of immortals. The age of prosaic men has begun. Here the game of facile comparisons peters out. The Finns are here to stay. Moreover, unlike the elves, who could hide from Middle Earth’s greatest travails, Finland must face them full on.
I have a suggestion. It’s based a little on a quid pro quo: not everything on the Finnish scene is bright. They haven’t won a Nobel prize in 40 years. Their 20 universities spread to ensure universal access divide resources. Timo Kekkonen, an economic adviser at the Finnish CBI, wishes that more foreign students, hi skilled tech workers, and foreign lecturers came. Finland needs more churn, suffers a labour shortage, needs more international stimulus of ideas across the board (there’smore to academe than engineering and technology). Finland needs more friends, and a bigger network: people who will say, oh, I lectured in Finland, why don’t you go and work there for a while. It needs to diversify/
So the suggestion is this: Finland ought to become the planet’s coordinating centre for global warming: just as Vienna in the cold war bagged the International Atomic Energy Agency, because of its strategic yet neutral location,, Helsinki ought to be awarded a similar body, close as it is (flying over the poles) to the Japan, China, the arctic itself, the rest of Europe, and, above all Russia, that closed country yet one which has a longer coastline than anyone else. Relations have improved since the Finns mined their latrines and saunas, and starved the invading Russians to death by shelling their troop kitchens in the winter war of 1940: as delicate interpreters of Russian intention for decades of the cold war, they can mediate between Russia and the arctic nations, loosely the West, at a time of difficult relations. Finland, with its talent for looking at the future, would keep larger nations focused on the long term role of dealing with the arctic: there are delicate issues of who owns what mineral resources under the ice. And in the long run, the world, let’s face it, is going to see massive population transfers to the Northern Regions..
Academics, policy makers, diplomats and environmental scientists wouldl all come through Helsinki giving Finland and its universities the international exposurer that they need. The climate will be warmer too, so the cold winters will be less unbearable. For foreigners, though, the 15 cases won’t go away.
biofuels
I walked past the Brussels's Atomium, the giant atom-shaped monument that defines the city. Silver balls suspended in the sky, linked by tubes. Built at the dawn of the nuclear age, when people thought nuclear power would solve all their problems. And then I went inside to hear the European commissioner for agriculture speak..
The problem
We all knew the story, but it was worth hearing again. First an implicit reference to a depressing fact by the ex president of Costa Rica. We're all going to die. But that's why many, maybe, don't worry about the Greenland glaciers shedding into the Atlantic. All the self sacrifices was all a lot of effort for no gain, since the gains benefit the next generation whereas you have to bear the cost. So he said: "You know when people built the cathedrals, they behaved as if they could see them completed in one generation, though it was the work of many generations. So is the fight against climate change."
There was mention of the hockey stick, and peak oil. That this year Chinese car sales overtook Japanese ones and that by 2015 China would be buying more cars than America - and even then, China would have to increase its car density fivefold to reach America's figure. By then, China, five times bigger, would be belching megatonnes of carbon.
Next was the Marianne Fischer Boel, the commissioner, who said that 20 percent of green houses gases came from transport and this was the only sector where CO2 emissions were growing. "Europe has to act together," she said, or there would just be a lot of fragmented efforts, she implied, leading nowhere.
2020 plan
So the European commission presented a legislative proposal in January that requires a 20 percent cut in Greenhouse gases (GHG), a 20 percent cut in energy use, and 20 percent use of renewables, in Europe, by 2020. The crucial bit is that the transport problem will be deal through a greater commitment to biofuels. Biofuels include biodiesel and bioethanol, made from rapeseed, palm oil and cooking oil; and beetroot, sugarcane and wheat respectively. Ten percent of transport fuel is the target; rising to 35-40 percent by 2030. China has a five-year plan. America also has an ambitious expansion plan. While Europe expects private industry to grow firms manufacturing biofuels, the US Department of Energy has given new firms big grants. Biofuels' advantages are: they are renewable. Even global warming sceptics realise that oil is finite - global consumption is a cubic mile a year - and has so many other high value uses that are desirable. Another is energy security: independence from increasingly expensive oil sourced from the difficult Middle East. America is quite explicit about this: its bill requiring a seven-fold increase in the use of biofuels by 2022 - and the US has already overtaken Brazil as the largest producer - is called the Energy Independence and Security Act. Finally, biofuels offer reductions in green house gases. Not in tail pipe emissions, which are the same as for petrol, but when making a life cycle assessment of carbon usage: when you factor in the carbon dioxide absorption of fuels based on corn, rapeseed, sugarcane, etc, this clearly reduces their net carbon contribution. You also have to factor in the CO2 used in production (fertilisers, transport, manufacture); but even so, according to studies used by the commission, rapeseed offers GHG emission reductions of 50 per cent, halfway between Brazilian sugarcane's 90 percent and American's corn's 15 percent. As Fischer Boel said: "Biofuels are a vital element in our tool box to combat climate change."
Problems.
But it's not so simple as just telling Europe's under-employed farmers to start tilling their set asides with biofuel crops. There are problems with sequencing. Getting investors, plants, transport infrastructure, fuel stations, car manufacturers and, then, above all, customers all to mesh, to launch into this new fuels adventure. It's early days, but only one country in Europe has taken to bioethanol cars in any quantities, Sweden. But even with tax breaks, congestion charge exemptions and a cash grant, flexifuel (which can take petrol and/or ethanol) vehicles still only make up 15% of new car sales. The Swedish government mandates petrol stations to have ethanol pumps; so 2,000 do. In the France the figure is 180. In the UK about 20. .
If pump unavailability, ethanol's newness and its allegedly corrosive properties were its only problems then the European commission's selling job - to publics and member state governments - might have been hard enough, handicapped by a seeming inability to push innovations such as GM crops through that are used in the United States. But biofuels’ problems are bigger than that.
Much bigger.
There have been clashes between demonstrators and security officers at biofuels cconferences. While demonstrators have been pinning placards to gates of conference centres,, frustrated young entrepreneurs and biotech executives have been reduced to talking querulously into their mobile phones. Finally they have been let in, but only after being handed leaflets that say said that biofuels were for "biofools". They were bad for the environment.
This is not just a view found on the ecological left,.. An OECD working group report published in September 2007 said the twentyfold anticipated amount of energy being extracted annually from land between now and 2050 and growing populations (9bn in 2050) will limit the amount of new land that can be brought into production leading to a
“food-versus-fuel” debate. This would then push starving people into cutting down the rainforests to grow crops, either for cash or food. Worse, biofuels' big claim, that they were good for the environment, when such impacts as soil acidification, fertilizer use, biodiversity loss and toxicity of agricultural pesticides are taken into account, "the overall environmental impacts
can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel" . For good measure, the European commission's in house science advice unit leaked a paper that the policy will be exceedingly costly and will neither lead to substantial greenhouse gas savings nor to job creation. Science, the world’s leading science journal, goes further than the OECD report, saying that analyses which the European commission based its policy suggestions on failed to count the carbon emissions that occurred as farmers responded to higher prices and converted forest and grasslands to croplands. The study found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20 percent savings, nearly doubled green house gases over 30 years and increased greenhouse gases over 167 years.
A UN report, Last Stand of the Orangutan, said that, combined with logging and fire pressures, palm oil production could result in the destruction of 98% of Indonesia’s rainforest within 12 years. Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on Food, calls biofuels a "crime against humanity".
Second generation
ONE OF THE interesting things about biofuels is that the number of patents has increased by 150 percent in each of the last two years, and now has more patents issued, over a 1,000 a year, than solar and wind combined. It seemed most of these patent-holders are travelling around Europe and the world. flush with the $1bn in bio-fuels research and development projects the US department of energy is granting to make second generation biofuels. There is a sense of ferment in the industry, as it were, for new ways to make chiefly ethanol. There is a score of experimental facilities in the US and Europe.
One of the main areas of research concerns turning cellulose from grasses, bagasse (the residue from sugarcane) sawdust, wood chip, straw, even municipal waste, into ethanol. (It is somewhat alarming to start to see every plant and tree around as as just a source of energy. Whither Wordsworth?) Their fertiliser and production carbon debts have already been paid by their primary products; so they are the greenest of all ethanols, and they do not dual role as potential food crops. but the treatment process is more complex: the lignine sheaths protecting the cellulose have to be separated out through applications of acid; then hydrolysed with the help of genetically engineered enzymes. They have then reached the state of beetroot or sugarcane sugar: these simple sugars can then be fermented by yeasts to alcohols, the usual way, before being distilled into usable bioethanol.
What enzymes? The plethora of wood-digesting proteins residing in termites' guts have been extensively studied to try and shed light on the bugs' wood eating capacity to suggest cheaper, more effective ways of generating cellulosic ethanol. But there are many, many other routes being studied..
One recent analysis said that no single breakthrough was likely to bring us to the point of efficient biofuel production. Rather, it will probably take many advances on several scientific and technological fronts, underlining the importance of a systems approach. And economics would determine the winner, no mater what plants get built in the short term.
Conclusion
What the commission and the United States have done is commit themselves to a controversial course of action, and only time will tell whether second generation biofuels will make a difference. The commission has to convince not only the public, but heads of government, which is like herding cats:at the annual EU spring competitiveness summit in March, Angela Merkel made public her anxiety about carbon leakage, that industry would migrate to where environmental conditions are laxer. The steel industry, which will be subject to carbon cap and trade policies that form the other centre plank of the commission's new environment policy, has complained that its cost will rise by 10 percent under the new legislation. It's a battle set to continue to rage versus hostile NGOs and journalists and an indifferent, confused public. Perhaps it is a battle that will take in other issues; for this promises to be the question of the century, Once you start talking about crops and land-use - if land use is what NGOs worry about - why not grazing for cattle?
For instance, one delegate at a meeting I was at recently noted that most arable land is in fact not used by biocrops but livestock for grazing; in calorie terms, that land would be better used for growing crops, eaten directly by people. Shortly after that we all drifted off into the most sumptuous of banquets, where many splendid meat dishes were served and plenty of ethanol of the superior kind served, perhaps to dull various ironies.
The problem
We all knew the story, but it was worth hearing again. First an implicit reference to a depressing fact by the ex president of Costa Rica. We're all going to die. But that's why many, maybe, don't worry about the Greenland glaciers shedding into the Atlantic. All the self sacrifices was all a lot of effort for no gain, since the gains benefit the next generation whereas you have to bear the cost. So he said: "You know when people built the cathedrals, they behaved as if they could see them completed in one generation, though it was the work of many generations. So is the fight against climate change."
There was mention of the hockey stick, and peak oil. That this year Chinese car sales overtook Japanese ones and that by 2015 China would be buying more cars than America - and even then, China would have to increase its car density fivefold to reach America's figure. By then, China, five times bigger, would be belching megatonnes of carbon.
Next was the Marianne Fischer Boel, the commissioner, who said that 20 percent of green houses gases came from transport and this was the only sector where CO2 emissions were growing. "Europe has to act together," she said, or there would just be a lot of fragmented efforts, she implied, leading nowhere.
2020 plan
So the European commission presented a legislative proposal in January that requires a 20 percent cut in Greenhouse gases (GHG), a 20 percent cut in energy use, and 20 percent use of renewables, in Europe, by 2020. The crucial bit is that the transport problem will be deal through a greater commitment to biofuels. Biofuels include biodiesel and bioethanol, made from rapeseed, palm oil and cooking oil; and beetroot, sugarcane and wheat respectively. Ten percent of transport fuel is the target; rising to 35-40 percent by 2030. China has a five-year plan. America also has an ambitious expansion plan. While Europe expects private industry to grow firms manufacturing biofuels, the US Department of Energy has given new firms big grants. Biofuels' advantages are: they are renewable. Even global warming sceptics realise that oil is finite - global consumption is a cubic mile a year - and has so many other high value uses that are desirable. Another is energy security: independence from increasingly expensive oil sourced from the difficult Middle East. America is quite explicit about this: its bill requiring a seven-fold increase in the use of biofuels by 2022 - and the US has already overtaken Brazil as the largest producer - is called the Energy Independence and Security Act. Finally, biofuels offer reductions in green house gases. Not in tail pipe emissions, which are the same as for petrol, but when making a life cycle assessment of carbon usage: when you factor in the carbon dioxide absorption of fuels based on corn, rapeseed, sugarcane, etc, this clearly reduces their net carbon contribution. You also have to factor in the CO2 used in production (fertilisers, transport, manufacture); but even so, according to studies used by the commission, rapeseed offers GHG emission reductions of 50 per cent, halfway between Brazilian sugarcane's 90 percent and American's corn's 15 percent. As Fischer Boel said: "Biofuels are a vital element in our tool box to combat climate change."
Problems.
But it's not so simple as just telling Europe's under-employed farmers to start tilling their set asides with biofuel crops. There are problems with sequencing. Getting investors, plants, transport infrastructure, fuel stations, car manufacturers and, then, above all, customers all to mesh, to launch into this new fuels adventure. It's early days, but only one country in Europe has taken to bioethanol cars in any quantities, Sweden. But even with tax breaks, congestion charge exemptions and a cash grant, flexifuel (which can take petrol and/or ethanol) vehicles still only make up 15% of new car sales. The Swedish government mandates petrol stations to have ethanol pumps; so 2,000 do. In the France the figure is 180. In the UK about 20. .
If pump unavailability, ethanol's newness and its allegedly corrosive properties were its only problems then the European commission's selling job - to publics and member state governments - might have been hard enough, handicapped by a seeming inability to push innovations such as GM crops through that are used in the United States. But biofuels’ problems are bigger than that.
Much bigger.
There have been clashes between demonstrators and security officers at biofuels cconferences. While demonstrators have been pinning placards to gates of conference centres,, frustrated young entrepreneurs and biotech executives have been reduced to talking querulously into their mobile phones. Finally they have been let in, but only after being handed leaflets that say said that biofuels were for "biofools". They were bad for the environment.
This is not just a view found on the ecological left,.. An OECD working group report published in September 2007 said the twentyfold anticipated amount of energy being extracted annually from land between now and 2050 and growing populations (9bn in 2050) will limit the amount of new land that can be brought into production leading to a
“food-versus-fuel” debate. This would then push starving people into cutting down the rainforests to grow crops, either for cash or food. Worse, biofuels' big claim, that they were good for the environment, when such impacts as soil acidification, fertilizer use, biodiversity loss and toxicity of agricultural pesticides are taken into account, "the overall environmental impacts
can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel" . For good measure, the European commission's in house science advice unit leaked a paper that the policy will be exceedingly costly and will neither lead to substantial greenhouse gas savings nor to job creation. Science, the world’s leading science journal, goes further than the OECD report, saying that analyses which the European commission based its policy suggestions on failed to count the carbon emissions that occurred as farmers responded to higher prices and converted forest and grasslands to croplands. The study found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20 percent savings, nearly doubled green house gases over 30 years and increased greenhouse gases over 167 years.
A UN report, Last Stand of the Orangutan, said that, combined with logging and fire pressures, palm oil production could result in the destruction of 98% of Indonesia’s rainforest within 12 years. Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on Food, calls biofuels a "crime against humanity".
Second generation
ONE OF THE interesting things about biofuels is that the number of patents has increased by 150 percent in each of the last two years, and now has more patents issued, over a 1,000 a year, than solar and wind combined. It seemed most of these patent-holders are travelling around Europe and the world. flush with the $1bn in bio-fuels research and development projects the US department of energy is granting to make second generation biofuels. There is a sense of ferment in the industry, as it were, for new ways to make chiefly ethanol. There is a score of experimental facilities in the US and Europe.
One of the main areas of research concerns turning cellulose from grasses, bagasse (the residue from sugarcane) sawdust, wood chip, straw, even municipal waste, into ethanol. (It is somewhat alarming to start to see every plant and tree around as as just a source of energy. Whither Wordsworth?) Their fertiliser and production carbon debts have already been paid by their primary products; so they are the greenest of all ethanols, and they do not dual role as potential food crops. but the treatment process is more complex: the lignine sheaths protecting the cellulose have to be separated out through applications of acid; then hydrolysed with the help of genetically engineered enzymes. They have then reached the state of beetroot or sugarcane sugar: these simple sugars can then be fermented by yeasts to alcohols, the usual way, before being distilled into usable bioethanol.
What enzymes? The plethora of wood-digesting proteins residing in termites' guts have been extensively studied to try and shed light on the bugs' wood eating capacity to suggest cheaper, more effective ways of generating cellulosic ethanol. But there are many, many other routes being studied..
One recent analysis said that no single breakthrough was likely to bring us to the point of efficient biofuel production. Rather, it will probably take many advances on several scientific and technological fronts, underlining the importance of a systems approach. And economics would determine the winner, no mater what plants get built in the short term.
Conclusion
What the commission and the United States have done is commit themselves to a controversial course of action, and only time will tell whether second generation biofuels will make a difference. The commission has to convince not only the public, but heads of government, which is like herding cats:at the annual EU spring competitiveness summit in March, Angela Merkel made public her anxiety about carbon leakage, that industry would migrate to where environmental conditions are laxer. The steel industry, which will be subject to carbon cap and trade policies that form the other centre plank of the commission's new environment policy, has complained that its cost will rise by 10 percent under the new legislation. It's a battle set to continue to rage versus hostile NGOs and journalists and an indifferent, confused public. Perhaps it is a battle that will take in other issues; for this promises to be the question of the century, Once you start talking about crops and land-use - if land use is what NGOs worry about - why not grazing for cattle?
For instance, one delegate at a meeting I was at recently noted that most arable land is in fact not used by biocrops but livestock for grazing; in calorie terms, that land would be better used for growing crops, eaten directly by people. Shortly after that we all drifted off into the most sumptuous of banquets, where many splendid meat dishes were served and plenty of ethanol of the superior kind served, perhaps to dull various ironies.
Story of the birdmen
The balloon rises gently over the quilted landscape of the Finnish countryside. The cosy houses drifting below the basket have little idea that a history attempt is about to be made, to fulfil a dream of man since the dawn of mankind: the first unassisted human free level flight.
A man is sitting on a ledge next to the balloon. He is our hero, and is wearing what looks like a white jumpsuit, a helmet with wing attachments, a dial gauge on his chest, and, most interestingly, two cylindrical metal objects,one strapped to each calf.
“Of course, this is quite dangerous,” says Jari Kuosma, friend and collaborator with the man on the edge of the balloon, “You have nylon and fire very close to each other.”
The man casts off, and drops, fast.
From Icarus onwards, human history has been filled with inventors, dreamers and various vainglorious individuals who have tried to fly off every precipice they could find, risking and often losing their lives. Peasants, kings and scholars have leapt from every rooftop, cliff, and towers wearing as many different types of feather set ups as they broke bones when they came down and landed.
Then came the Wright brothers, and now we sit in cramped tubes in economy class. But the dream never really went away.
In the era of the barnstormers, the 1930s, people who called themselves batmen and semi rigid wings that made them look like baroque human first world war fighter planes used to entertain crowds at airshows by jumping off the wings of air planes. Some of them even survived. The difficulty was that the wings, made of canvas and held up by balsawood, were too big, and inflexible: when the batman pulled the ripcord the wings tended to get entangled in the parachute, plunging the batman to his death. According to one writer, 72 out of 75 batmen died between 1930s – 60s. The persistence is impressive. One is reminded of the Darwin Award, the mock science prize granted each year to the person who performs the best service to mankind by removing himself from the gene pool.
Jari Kuosma is a 38-year-old business administration graduate who just didn’t fit in at his job at Finland’s telecommunications company. He wore a suit and tie; but preferred excitement. His first love was skydiving stunts: he was once part of the Finnish record for the largest free-falling formation, 57 divers. Later, in Estonia, he learnt a Russian technique for jumping at extremely low altitudes: 100 metres, from a plane travelling at 250mph. He became an expert in hook turns, in which the diver takes a sharp degree turn shortly before landing in his parachute to rapidly increase the speed of the final descent so as to finish with a flourish. The diver skims across high grass and bushes, just a metre off the ground, before landing in a predetermined place such as a small raft on a pond. In skydivers’ slang it is called femuring; the femur, the thighbone, is the bone that most often breaks.
The art of diving with wings remained a largely lethal sport until a legendary French diver Patrick Gayardon began building wingsuits of nylon with porous air cells that filled up with air and gave enough rigidity and shape to fly. Kuosma, having just jumped from an 800metre mountain in Italy with a friend, saw a postcard of Gayardon and thought: this is even better than regular skydiving. Gayardon died a few months later in Hawaiian banana field.
Undeterred, Kuosma and a colleague set about building their own. The shape of the wingsuit is defined by the outstretched arms and legs of the person in the suit. In experiments, Kuosma determined the correct angle by holding a book at different angles. It was much easier to hold up a book if the angle was slightly tilted backwards.
Neither was an engineer, and when he made his first jump with his girlfriend – clearly devoted - he estimated his chances of their survival at 50-50: the pilot said goodbye, says Kuosma. But the jump was successful, and awesome. Unlike the roar of skydiving, wingsuit flying was in total silence, and they flew for several minutes; a normal jump is 60 seconds. The drop speed is 45mph, but can be as low as 25mph. In contrast, regular skydivers fall as fast as 160mph.
On further jumps Kuosma took pleasure in overtaking cars, noting that “there are no speed limits in the sky.” He was jailed once in Georgia, USA, for speeding.
Kuosma went to Slovenia and put all the money he had into a wingsuit making venture with a well-known Croatian designer of parachutes. He made dozens of suits, smuggling them through customs because he couldn’t afford to pay duty. And went from airshow to airshow and diving clubs across Europe demonstrating his concept.
Skydivers were keen, but several clubs barred him because “we want to keep our members alive”. Twelve people have died in wingsuit flying so far.
But 2,000 have tried and survived. Some of them are girls: batbabes.
Regarding these figures, the writer Michael Abrams, who has written a book about wingsuit flying, says the number of fatalities per year remains largely the same, but that’s only because the new gear lets experienced skydivers take greater risks. “The number of beginner fatalities per year has plunged to next to zero. Since only individuals who have completed 200 dives are allowed to use wingsuits, they presumably know what they are setting themselves up for.”
Kuosma adds that Birdman – the successful company he set up to make wingsuits - offers qualified instructors’ courses. “We wanted to remove the stigma that wingsuit flying was dangerous; the programmes not only allowed people to experience the joys of flight safely, it also allowed for the creation of more instructors who would be able to train beginners all over the skydiving world.”
There was one barrier still to be conquered: under the inexorable laws of physics, even wingsuited flyers have to descend to the ground eventually, at a ratio of 2.5:1.
Back in the balloon, the man tumbles away, downward, fast. Suddenly there is a flash: the cylinders attached to his legs fire up, there is a swoop and then a levelling up as the man roars away. The human jet continues for several kilometres horizontally; when the fuel from the 16kg thrusters, usually used in model jet airplanes, the parachute bursts like a flower, and, after a descent of 2,000 metres, there is a safe landing. Kuosma’s friend Visa Parvianian (“the crazy Finn”) has just made history: he had become the first man unassisted by a vehicle to fly more or less horizontally with wings no wider than his arm span for any length of time. It’s the 25th October 2005.
There have been thirty or forty jet flights since; the team are working hard on achieving the next goal: to land unassisted by a parachute. Kuosma is a little tight-lipped about this, but then several other teams are trying to achieve the same, using their own style techniques.
A longer term aim is to make flights last longer: the fuel was contained in two kerosene hot water bottles squeezed under Parviainen’s wingsuits. Two litres won’t go far. But just how much fuel can a man carry? “We have shown it is possible,” says Kuosma. “The only thing is to make the flight sustainable. It’s the holy grail.”
Abram puts it: “Undoubtedly sometime in the next decade someone will land in a wingsuit without using a parachute. And who knows, if nanotechnology allows for materials to get light enough, skyflyers may be able to jump out of a plane, let their wings unfold and fly all day using thermals. You’ve got to remember these are people who were not warned away, but inspired, by the story Icarus.”
Why do they do it? Kuosma has siaid, very philosophically, that "You feel smaller up there, but much bigger. Because you know how small you feel and the knowledge makes you feel bigger."
I like the words of the pilot writer Antoine de Saint Exupery (Author of the little prince) who described the airman as the kataskopos, originally in Greek, he who sees everything. The word later came to mean spy or explorer. And what he saw, piloting a small plane to Argentina when he did the air run as a postal pilot in the 1920s, was the need for unity.
"It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness ... the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men.”
"We must", Saint-Ex concluded, "surely seek unity. We must surely seek to communicate with some of those fires burning far apart in the landscape."
One wonders if the birdmen, sharing the intense camaraderie of the sky, sharpened by the possibility of death, are not trying to do just that.
A man is sitting on a ledge next to the balloon. He is our hero, and is wearing what looks like a white jumpsuit, a helmet with wing attachments, a dial gauge on his chest, and, most interestingly, two cylindrical metal objects,one strapped to each calf.
“Of course, this is quite dangerous,” says Jari Kuosma, friend and collaborator with the man on the edge of the balloon, “You have nylon and fire very close to each other.”
The man casts off, and drops, fast.
From Icarus onwards, human history has been filled with inventors, dreamers and various vainglorious individuals who have tried to fly off every precipice they could find, risking and often losing their lives. Peasants, kings and scholars have leapt from every rooftop, cliff, and towers wearing as many different types of feather set ups as they broke bones when they came down and landed.
Then came the Wright brothers, and now we sit in cramped tubes in economy class. But the dream never really went away.
In the era of the barnstormers, the 1930s, people who called themselves batmen and semi rigid wings that made them look like baroque human first world war fighter planes used to entertain crowds at airshows by jumping off the wings of air planes. Some of them even survived. The difficulty was that the wings, made of canvas and held up by balsawood, were too big, and inflexible: when the batman pulled the ripcord the wings tended to get entangled in the parachute, plunging the batman to his death. According to one writer, 72 out of 75 batmen died between 1930s – 60s. The persistence is impressive. One is reminded of the Darwin Award, the mock science prize granted each year to the person who performs the best service to mankind by removing himself from the gene pool.
Jari Kuosma is a 38-year-old business administration graduate who just didn’t fit in at his job at Finland’s telecommunications company. He wore a suit and tie; but preferred excitement. His first love was skydiving stunts: he was once part of the Finnish record for the largest free-falling formation, 57 divers. Later, in Estonia, he learnt a Russian technique for jumping at extremely low altitudes: 100 metres, from a plane travelling at 250mph. He became an expert in hook turns, in which the diver takes a sharp degree turn shortly before landing in his parachute to rapidly increase the speed of the final descent so as to finish with a flourish. The diver skims across high grass and bushes, just a metre off the ground, before landing in a predetermined place such as a small raft on a pond. In skydivers’ slang it is called femuring; the femur, the thighbone, is the bone that most often breaks.
The art of diving with wings remained a largely lethal sport until a legendary French diver Patrick Gayardon began building wingsuits of nylon with porous air cells that filled up with air and gave enough rigidity and shape to fly. Kuosma, having just jumped from an 800metre mountain in Italy with a friend, saw a postcard of Gayardon and thought: this is even better than regular skydiving. Gayardon died a few months later in Hawaiian banana field.
Undeterred, Kuosma and a colleague set about building their own. The shape of the wingsuit is defined by the outstretched arms and legs of the person in the suit. In experiments, Kuosma determined the correct angle by holding a book at different angles. It was much easier to hold up a book if the angle was slightly tilted backwards.
Neither was an engineer, and when he made his first jump with his girlfriend – clearly devoted - he estimated his chances of their survival at 50-50: the pilot said goodbye, says Kuosma. But the jump was successful, and awesome. Unlike the roar of skydiving, wingsuit flying was in total silence, and they flew for several minutes; a normal jump is 60 seconds. The drop speed is 45mph, but can be as low as 25mph. In contrast, regular skydivers fall as fast as 160mph.
On further jumps Kuosma took pleasure in overtaking cars, noting that “there are no speed limits in the sky.” He was jailed once in Georgia, USA, for speeding.
Kuosma went to Slovenia and put all the money he had into a wingsuit making venture with a well-known Croatian designer of parachutes. He made dozens of suits, smuggling them through customs because he couldn’t afford to pay duty. And went from airshow to airshow and diving clubs across Europe demonstrating his concept.
Skydivers were keen, but several clubs barred him because “we want to keep our members alive”. Twelve people have died in wingsuit flying so far.
But 2,000 have tried and survived. Some of them are girls: batbabes.
Regarding these figures, the writer Michael Abrams, who has written a book about wingsuit flying, says the number of fatalities per year remains largely the same, but that’s only because the new gear lets experienced skydivers take greater risks. “The number of beginner fatalities per year has plunged to next to zero. Since only individuals who have completed 200 dives are allowed to use wingsuits, they presumably know what they are setting themselves up for.”
Kuosma adds that Birdman – the successful company he set up to make wingsuits - offers qualified instructors’ courses. “We wanted to remove the stigma that wingsuit flying was dangerous; the programmes not only allowed people to experience the joys of flight safely, it also allowed for the creation of more instructors who would be able to train beginners all over the skydiving world.”
There was one barrier still to be conquered: under the inexorable laws of physics, even wingsuited flyers have to descend to the ground eventually, at a ratio of 2.5:1.
Back in the balloon, the man tumbles away, downward, fast. Suddenly there is a flash: the cylinders attached to his legs fire up, there is a swoop and then a levelling up as the man roars away. The human jet continues for several kilometres horizontally; when the fuel from the 16kg thrusters, usually used in model jet airplanes, the parachute bursts like a flower, and, after a descent of 2,000 metres, there is a safe landing. Kuosma’s friend Visa Parvianian (“the crazy Finn”) has just made history: he had become the first man unassisted by a vehicle to fly more or less horizontally with wings no wider than his arm span for any length of time. It’s the 25th October 2005.
There have been thirty or forty jet flights since; the team are working hard on achieving the next goal: to land unassisted by a parachute. Kuosma is a little tight-lipped about this, but then several other teams are trying to achieve the same, using their own style techniques.
A longer term aim is to make flights last longer: the fuel was contained in two kerosene hot water bottles squeezed under Parviainen’s wingsuits. Two litres won’t go far. But just how much fuel can a man carry? “We have shown it is possible,” says Kuosma. “The only thing is to make the flight sustainable. It’s the holy grail.”
Abram puts it: “Undoubtedly sometime in the next decade someone will land in a wingsuit without using a parachute. And who knows, if nanotechnology allows for materials to get light enough, skyflyers may be able to jump out of a plane, let their wings unfold and fly all day using thermals. You’ve got to remember these are people who were not warned away, but inspired, by the story Icarus.”
Why do they do it? Kuosma has siaid, very philosophically, that "You feel smaller up there, but much bigger. Because you know how small you feel and the knowledge makes you feel bigger."
I like the words of the pilot writer Antoine de Saint Exupery (Author of the little prince) who described the airman as the kataskopos, originally in Greek, he who sees everything. The word later came to mean spy or explorer. And what he saw, piloting a small plane to Argentina when he did the air run as a postal pilot in the 1920s, was the need for unity.
"It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness ... the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men.”
"We must", Saint-Ex concluded, "surely seek unity. We must surely seek to communicate with some of those fires burning far apart in the landscape."
One wonders if the birdmen, sharing the intense camaraderie of the sky, sharpened by the possibility of death, are not trying to do just that.
Eurostar rant
It is interesting that, in British pub talk, European Union is often presented as wanting to impose a false, inhuman, inorganic technocrat's idea of the world on England. Just the opposite is happening, say many Europeans: Anglo saxon culture is imposing itself on Europe, with the most market-oriented European commission in history making Europe more homogenous than ever.
Plenty of (continental) European discourse has wished for Europe to build a defence of humanism against "American civilisation" , especially the French, who considered the words an oxymoron, an absolute negation of all the values humanity were founded on. This is a running thread through French intellectual debate from the Goncourts who condemned washbasins fastened to the walls to left-bank Cpmmunists who thought labour saving devices deprived man from absolution through toil.
Bertrand de Jouvenel's Crise de capitalisme merged the "organisation of production", "the shaping of consumption through advertising", the "methodical selection of personnel", the permanent recourse to statistical methods and finally, the tyranny of the "service" ideology.
As for American individualism, it was but an illusion: "Though an American always pictures himself as being a free and unbridled as a prairie pony, in reality he is the most docile of men,"moulded as easily as clay". Hundreds of millions of Americans let themselves be sanded down by scientists, economists and psychologists in the service of consumption.
Socialist Francois Drujon noted that indoctrination of human life was greater than what Soviet collectivism would bring. The eating factories, standardised stores, standardised meals, standardised frozen meat, standardised bars and bartenders. American small towns seemed like "so many branches of a parent company". Another thinker compared the USSR with the USA: neither was much better than thei other, and the fact that their names were an inorganic set of initials were a refection of their values, which were the same as those of a corporation or a trust, like IBM.
Given all this, one could argue that the European community was founded in 1957 to keep the Germans down - but also American values out. The Common Agricultural Policy, which still takes half of EU spending, was meant to keep rural France's humanistic qualities, to allow France's inefficient small holders to be custodians of a civilization that nurtured and fed into the culture of the provincial towns and ultimately of Paris; a bulwark against the kind of civilization America and its parent culture across the Atlantic, the "nation of shopkeepers", stood for. A civilisation based on inividualism, small-holding and diversity: the French boulangerie compared to the Walmart hypermarket.
The French were not rejecting Europe when they said no the European constitution in June 2005; they just wanted a different one, and when the east Europeans joined and allied themselves to the Anglo-Saxon vision of a common market, the French saw the realisation of their ideal slip away. The flagship policies of the Barroso commission are all about making Europe more efficient, by creating a single market in labour, healthcare, services, education and science: beating the opponent across the Atlantic in economic and technological achievement by becoming more like it.
Many British vaguely think of Europe as being "socialist", "conformist" and "all the same", to which any Frenchman could reply: "All the same. Of course. Unlike your High Streets." Tthe French argument is that the British criticism that Europe is "all the same" and "technocratic" is indeed coming true - but because Europe is becoming more Anglo-American, and more capitalist, and that capitalism breeds conformity.
Plenty of (continental) European discourse has wished for Europe to build a defence of humanism against "American civilisation" , especially the French, who considered the words an oxymoron, an absolute negation of all the values humanity were founded on. This is a running thread through French intellectual debate from the Goncourts who condemned washbasins fastened to the walls to left-bank Cpmmunists who thought labour saving devices deprived man from absolution through toil.
Bertrand de Jouvenel's Crise de capitalisme merged the "organisation of production", "the shaping of consumption through advertising", the "methodical selection of personnel", the permanent recourse to statistical methods and finally, the tyranny of the "service" ideology.
As for American individualism, it was but an illusion: "Though an American always pictures himself as being a free and unbridled as a prairie pony, in reality he is the most docile of men,"moulded as easily as clay". Hundreds of millions of Americans let themselves be sanded down by scientists, economists and psychologists in the service of consumption.
Socialist Francois Drujon noted that indoctrination of human life was greater than what Soviet collectivism would bring. The eating factories, standardised stores, standardised meals, standardised frozen meat, standardised bars and bartenders. American small towns seemed like "so many branches of a parent company". Another thinker compared the USSR with the USA: neither was much better than thei other, and the fact that their names were an inorganic set of initials were a refection of their values, which were the same as those of a corporation or a trust, like IBM.
Given all this, one could argue that the European community was founded in 1957 to keep the Germans down - but also American values out. The Common Agricultural Policy, which still takes half of EU spending, was meant to keep rural France's humanistic qualities, to allow France's inefficient small holders to be custodians of a civilization that nurtured and fed into the culture of the provincial towns and ultimately of Paris; a bulwark against the kind of civilization America and its parent culture across the Atlantic, the "nation of shopkeepers", stood for. A civilisation based on inividualism, small-holding and diversity: the French boulangerie compared to the Walmart hypermarket.
The French were not rejecting Europe when they said no the European constitution in June 2005; they just wanted a different one, and when the east Europeans joined and allied themselves to the Anglo-Saxon vision of a common market, the French saw the realisation of their ideal slip away. The flagship policies of the Barroso commission are all about making Europe more efficient, by creating a single market in labour, healthcare, services, education and science: beating the opponent across the Atlantic in economic and technological achievement by becoming more like it.
Many British vaguely think of Europe as being "socialist", "conformist" and "all the same", to which any Frenchman could reply: "All the same. Of course. Unlike your High Streets." Tthe French argument is that the British criticism that Europe is "all the same" and "technocratic" is indeed coming true - but because Europe is becoming more Anglo-American, and more capitalist, and that capitalism breeds conformity.
European Institute Technology
There’s a lot of terminology in EU science that can be quite baffling: Joint technology initiatives, ERA net, technology platforms, ERC, Eureka, and more. Enough for the would-be interested outsider to throw up his hands.
Ah, but all this is just details, say Eurocrats. The important thing to realise is that the EU is obsessed with the United States, which has a lower gross domestic product and produces fewer scientific papers, yet has a vastly greater influence in global affairs – and wins more Nobel prizes. The reason, officials, say,. is economies of scale. Europe’s many borders and languages, and nation-centred research budgets, means a lot of similar and low-level science is going on several countries – duplication – and the best do not rub shoulders with each, compete, or collaborate, and so the global heights of science are never reached
Te EU vision is to get away from “subcriticality” at the highest level of academic research (quite good, but not good enough) through a single European research area, . The goal is to assemble clusters of specialisation, with the best researchers from across Europe in that particular area, with a penumbra of start up firms and industry support: so, maybe, the best European biotech scientists gathering in Copenhagen,; best experts in another field in Budapest. The parallel is not so much with a premier league, but a capital city for each sport, bringing together the best players in that sport, wherever they are from, to compete and collaborate.
How to get it going? With a new structural concept, yet another acronym, but one worth remembering, called KICS, Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs).
KICS hope to bring together departments of universities, companies and research institutes to form an integrated partnership to perform in response to calls for proposals by the EU’s science funding scheme, in two areas, ICT and Energy research
The researchers will be based at their home universities; linked by email (and European money) but will the idea is that the clusters of contacts and knowledge sharing will coalesce and eventually bandy together to establish bricks and mortar institutions in one of other of the virtual components of the KICs resides. Voila: there’s the European centre of excellence.
It’s early days, but just how optimistic established universities are about these cuckoos in the nest, and whether researchers will forego their regular contacts (often, ironically, across the Atlantic) remains to be seen. But IMEC, in Leuven, Belgium, the world’s leading research centre for nano electronics and nano technology, trickle-funded for decades by the Belgian government and now funded by global industry, offers a model of what the realised KICs might evolve into.
Eurocrats readily agree that there are arguments for and against, and many MEPs, organisations and lobby groups on the inside in Brussels are rather sceptical that the KICs will take off, attract the best researchers, or flourish in their borrowed premises. But they at least have good arguments. Inasmuch in that the EU issue reaches British public consciousness, there is a fixation with what the EU is against, rather than what the EU is about: this naturally leads the average British newspaper reader to assume that Eurocrats’ are dim, sinister or forever self aggrandising. Or there’s a fixation on the ludicrous: personally, laughing at the EU always brings to my mind the underenfranchised British Tommies making jokes about the Kaiser before going over the top and being gunned down by the Huns. It’s a laughter of mistaken superiority. Continentals are serious about the EU, and foreigners are Not. Stupid. Which is always worth reminding the Brits about.. As yet the KICs make up only a vision for EU science, but for what it’s worth, here it is..
Ah, but all this is just details, say Eurocrats. The important thing to realise is that the EU is obsessed with the United States, which has a lower gross domestic product and produces fewer scientific papers, yet has a vastly greater influence in global affairs – and wins more Nobel prizes. The reason, officials, say,. is economies of scale. Europe’s many borders and languages, and nation-centred research budgets, means a lot of similar and low-level science is going on several countries – duplication – and the best do not rub shoulders with each, compete, or collaborate, and so the global heights of science are never reached
Te EU vision is to get away from “subcriticality” at the highest level of academic research (quite good, but not good enough) through a single European research area, . The goal is to assemble clusters of specialisation, with the best researchers from across Europe in that particular area, with a penumbra of start up firms and industry support: so, maybe, the best European biotech scientists gathering in Copenhagen,; best experts in another field in Budapest. The parallel is not so much with a premier league, but a capital city for each sport, bringing together the best players in that sport, wherever they are from, to compete and collaborate.
How to get it going? With a new structural concept, yet another acronym, but one worth remembering, called KICS, Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs).
KICS hope to bring together departments of universities, companies and research institutes to form an integrated partnership to perform in response to calls for proposals by the EU’s science funding scheme, in two areas, ICT and Energy research
The researchers will be based at their home universities; linked by email (and European money) but will the idea is that the clusters of contacts and knowledge sharing will coalesce and eventually bandy together to establish bricks and mortar institutions in one of other of the virtual components of the KICs resides. Voila: there’s the European centre of excellence.
It’s early days, but just how optimistic established universities are about these cuckoos in the nest, and whether researchers will forego their regular contacts (often, ironically, across the Atlantic) remains to be seen. But IMEC, in Leuven, Belgium, the world’s leading research centre for nano electronics and nano technology, trickle-funded for decades by the Belgian government and now funded by global industry, offers a model of what the realised KICs might evolve into.
Eurocrats readily agree that there are arguments for and against, and many MEPs, organisations and lobby groups on the inside in Brussels are rather sceptical that the KICs will take off, attract the best researchers, or flourish in their borrowed premises. But they at least have good arguments. Inasmuch in that the EU issue reaches British public consciousness, there is a fixation with what the EU is against, rather than what the EU is about: this naturally leads the average British newspaper reader to assume that Eurocrats’ are dim, sinister or forever self aggrandising. Or there’s a fixation on the ludicrous: personally, laughing at the EU always brings to my mind the underenfranchised British Tommies making jokes about the Kaiser before going over the top and being gunned down by the Huns. It’s a laughter of mistaken superiority. Continentals are serious about the EU, and foreigners are Not. Stupid. Which is always worth reminding the Brits about.. As yet the KICs make up only a vision for EU science, but for what it’s worth, here it is..
Hakan Lans
Think back to Italy’s worst aviation disaster, at Milan’s Linate airport, in October 2001, when an SAS MD-87 jet taking off in thick fog and rain at 170 mph slammed into a . business Cessna taxi-ing on the wrong runway, the SAS jet lost its right engine and killed the four occupants of the smaller jet instantly.
The bigger plane then managed to take off, reaching a height of 12m; but because the remaining engine had ingested debris from the crash, reducing its thrust, the plane came down on to its destroyed landing gear and careered into a baggage handling hangar at 150mph, killing all 118 people on board. Four Italian ground personnel also died. Pilot Jonas Gustafsson’s manoeuvring of the controls was considered so skilful the sequence of his actions are now held up as an example in the SAS training manual.
Had the aircraft been able to see each other - in fog-proof electronic real-time on a cockpit computer screen, and not rely on radio instructions from a negligent control tower, the accident would surely have been avoided. In fact such a system had, in 2001, been up and running for five years, designed by Hakan Lans, often regarded as Sweden’s top inventor in the 20th century.
Yet in 2007, six years after Linate, there is still no progress in bringing his STDMA system on to the global aviation market. It's cheap to install and run; and allows planes to see each other whether in the ground or in the sky, regardless of clouds and weather - and even see ground vehicles. It's even an International civil aviation organisation (ICAO) standard, but it's a standard is only as good as the uptake of the system is broad.
And at the moment, use is compulsory only over Swedish and Russian airspace. Reason. "Nothing to do with its merits, it's excellent. But industry lobbying," says Bo Redeborn, director of Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic controllers across Europe.
Many who work in creative endeavour including science will have empathised with Lans. You spend fifteen years in a lab or garret perfecting your brilliant idea only to find it dumped because it is, how shall one put it, ahead of its time, attracting the ire of if not luddites then lobbyists. .
How does the Lans system work? Well, let’s look first at how the current system radar works. A rotating transmission antenna, using lots of electricity and spectrum, pumps out high energy pulses into the sky and picks up echoes from aircraft which are painted by the beams. It’s slow, taking up to half a minute for stressed ground controllers to give a reading from a screen full of dots over scratchy radios: it requires aircraft to cooperate, identify themselves and fly at a reasonably high altitude. It’s also not so accurate.
In contrast, Lans's system is a GPS "crystal ball", showing the location, direction of flight, call sigh of up 9,000 other craft in the sky, overlaid on a colour map of the region. Its astonishing system that allows free flight, allowing aircraft to negotiate with each other on a peer to peer basis, to figure out potential hazards and avoid them, as pilots routinely do in good weather by using their eyes and brains. Bypasing the thirty seconds It takes for air traffic control to get a radar reading means that the current safety buffers between planes In the air - several miles - can be reduced, allowing more landings and take offs - and therefore less need to expand to extra runways. Another consequence Is safety spacing: air traffic control requires airlines to stick to certain highways In the sky, which keeps aircraft separated vertically and horiztonally but Is rarely the most direct route. Unlikemotorists, pilots must fule a flight plan and stick to it, unless authorised otherwise by their controllers. Airlines cannot in most cases take the direct route and avoid air traffic snarlups, leading to more congestion. Lans's system changes all that.
The system works by aircraft transmitting their own details, taken from readings from four satellites, and using his STDMA (Self organising Time Division Multiple Access) algorithm to divide transmissions into little packets or slots which ensures that, while information is sent out on the same frequency –necessarily so- only one aircraft is ever transmitting at any one time, also necessary, to avoid interference.
The genius of his algorithm is that it is self-organising, without the need for base stations, a process that is registered and worked out by a computer program existing in all aircraft. The craft would continually change time slots and inform others which time slot they would occupy next: His algorithm applied in onboard computers didn’t choose the best time slot, which would mean that two aircraft equidistant from a third would get the same time slot even if very close. Instead the inventor saw to that the algorithm gave a range of choices, then let a randomiser take the actual slot. This is endlessly repeated to give positions to other craft at short notice.
Aviation expert professor Eli Noam, director of the Columbia University Institute for Tele-information, argues that GPS navigation is so far superior to radar he even advises closing the stations to free up bandwidth for other purposes.
Others wouldn’t go as far. Redeborn of Eurocontrol says “We need GPS regardless of what happens to radar, in fact
For national security reasons, the military will continue to use it.”
So why the holdups?
Redeborn says:"Industry and other actors in aviation spread
disinformation because they have commercial and national interests to protect." Not only the radar industry, with its multibillion-dollar investments in equipment. He includes the US Federal Aviation Administration. "They haven't been supportive at all." As well as others.
The disinformation they spread is something supporters of Lans’s system such as Redeborn often have to deal with. A common criticism is that the system lacks "integrity", that it is not secure enough from prying and dangerous eyes. In the past aircraft position was a secret known only to air traffic controllers hunched over their radar monitors. Now, the story goes, anyone, for instance a terrorist, can buy a receiver and software costing a few hundred pounds and sit in their bedsit watching real-time a map of the world's aircraft movements. True? Wrong, says Redeborn, STDMA allows advanced encryption:
"Every time we answer an argument," says Redeborn, "the lobbyists come up with a new objection, ever more trivial. Probably more money has been spent in disinformation than on developing the system, in the first place."
In truth as Redeborn well knows, it is nothing to with about efficacy or fairness; everything to do with politics. Lans’s system was never going to be implemented as the standard in aircraft in the United States even if the radar industry were to greenlight GPS, because Lans is, to put it bluntly, not American.
While Lans patented his system in 1996, and has been successfully stalled since in the international aviation industry, the US is now developing a parallel system, UAT, which it expects to roll out by 2020; even then its inferior to Lans's invention, as it lacks "SMS" capacity between aircraft and ground control, which permit written take off commands and could avoid the misunderstandings in spoken commands. Never mind: the American political-industrial complex has come to some kind of mutually satisfactory agreement. Even though for many American enterprises it’s years too late: as long ago as 1999 the American branch of UPS, the parcel service, which had installed Lans’s transponders on its own fleet was complaining that that the FAA was not demanding it as standard on all aircraft.
In Europe, perhaps because it’s less corrupted, and things are at least supposed to be judged on merit, there is precisely for that reason less movement. STDMA is clearly a system that works. (It's been tested for 150,000 flight hours, and something very similar Is the worldwide standard on ships.) But, Redeborn says: .
"Sweden is a small country with not much clout, but the government also doesn't have a tradition of intervention and flying the flag on behalf of its business and research community. Unlike France, Germany, Italy and to some extent the UK -as we see now over the squabbles with who gets what in Galileo."
So, this is how it goes in the DG transport conference rooms, in the free-for-all of shifting alliances where national and industrial interests are pitted against and with each other, and a cheap and revolutionary system from an individual inventor from a small albeit innovative country already in existence that earns none of other big players any money stands less chance. Only its evident excellence prevents the last rites being read over it; and the deadlock being broken up, with some other air navigation system getting the European go-ahead. Eventually.
Something for the reader to think about the next time he steps on a plane and gazes through the window at a fogbound runway.
The bigger plane then managed to take off, reaching a height of 12m; but because the remaining engine had ingested debris from the crash, reducing its thrust, the plane came down on to its destroyed landing gear and careered into a baggage handling hangar at 150mph, killing all 118 people on board. Four Italian ground personnel also died. Pilot Jonas Gustafsson’s manoeuvring of the controls was considered so skilful the sequence of his actions are now held up as an example in the SAS training manual.
Had the aircraft been able to see each other - in fog-proof electronic real-time on a cockpit computer screen, and not rely on radio instructions from a negligent control tower, the accident would surely have been avoided. In fact such a system had, in 2001, been up and running for five years, designed by Hakan Lans, often regarded as Sweden’s top inventor in the 20th century.
Yet in 2007, six years after Linate, there is still no progress in bringing his STDMA system on to the global aviation market. It's cheap to install and run; and allows planes to see each other whether in the ground or in the sky, regardless of clouds and weather - and even see ground vehicles. It's even an International civil aviation organisation (ICAO) standard, but it's a standard is only as good as the uptake of the system is broad.
And at the moment, use is compulsory only over Swedish and Russian airspace. Reason. "Nothing to do with its merits, it's excellent. But industry lobbying," says Bo Redeborn, director of Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic controllers across Europe.
Many who work in creative endeavour including science will have empathised with Lans. You spend fifteen years in a lab or garret perfecting your brilliant idea only to find it dumped because it is, how shall one put it, ahead of its time, attracting the ire of if not luddites then lobbyists. .
How does the Lans system work? Well, let’s look first at how the current system radar works. A rotating transmission antenna, using lots of electricity and spectrum, pumps out high energy pulses into the sky and picks up echoes from aircraft which are painted by the beams. It’s slow, taking up to half a minute for stressed ground controllers to give a reading from a screen full of dots over scratchy radios: it requires aircraft to cooperate, identify themselves and fly at a reasonably high altitude. It’s also not so accurate.
In contrast, Lans's system is a GPS "crystal ball", showing the location, direction of flight, call sigh of up 9,000 other craft in the sky, overlaid on a colour map of the region. Its astonishing system that allows free flight, allowing aircraft to negotiate with each other on a peer to peer basis, to figure out potential hazards and avoid them, as pilots routinely do in good weather by using their eyes and brains. Bypasing the thirty seconds It takes for air traffic control to get a radar reading means that the current safety buffers between planes In the air - several miles - can be reduced, allowing more landings and take offs - and therefore less need to expand to extra runways. Another consequence Is safety spacing: air traffic control requires airlines to stick to certain highways In the sky, which keeps aircraft separated vertically and horiztonally but Is rarely the most direct route. Unlikemotorists, pilots must fule a flight plan and stick to it, unless authorised otherwise by their controllers. Airlines cannot in most cases take the direct route and avoid air traffic snarlups, leading to more congestion. Lans's system changes all that.
The system works by aircraft transmitting their own details, taken from readings from four satellites, and using his STDMA (Self organising Time Division Multiple Access) algorithm to divide transmissions into little packets or slots which ensures that, while information is sent out on the same frequency –necessarily so- only one aircraft is ever transmitting at any one time, also necessary, to avoid interference.
The genius of his algorithm is that it is self-organising, without the need for base stations, a process that is registered and worked out by a computer program existing in all aircraft. The craft would continually change time slots and inform others which time slot they would occupy next: His algorithm applied in onboard computers didn’t choose the best time slot, which would mean that two aircraft equidistant from a third would get the same time slot even if very close. Instead the inventor saw to that the algorithm gave a range of choices, then let a randomiser take the actual slot. This is endlessly repeated to give positions to other craft at short notice.
Aviation expert professor Eli Noam, director of the Columbia University Institute for Tele-information, argues that GPS navigation is so far superior to radar he even advises closing the stations to free up bandwidth for other purposes.
Others wouldn’t go as far. Redeborn of Eurocontrol says “We need GPS regardless of what happens to radar, in fact
For national security reasons, the military will continue to use it.”
So why the holdups?
Redeborn says:"Industry and other actors in aviation spread
disinformation because they have commercial and national interests to protect." Not only the radar industry, with its multibillion-dollar investments in equipment. He includes the US Federal Aviation Administration. "They haven't been supportive at all." As well as others.
The disinformation they spread is something supporters of Lans’s system such as Redeborn often have to deal with. A common criticism is that the system lacks "integrity", that it is not secure enough from prying and dangerous eyes. In the past aircraft position was a secret known only to air traffic controllers hunched over their radar monitors. Now, the story goes, anyone, for instance a terrorist, can buy a receiver and software costing a few hundred pounds and sit in their bedsit watching real-time a map of the world's aircraft movements. True? Wrong, says Redeborn, STDMA allows advanced encryption:
"Every time we answer an argument," says Redeborn, "the lobbyists come up with a new objection, ever more trivial. Probably more money has been spent in disinformation than on developing the system, in the first place."
In truth as Redeborn well knows, it is nothing to with about efficacy or fairness; everything to do with politics. Lans’s system was never going to be implemented as the standard in aircraft in the United States even if the radar industry were to greenlight GPS, because Lans is, to put it bluntly, not American.
While Lans patented his system in 1996, and has been successfully stalled since in the international aviation industry, the US is now developing a parallel system, UAT, which it expects to roll out by 2020; even then its inferior to Lans's invention, as it lacks "SMS" capacity between aircraft and ground control, which permit written take off commands and could avoid the misunderstandings in spoken commands. Never mind: the American political-industrial complex has come to some kind of mutually satisfactory agreement. Even though for many American enterprises it’s years too late: as long ago as 1999 the American branch of UPS, the parcel service, which had installed Lans’s transponders on its own fleet was complaining that that the FAA was not demanding it as standard on all aircraft.
In Europe, perhaps because it’s less corrupted, and things are at least supposed to be judged on merit, there is precisely for that reason less movement. STDMA is clearly a system that works. (It's been tested for 150,000 flight hours, and something very similar Is the worldwide standard on ships.) But, Redeborn says: .
"Sweden is a small country with not much clout, but the government also doesn't have a tradition of intervention and flying the flag on behalf of its business and research community. Unlike France, Germany, Italy and to some extent the UK -as we see now over the squabbles with who gets what in Galileo."
So, this is how it goes in the DG transport conference rooms, in the free-for-all of shifting alliances where national and industrial interests are pitted against and with each other, and a cheap and revolutionary system from an individual inventor from a small albeit innovative country already in existence that earns none of other big players any money stands less chance. Only its evident excellence prevents the last rites being read over it; and the deadlock being broken up, with some other air navigation system getting the European go-ahead. Eventually.
Something for the reader to think about the next time he steps on a plane and gazes through the window at a fogbound runway.
Good in theory
But I have become a little sceptical
I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and right. The European Commission proposed; European parliament amended, with the insight from impact assessments; law proposals went on to the council of ministers, which represented the nation states. There was input from the Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee. Numerous lobbyists and members of civil society also had their input arrows; there was COREPER, the nation states’ embassies to the EU, and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, when the institutions failed to agree.
It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics, with all the generalisations, demagoguery, and simplification of issuess, that this implied. Instead policy-making is carried by a large number of extremely well educated, well paid, but too well paid, multilingual individuals. .
It seemed a liberation. There were differences between what different groups wanted, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
Who could say that Europe didn’t deliver? It broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulated technical innovation. The EU funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network. It co-funded a bridge between between Sweden and Denmark. It was responsible for the ITER fusion reactor, which aims to provide an inexhaustible supply of clean energy by 2050, and now the Galileo global positioning satellites. European universities were pushed to collaborate so that there would be no duplication of scientific effort, so to compete with the US:
The EU also funded student exchange programmes and drove through the mutual recognition of professional qualifications,
For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, better food labelling, cheap European flights, and free healthcare abroad
When the people said: “What has Europe ever done for us”, my reponse always used to be: “Watch the life of Brian”.
* * *
These days, my enthusiasm has moderated considerably.
There were times when I despaired of the British, with their insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that cynicism is either merited or is a useful intellectual stance towards the institutions..
Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, , I have come to realise are individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. The court of auditors failed to sign off the accounts for the13th year running. Money goes back into the national scene, having been handled en route by eurocrats, not always most efficiently. Science and Technology funding, the EU’s third largest item, is said to be particularly badly spent: take a closer look underneath the gloire and an independent satellite system like Galileo doesn’t look so good after all; and several of the pan European highways haven’t happened. .Meanwhile the EU buildings just continue to expand.
* * *
Still, there are moments when I still feel idealistic. And there are still persuasive europhiles about. Arrive in the European parliament’s press centre in the morning, and over a coffee, one spies and even rejoices at the young parliamentary assistants, the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together, planning a better world, one that looks splendid on paper Both that vision, and the more sordid reality, deserve to be more written about, to give undoubted power its due..
I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and right. The European Commission proposed; European parliament amended, with the insight from impact assessments; law proposals went on to the council of ministers, which represented the nation states. There was input from the Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee. Numerous lobbyists and members of civil society also had their input arrows; there was COREPER, the nation states’ embassies to the EU, and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, when the institutions failed to agree.
It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics, with all the generalisations, demagoguery, and simplification of issuess, that this implied. Instead policy-making is carried by a large number of extremely well educated, well paid, but too well paid, multilingual individuals. .
It seemed a liberation. There were differences between what different groups wanted, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
Who could say that Europe didn’t deliver? It broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulated technical innovation. The EU funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network. It co-funded a bridge between between Sweden and Denmark. It was responsible for the ITER fusion reactor, which aims to provide an inexhaustible supply of clean energy by 2050, and now the Galileo global positioning satellites. European universities were pushed to collaborate so that there would be no duplication of scientific effort, so to compete with the US:
The EU also funded student exchange programmes and drove through the mutual recognition of professional qualifications,
For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, better food labelling, cheap European flights, and free healthcare abroad
When the people said: “What has Europe ever done for us”, my reponse always used to be: “Watch the life of Brian”.
* * *
These days, my enthusiasm has moderated considerably.
There were times when I despaired of the British, with their insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that cynicism is either merited or is a useful intellectual stance towards the institutions..
Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, , I have come to realise are individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. The court of auditors failed to sign off the accounts for the13th year running. Money goes back into the national scene, having been handled en route by eurocrats, not always most efficiently. Science and Technology funding, the EU’s third largest item, is said to be particularly badly spent: take a closer look underneath the gloire and an independent satellite system like Galileo doesn’t look so good after all; and several of the pan European highways haven’t happened. .Meanwhile the EU buildings just continue to expand.
* * *
Still, there are moments when I still feel idealistic. And there are still persuasive europhiles about. Arrive in the European parliament’s press centre in the morning, and over a coffee, one spies and even rejoices at the young parliamentary assistants, the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together, planning a better world, one that looks splendid on paper Both that vision, and the more sordid reality, deserve to be more written about, to give undoubted power its due..
Vote Obama
Imagine if a movie could change the way a country thinks, that it could sway an election. I think I am Legend could be such a movie.
It is commonplace now to realise that America has long thought all its problems could be solved by a bit of bombing. Too much carbon dioxide in the air! Well, we must be able to attack something to solve it.
Military action, or the threat of it, won three wars, two hot, and one cold, no?
World War IV? Well, what about aliens?. There was Will Smith in Independence Day in 1996, when earth is attacked by a species of alien invaders in flying saucers with thirty mile diameters which destroy several cities and are impervious to aerial attack; The world rallies; America takes the lead, its. Stirring music, America’s armed forces scramble, apathetic allies await instructions. Fighters are launched pointlessly against impervious shields, but US Marine pilot. Smith saves the day when his captured alien fighter craft gains entry into the mothership; and (with the help of a mad scientist) destroys it from within causing appropriate pyrotechnic for the world’s grateful fourth of July celebrations, a hymnal to muscular American swagger.. I remember seeing the film with my wife: it was like having some walnut faced American footballer rearing his butt in your face for two hours. The BBC said the president’s battle speech was “the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie". While another reviewer said: its American jingoism.was.so over the top in its conceit that Independence Day would be a top-class farce if it didn't take itself so seriously.”
In contrast USA Today wrote:”A rousing state-of-the-art cartoon capped by an aerial-combat climax that, to its credit, isn't anti-climactic.” The solipsistic militarism that characterised the Bush era well predated it.
Fast forward twelve years, after a chastening Iraq war, and America’s biggest box office hit in the weeks running up to the big primaries features a greyer Will Smith , still under 40, starring in I am Legend.
It features a post-apocalyptic Manhattan three years after a deadly virus has killed every healthy human on the island, except one. Weeds poke up through the streets, piled with abandoned cars, there are no traffic sounds, only the singing of birds. There is an air of decay. Then, down one street, speeds a sports car driven by Robert Neville (Smith), who is trying to get a good shot at one of the deer roaming the city. A lioness beats him to it. .
Neville has only his dog to keep him company. Nights are spent barricaded inside a house in Greenwich Village, its doors and windows sealed by steel shutters to keep out the bands of pale cannibals that rule the streets after dark; they were once humans, turned into mute, savage killers by the virus, for which, during daytimes, Neville tries to find a cure in his basement laboratory. He tries out his cures on zombies he manages to capture in his daytime meanderings; manacling them to his lab gurney and injecting various serums from experimental rats. Note how the emphasis is on capture rather than killing.
Neville just tries to stay alive; setting up a routine of living alone in a deserted New York, making a point of returning his DVDs to a deserted DVD store, saying hello to store-browsing mannequins he relocated from fashion stores to give a simulacrum of human busyness, then,, one day, his dog is killed in a trap set up by these creatures. He runs amok, is almost killed himself and is rescued by an uninfected young woman who has heard his daily radio broadcast for anyone out there – he believes he is not only the last person in New York but perhaps the world.
Next night, just as a response to his test on one of his captured and manacled zombies promising, his house is overwhelmed by zombies – he retreats to the lab, draws of some life-saving serum from the woman, and, while the zombies bang on the plate glass window to the lab, offers it to them, saying “I can save you now” He could bring them back. When it’s clear they will pay no attention, he sends the girl and her son up into a hiding place with the serum sasmple, while he turns to face the zombies with a grenade. Huge conflagration follows. In the epilogue we see her turn up at a high steel walled survivors colony in autumnal Vermont – where else - and enters. A voiceover says that he died; his serum saved the world.
Notice how different this is from Independence Day, where the enemy was external and killable with military hardware. The virus stands in both for terrorism and pandemic flu (which could arise out of environmental degradation.) It changes humans to beasts who want to kill you – like terrorist ideas – or kills them, The virus represents an internal, insidious enemy, which, as ideas do, turn friends into foe. Neville realises he cannot "kill" all the zombies in the world. He must find a cure, a way to "turn" the zombies back.. Is this not America's coming to terms what everyone else has long realised is true of terrorism?
It’s also interesting that Neville is primarily a scientist, though this hyphen is an important one: the scientist-soldier. (He’s a colonel in the army.) Gone is the babe-repellent egghead in glasses. America needs scientists, hasn’t had enough of them since the space race.. America has been in the grip of faith-based solutions, of God, since 2001. But Beville makes a very strong statement to his girl: “There is no God. There were six billion people. All the people you knew are dead. Except you and me.” His solution is a science –based one: to find a cure for the vampirism. The film is a memo to Bush: faith-based solutions do not work. And we all know science is what is needed to fight global warming. .
There was a sympathy for opponents one has not often seen in hero movies; there was also a willingness of self sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. If I am Legend is reflective of America today , or is helping to change the national psychology as the top grossing movie of the month, then the country may be entering a new phase of its maturity. Vote for Barack Obama!. I left the film with a lump in my throat.
It is commonplace now to realise that America has long thought all its problems could be solved by a bit of bombing. Too much carbon dioxide in the air! Well, we must be able to attack something to solve it.
Military action, or the threat of it, won three wars, two hot, and one cold, no?
World War IV? Well, what about aliens?. There was Will Smith in Independence Day in 1996, when earth is attacked by a species of alien invaders in flying saucers with thirty mile diameters which destroy several cities and are impervious to aerial attack; The world rallies; America takes the lead, its. Stirring music, America’s armed forces scramble, apathetic allies await instructions. Fighters are launched pointlessly against impervious shields, but US Marine pilot. Smith saves the day when his captured alien fighter craft gains entry into the mothership; and (with the help of a mad scientist) destroys it from within causing appropriate pyrotechnic for the world’s grateful fourth of July celebrations, a hymnal to muscular American swagger.. I remember seeing the film with my wife: it was like having some walnut faced American footballer rearing his butt in your face for two hours. The BBC said the president’s battle speech was “the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie". While another reviewer said: its American jingoism.was.so over the top in its conceit that Independence Day would be a top-class farce if it didn't take itself so seriously.”
In contrast USA Today wrote:”A rousing state-of-the-art cartoon capped by an aerial-combat climax that, to its credit, isn't anti-climactic.” The solipsistic militarism that characterised the Bush era well predated it.
Fast forward twelve years, after a chastening Iraq war, and America’s biggest box office hit in the weeks running up to the big primaries features a greyer Will Smith , still under 40, starring in I am Legend.
It features a post-apocalyptic Manhattan three years after a deadly virus has killed every healthy human on the island, except one. Weeds poke up through the streets, piled with abandoned cars, there are no traffic sounds, only the singing of birds. There is an air of decay. Then, down one street, speeds a sports car driven by Robert Neville (Smith), who is trying to get a good shot at one of the deer roaming the city. A lioness beats him to it. .
Neville has only his dog to keep him company. Nights are spent barricaded inside a house in Greenwich Village, its doors and windows sealed by steel shutters to keep out the bands of pale cannibals that rule the streets after dark; they were once humans, turned into mute, savage killers by the virus, for which, during daytimes, Neville tries to find a cure in his basement laboratory. He tries out his cures on zombies he manages to capture in his daytime meanderings; manacling them to his lab gurney and injecting various serums from experimental rats. Note how the emphasis is on capture rather than killing.
Neville just tries to stay alive; setting up a routine of living alone in a deserted New York, making a point of returning his DVDs to a deserted DVD store, saying hello to store-browsing mannequins he relocated from fashion stores to give a simulacrum of human busyness, then,, one day, his dog is killed in a trap set up by these creatures. He runs amok, is almost killed himself and is rescued by an uninfected young woman who has heard his daily radio broadcast for anyone out there – he believes he is not only the last person in New York but perhaps the world.
Next night, just as a response to his test on one of his captured and manacled zombies promising, his house is overwhelmed by zombies – he retreats to the lab, draws of some life-saving serum from the woman, and, while the zombies bang on the plate glass window to the lab, offers it to them, saying “I can save you now” He could bring them back. When it’s clear they will pay no attention, he sends the girl and her son up into a hiding place with the serum sasmple, while he turns to face the zombies with a grenade. Huge conflagration follows. In the epilogue we see her turn up at a high steel walled survivors colony in autumnal Vermont – where else - and enters. A voiceover says that he died; his serum saved the world.
Notice how different this is from Independence Day, where the enemy was external and killable with military hardware. The virus stands in both for terrorism and pandemic flu (which could arise out of environmental degradation.) It changes humans to beasts who want to kill you – like terrorist ideas – or kills them, The virus represents an internal, insidious enemy, which, as ideas do, turn friends into foe. Neville realises he cannot "kill" all the zombies in the world. He must find a cure, a way to "turn" the zombies back.. Is this not America's coming to terms what everyone else has long realised is true of terrorism?
It’s also interesting that Neville is primarily a scientist, though this hyphen is an important one: the scientist-soldier. (He’s a colonel in the army.) Gone is the babe-repellent egghead in glasses. America needs scientists, hasn’t had enough of them since the space race.. America has been in the grip of faith-based solutions, of God, since 2001. But Beville makes a very strong statement to his girl: “There is no God. There were six billion people. All the people you knew are dead. Except you and me.” His solution is a science –based one: to find a cure for the vampirism. The film is a memo to Bush: faith-based solutions do not work. And we all know science is what is needed to fight global warming. .
There was a sympathy for opponents one has not often seen in hero movies; there was also a willingness of self sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. If I am Legend is reflective of America today , or is helping to change the national psychology as the top grossing movie of the month, then the country may be entering a new phase of its maturity. Vote for Barack Obama!. I left the film with a lump in my throat.
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel and his prizes
There is no Nobel Prize in the category "country with the most Nobel prizes per capita" or Sweden, you won't be surprised to hear, would have won that too. Nothing to do with favouritism, you understand.
What was the man like? Alfred Nobel (1833-96) studied chemistry, and quickly realised the potential of nitroglycerine, a liquid that was fantastically explosive but equally hard to harness. If a safe way of packing and detonating the material could be found, it would replace the far weaker gunpowder. One of his experiments caused the death of five people, including his younger brother.
Aged thirty he found the solution: a porous silicate of hardened algae called kieselguhr, which absorbed the fluid and made it transportable and secure.. Nobel christened it dynamite, and intended to have peaceful uses such as mining or construction of railways, but it was also used by terrorists: Czar Alexander II was assassinated by dynamite.
[The fear of nitroglycerine was so widespread he had to show it was safe by tossing sticks from a great height or into bonfires. In England there was a ban on moving it by rail, so that Nobel had to send all the blasting oil to his British factory in bottles marked "White Wine". Eventually dynamite was accepted as safe and when he died he owned 90 factories around the world.]
When his brother Ludvig died, a French newspaper thought it was Alfred and published an obituary that called him a "cynical merchant of death, always discovering new ways to mutilate and kill". So for the rest of his life, Alfred was obsessed with the way posterity would remember him. The result was his prizes, funded by his bequest.
The physics prize was actually available to technologists and inventors as well., according to Nobel’s testament. However, according to Anders Barany, curator of the Nobel museum, after early awards were given to a number inventors, including Marconi for the telegraph in 1909, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided informally not to honour technical inventions: perhaps because they were pure scientists themselves..
The latest generation of academicians started showing greater fidelity to Nobel’s original instructions. In 2000, Jack Kilby, ,was honoured for his invention of the integrated circuit. And last year Fert and Grunberg were awarded the Physics prize for the technology used to read data on hard disks,. Barany predicts that “many more” technical inventions receive the Physics prize in the future..
There is no Nobel Prize in the category "country with the most Nobel prizes per capita" or Sweden, you won't be surprised to hear, would have won that too. Nothing to do with favouritism, you understand.
What was the man like? Alfred Nobel (1833-96) studied chemistry, and quickly realised the potential of nitroglycerine, a liquid that was fantastically explosive but equally hard to harness. If a safe way of packing and detonating the material could be found, it would replace the far weaker gunpowder. One of his experiments caused the death of five people, including his younger brother.
Aged thirty he found the solution: a porous silicate of hardened algae called kieselguhr, which absorbed the fluid and made it transportable and secure.. Nobel christened it dynamite, and intended to have peaceful uses such as mining or construction of railways, but it was also used by terrorists: Czar Alexander II was assassinated by dynamite.
[The fear of nitroglycerine was so widespread he had to show it was safe by tossing sticks from a great height or into bonfires. In England there was a ban on moving it by rail, so that Nobel had to send all the blasting oil to his British factory in bottles marked "White Wine". Eventually dynamite was accepted as safe and when he died he owned 90 factories around the world.]
When his brother Ludvig died, a French newspaper thought it was Alfred and published an obituary that called him a "cynical merchant of death, always discovering new ways to mutilate and kill". So for the rest of his life, Alfred was obsessed with the way posterity would remember him. The result was his prizes, funded by his bequest.
The physics prize was actually available to technologists and inventors as well., according to Nobel’s testament. However, according to Anders Barany, curator of the Nobel museum, after early awards were given to a number inventors, including Marconi for the telegraph in 1909, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided informally not to honour technical inventions: perhaps because they were pure scientists themselves..
The latest generation of academicians started showing greater fidelity to Nobel’s original instructions. In 2000, Jack Kilby, ,was honoured for his invention of the integrated circuit. And last year Fert and Grunberg were awarded the Physics prize for the technology used to read data on hard disks,. Barany predicts that “many more” technical inventions receive the Physics prize in the future..
Exhibit A against American imperialism
We were in the American cemetery in Manila, an oasis
of clipped lawns and neat graves.
Manila days often had me thinking of Gunter Grass's
summary of Calcutta, where he lived for six months: "a
shitpile topped with Victorian excrescences inhabited
by maggots in white shirts. "
Manila was more modern, the city having been destroyed
during the war; but the maggots in white shirts were
inescapable, even here: thrusting their diseased hands
into your taxi, or selling knickknacks on a
handkerchief sized piece of cardboard that floated on
a monsoon soaked pavement
Then my friend gave out a cry. "Those bastards!"
"What?!?"
"Look at those skyscrapers. They weren't here last
time."
It was fairly common for foreigners to run verbally
amok in Manila. I followed his gaze, above the verdant
trees where a line of unfinished skyscrapers, spitting
sparks from their skeletal innards
"They have destroyed the view. You could forget for a
moment you were in Manila."
Detouring past the site, a sign: "Luxury Apartments
with Superb View" And then, in small print: "in
collaboration with the Deichi corporation, Tokyo,
Japan", we left the American cemetery., with its
trimmed lawns, its neat rows of crosses, its memorial
buildings that sheltered you from the rain with
dignified mosaics of the theatres of war and the names
of the dead.
Many Filipinos were very grateful for liberation, in
1944, by their colonial power between 1898 and 1940.
Strongly pro-American feelings grew even stronger. The
country was given its independence in 1946 but in a
world where America's stock is slowly sinking,
Filipinos remain staunchly pro-American - they are the
only population in the world to give Bush net positive
approval ratings - and thoroughly, unashamedly engaged
in American culture.
Filipinos in baseball caps in Gap shorts take SAT
tests at eighteen, and learnt about Neil Armstrong,
Douglas MacArthur, George Washington and Buffalo Bill
Imperialists everywhere shake their heads in amazement
and admiration. Filipina women journalists pep each
other's Jane Fonda exercises with Southern California
lingo: "Go for it hon", "yea-yeah~yeah"; or "Go for it
girl" before writing opinion pieces that
contemptuously note how Filipino politics falls short
of the ideals of Thomas Jefferson (ironically), or the
Federalist Papers. When a former president Joseph
Estrada once sang "Kiss me Kate:, followed by a medley
of Frank Sinatra, on the day the country's single
foreign policy issue was resolved - the return of US
bases - on the national day, his audience of "poor
people" in New York knicks T-shirts, feasting on
hotdogs and hamburgers at a sports stadium dedicated
to basket ball, knew the words to sing along with him.
From the morning skateboard ride to school, or pick up
truck s with shot gun racks journey to work
accompanied by Country and Western on the car stereo,
to a home life of American soap operas on HBO while
scarfing down Oreole cookies and a fast food supper at
Kenny Roasters, or Jollibees, or perhaps a reading
evening of Bill Gates's Good advice book or one of the
other American self help books that crowd Manila's
bookstore shelves to the exclusion of European
literature....the American influence is overwhelming.
The rich go to the US often and have property there;
the poor dream, of doing so. There is little news from
Europe. US issues predominated to a degree exacerbated
by its superpower status.
The Filipinos worship America; but I do wonder if
America has been good for the Philippines. The country
was the region's richest in 1950; now it's one of the
poorest. Of course you might say: it's because the
American left that they fell back. Another argument
is: it is the inquitous influences on the Filipino
mindset in some way or another, the ideology and the
legacies of occupation they have left behind (which
maybe works in America) that has keep the country so
poor. The history and induced mindset of Islam,
Shintoism, confucianism, communism, and even whatever
the British empire left behind, have all worked better
in a relative way for Asians than the US ideology for
Filipinos - if you look at a starting point in 1945.
China has long since swept past on a per capita basis.
Why is this? It's a pretty profound question for our
times, since America is the world's superpower, and -
if you take the best intentions of the neocons at face
value - is trying to democratise the Middle East along
American lines. The last time such a colonial project
was attempted by Washington was in the first decade of
the 20th century, when Teddy Roosevelt and his
administrators set out to civilise the Philippines.
There are many contenders for solutions,not related to
American influence: geography, anthropology,
resources, island culture, land ownership, even
genetic endowment. (Although some of these
disadvantages are shared by far more succesful
countries such as Malaysia; Malays are of similar
stock.)
But I am going to nominate the following set of
causes. The Americans were brutal, perhaps more brutal
than the Japanese in Manchuria. They slaughtered half
the population of the large island of Samar in 1901
and ruthlessly bombed Manila to bits in 1944 to save
US lives but without regards to Filipino ones. In
early days they killed off the intellectual elite.
Then they brainwashed the rest, who had already
suffered 500 years of Catholicism from Spanish friars,
into the supremacy of America's religious-based
exceptionalism, shining city on a hill and all that.
Asian leaders had nativised versions of socialism or
communism or Islam that bound them to their countries,
traditions and peoples. Filipinos - and especially
their elites - had a perverted sense of Christianity
that told them that virtue rested not in staying in
the country but in leaving for the shining city on the
hill.
The sleazy self enrichment of the rich landowning
oligarchy was justified in the poor people's terms
because the rich too, by saving up for their green
cards and estates on the US west coast, could justify
by seeking virtue, that of entering Christ's kingdom
of earth, that of America itself.
The home country is neglected; after all it was only
the fallible kingdom of man. No country is less
nationalistic, patriotic, than the Philippines. No
people, incidentally, is so associated with low status
jobs. In the west, Malays and Indians become
entrepreneurs or doctors, or even scientists.
Filipinos, well, I don't need to spell it out. The
story that the fluorescent light was invented by a
Filipino called Flores is just that, a joke. It's
almost as if the whole American association has put
the country and people down.
So this is just kite-flying and spoeculation on my
behalf, and I make it gleefully, but here is what I
further propose. Christianity is based on surrender,
and what the Filipinos need is something that teaches
them to fight, metaphorically of course. They need to
work for their country now, and believe in it, rather
than have this passive faith that the green card will
deliver them unto fulfilment on earth.
Since the rot is so far gone, and in the absence of
strongmen that made Malaysia and Singapore what they
are, colonisation by Japan - which was attempted in
1941 - would be a second best option: teach them to
fight (metaphorically) the west, not surrender to it.
Perhaps, indeed, it would have been better for
America's colony at least, if Japan had won the war.
But those ugly skyscrapers showed a second chance at a
promising development.
I say the following now with relish, for some one who
has grown up with the FDR version of history, that the
French and British empires were wicked and America was
going to set them free. Their own colony, hidden from
the world by America's own historians' code of omerta,
shows the disasters consequent upon America's own
particular flaws.
If I may conclude. The lesson for the rest of the
world is that America has its own colonising,
manipulative ways, connected to US imposing a
religious exceptionalism, and in surrendering to a US
way of life.
No other country has gone as far as the Philippines,
but it stands as a warning to us all
of clipped lawns and neat graves.
Manila days often had me thinking of Gunter Grass's
summary of Calcutta, where he lived for six months: "a
shitpile topped with Victorian excrescences inhabited
by maggots in white shirts. "
Manila was more modern, the city having been destroyed
during the war; but the maggots in white shirts were
inescapable, even here: thrusting their diseased hands
into your taxi, or selling knickknacks on a
handkerchief sized piece of cardboard that floated on
a monsoon soaked pavement
Then my friend gave out a cry. "Those bastards!"
"What?!?"
"Look at those skyscrapers. They weren't here last
time."
It was fairly common for foreigners to run verbally
amok in Manila. I followed his gaze, above the verdant
trees where a line of unfinished skyscrapers, spitting
sparks from their skeletal innards
"They have destroyed the view. You could forget for a
moment you were in Manila."
Detouring past the site, a sign: "Luxury Apartments
with Superb View" And then, in small print: "in
collaboration with the Deichi corporation, Tokyo,
Japan", we left the American cemetery., with its
trimmed lawns, its neat rows of crosses, its memorial
buildings that sheltered you from the rain with
dignified mosaics of the theatres of war and the names
of the dead.
Many Filipinos were very grateful for liberation, in
1944, by their colonial power between 1898 and 1940.
Strongly pro-American feelings grew even stronger. The
country was given its independence in 1946 but in a
world where America's stock is slowly sinking,
Filipinos remain staunchly pro-American - they are the
only population in the world to give Bush net positive
approval ratings - and thoroughly, unashamedly engaged
in American culture.
Filipinos in baseball caps in Gap shorts take SAT
tests at eighteen, and learnt about Neil Armstrong,
Douglas MacArthur, George Washington and Buffalo Bill
Imperialists everywhere shake their heads in amazement
and admiration. Filipina women journalists pep each
other's Jane Fonda exercises with Southern California
lingo: "Go for it hon", "yea-yeah~yeah"; or "Go for it
girl" before writing opinion pieces that
contemptuously note how Filipino politics falls short
of the ideals of Thomas Jefferson (ironically), or the
Federalist Papers. When a former president Joseph
Estrada once sang "Kiss me Kate:, followed by a medley
of Frank Sinatra, on the day the country's single
foreign policy issue was resolved - the return of US
bases - on the national day, his audience of "poor
people" in New York knicks T-shirts, feasting on
hotdogs and hamburgers at a sports stadium dedicated
to basket ball, knew the words to sing along with him.
From the morning skateboard ride to school, or pick up
truck s with shot gun racks journey to work
accompanied by Country and Western on the car stereo,
to a home life of American soap operas on HBO while
scarfing down Oreole cookies and a fast food supper at
Kenny Roasters, or Jollibees, or perhaps a reading
evening of Bill Gates's Good advice book or one of the
other American self help books that crowd Manila's
bookstore shelves to the exclusion of European
literature....the American influence is overwhelming.
The rich go to the US often and have property there;
the poor dream, of doing so. There is little news from
Europe. US issues predominated to a degree exacerbated
by its superpower status.
The Filipinos worship America; but I do wonder if
America has been good for the Philippines. The country
was the region's richest in 1950; now it's one of the
poorest. Of course you might say: it's because the
American left that they fell back. Another argument
is: it is the inquitous influences on the Filipino
mindset in some way or another, the ideology and the
legacies of occupation they have left behind (which
maybe works in America) that has keep the country so
poor. The history and induced mindset of Islam,
Shintoism, confucianism, communism, and even whatever
the British empire left behind, have all worked better
in a relative way for Asians than the US ideology for
Filipinos - if you look at a starting point in 1945.
China has long since swept past on a per capita basis.
Why is this? It's a pretty profound question for our
times, since America is the world's superpower, and -
if you take the best intentions of the neocons at face
value - is trying to democratise the Middle East along
American lines. The last time such a colonial project
was attempted by Washington was in the first decade of
the 20th century, when Teddy Roosevelt and his
administrators set out to civilise the Philippines.
There are many contenders for solutions,not related to
American influence: geography, anthropology,
resources, island culture, land ownership, even
genetic endowment. (Although some of these
disadvantages are shared by far more succesful
countries such as Malaysia; Malays are of similar
stock.)
But I am going to nominate the following set of
causes. The Americans were brutal, perhaps more brutal
than the Japanese in Manchuria. They slaughtered half
the population of the large island of Samar in 1901
and ruthlessly bombed Manila to bits in 1944 to save
US lives but without regards to Filipino ones. In
early days they killed off the intellectual elite.
Then they brainwashed the rest, who had already
suffered 500 years of Catholicism from Spanish friars,
into the supremacy of America's religious-based
exceptionalism, shining city on a hill and all that.
Asian leaders had nativised versions of socialism or
communism or Islam that bound them to their countries,
traditions and peoples. Filipinos - and especially
their elites - had a perverted sense of Christianity
that told them that virtue rested not in staying in
the country but in leaving for the shining city on the
hill.
The sleazy self enrichment of the rich landowning
oligarchy was justified in the poor people's terms
because the rich too, by saving up for their green
cards and estates on the US west coast, could justify
by seeking virtue, that of entering Christ's kingdom
of earth, that of America itself.
The home country is neglected; after all it was only
the fallible kingdom of man. No country is less
nationalistic, patriotic, than the Philippines. No
people, incidentally, is so associated with low status
jobs. In the west, Malays and Indians become
entrepreneurs or doctors, or even scientists.
Filipinos, well, I don't need to spell it out. The
story that the fluorescent light was invented by a
Filipino called Flores is just that, a joke. It's
almost as if the whole American association has put
the country and people down.
So this is just kite-flying and spoeculation on my
behalf, and I make it gleefully, but here is what I
further propose. Christianity is based on surrender,
and what the Filipinos need is something that teaches
them to fight, metaphorically of course. They need to
work for their country now, and believe in it, rather
than have this passive faith that the green card will
deliver them unto fulfilment on earth.
Since the rot is so far gone, and in the absence of
strongmen that made Malaysia and Singapore what they
are, colonisation by Japan - which was attempted in
1941 - would be a second best option: teach them to
fight (metaphorically) the west, not surrender to it.
Perhaps, indeed, it would have been better for
America's colony at least, if Japan had won the war.
But those ugly skyscrapers showed a second chance at a
promising development.
I say the following now with relish, for some one who
has grown up with the FDR version of history, that the
French and British empires were wicked and America was
going to set them free. Their own colony, hidden from
the world by America's own historians' code of omerta,
shows the disasters consequent upon America's own
particular flaws.
If I may conclude. The lesson for the rest of the
world is that America has its own colonising,
manipulative ways, connected to US imposing a
religious exceptionalism, and in surrendering to a US
way of life.
No other country has gone as far as the Philippines,
but it stands as a warning to us all
Friday, January 04, 2008
Northern Lights
….but we’re is still pleased it has a dark side
I left Sweden in the 1980s when the self satisfaction started to get on my nerves.
There is a joke circulating in Brussels: a typical EU seminar of 27 experts, all exchanging ideas, except the Swedish delegate who sits, arms crossed, quietly. “Why don’t you make a contribution?” jokes her Italian neighbour. “Okay, well, why don’t you just do what we do,” says the Swedish delegate.
It took me a long time to accept that there was a sound basis for that smugness, but now I do.
One can have a lot of visual impressions of Sweden – distinctly unobese men and women sitting under parasols in old town squares, Pippi Long-stocking and her monkey, Stockholm stranded in ice and snow, King Carl Gustaf walking down the Nobel inscribed carpet, the deer in Lapland, the tanned youth sunbathing on the bare rocks of the western archipelago, the fashion models who appear to have a sideline in Olympic medals.
But here are the numbers: according the Economist Intelligence Unit, Sweden ranks in first place among 167 countries in democratic values. In the World Economic Forum gender gap study, Sweden is the most egalitarian country in the world. It nearly tops the UN index on development. Sweden has the world’s third most competitive economy and the world’s highest per capita spending on Research and development. It has the world’s lowest infant mortality rate and the second best environmental performance. And so it goes on.
Sweden is also the world’s top arms exporter, per capita, along with Israel, the grit in the oyster, as it may have contributed to the death of one prime minister and certainly destroyed the career of another.
* * *
HOW MANY countries with a population of under ten million produce one, let alone two, famous car manufacturers?
Nul points if you guessed Belgium or Switzerland. (with which Sweden is often confused. Totally understandable given the fact both countries have crosses in their flags, and are neutral.) Volvo and Saab work in close collaboration with legislators in parliament and the bureaucrats of the Swedish national roads administration (NRA), lead the way for Sweden in two areas in the automotive world: traffic safety, and alternative fuels.
. The country already has the lowest traffic mortality rates, but the government is committed to its zero vision of no road deaths at all.
.
Three years ago I was tooling around the northern town of Borlange (seat of the NRA) in a modified Volvo with a rather irritating woman’s voice telling me when I exceeded the speed limit for that kind of road, detected by automatic sensors. The gas pedal vibrated uncomfortably. It was easier just to keep to the speed limit; overtaking was, of course, impossible,
Before I started the car I was asked to breathe into a plastic mouthpiece attached by a coiled lead to an apparatus in the dashboard. This was an alcolock. Had I had any ethanol in my breath, the car would not have started. It was hard work.One impact assessment produced by the Dutch transport ministry laconically noted that alcolocks were not to be recommended to asthmatics. By the time the light showed green, my heart was pounding from exertion.
These bits of prototype technology were quite crude, but since the company which invented the modern seatbelt has made commercially available several safety enhancing modifications; they include lane departure warning, autobrakes (if you’re too close to the car in front), and driver alert control, which uses sensors and cameras to determine if the vehicle is driven in a controlled way: 50 pc of accidents are due to driver distractedness; when erratic control is indicated, a coffee cup signal lights up: a hint, I was informed recently by Anders Eugensson, a Volvo traffic analyst, to take a break.
[[[It is not known whether any of these safety measures will be available on entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft, which will begin commercial space flights in 2010 from the Laplandic space centre at Kiruna. For, $200,000 passengers will be launched into the aurora borealis and through to the edges of space at 115km above earth, where people will be able to enjoy six minutes of weightlessness – provided they take their seatbelts off, of course]]]
Volvo’s innovations do nothing to dispel Swedes’ image as serious and, well, sober, but Volvo’s designers sometimes flaunt their more light-hearted side: it assembled an all woman design team to make a concept car that women actually want. After consulting Volvo’s workforce, the all-female team led by designer Eva-Lisa Andersson (picture) produced a car that parks automatically, has an engine that automatically books an appointment at garage when needed – in fact the bonnet cannot be opened by non-professionals. It has changeable seat covers, cinema type rear seats, and gull wing remotely operated doors, to avoid the problem of shopping bags on the rainy pavement. The one thing it doesn’t seem to have is a system that prevents women from being overcharged at the aforementioned garages, although, as the world’s most egalitarian country, this probably happens less in Sweden than elsewhere.
In the second world war, with access to oil supplies cut off, Swedes pioneered the use of wood gas in their cars: the raw material was everywhere, since the country is 60 percent forest. These days though, Nicholas Gustafsson, Volvo’s alternative fuels expert tells me, the more common way of avoiding oil dependence is ethanol, where Sweden is the European leader, partly due to government’s passing of a law that required every petrol station in the country to provide ethanol pumps. The government also granted tax concessions, an exemption on the Stockholm congestion charge and a taxpayer funded cashback grant for individuals who stumped up for the slightly dearer ethanol-compatible cars.
There are more than 1,500 ethanol filling stations in Sweden (the UK has about 20), more than the rest of Europe put together, but most cars are sold as flexi-fuel models, which means they can run on either petrol or ethanol in any concentration: so if the tank is half full of ethanol and the owners fills up with petrol, the car’s system will adjust to the new 50-50 mix. Ethanol produces 60 percent less carbon dioxide than petrol. At a Chatham house conference I attended a few months ago it was made very clear to me that ethanol was a happy medium, since biogas and hydrogen cell fuel vehicles that produced less CO2 were currently more expensive. Financial incentives aside, Swedes do also benefit from a strong sene of national team spirit, and the desire to do the best thing – or better than the English anyway, with whom the Swedes compare themselves as much as the Scots, but with better success.
Although Swedes are a nation of proudly self conscious early adopters possessed of a government that pushes innovation in many ways, it would be a mistake to think of Swedes as pliable collectivists.
The country has an almost unparalleled tradition of individual innovators and inventors: the zip fastener, the ball bearing, the propeller, the refrigerator and the pacemaker are a few examples. It was the Swede Niklas Zennstrom who invented Skype, the technology that allows free calls worldwide via the internet. .I have heard the reasons put down to the long, lonely winters when people had nothing else to but think.
But the most famous inventor of modern times is arguably Hakan Lans, 60, recently named the best European inventor in the last 20 years, who invented the computer mouse, computer colour graphics and – above all – a revolutionary system of air navigation. .
Using GPS positioning, the system allows planes with the equipment installed to see the height, speed, location and direction of all other planes in the sky; currently they fly virtually blind, on verbal instructions from ground control
Lans’s system is truly revolutionary: it will reduce delays due to the current necessity of large flight distance separation and ground control error responsible for at least two bug runway accidents in the last few years – but it also comes up against huge vested interests. It also makes planes independent of centralised control, which no government in this post-911 era likes.
So while Lans’s computer navigation system is now the compulsory worldwide standard for ships, it has yet to be implemented in aviation outside Sweden and Russia, despite its evident superiority over the current technology.
If being a small country helps in being an early adopter of technology ,,the flipside is that small countries have, alas, less clout on the world stage when faced with the vested interests of larger powers.
Another disadvantage of being a small country is that any indigenous defence industry is extremely reliant on exports. Add this to neutrality and a purportedly ethical arms export policy and Sweden’s arms manufacturers face a double challenge.
Sweden, amazing though it may seem given the country’s image, is the world’s first or second biggest arms exporter per capita. Sweden after all gave the world the Nobel peace prize. But the country’s engineering culture and the self sufficiency imposed by neutrality has produced fine armaments across the whole range.
But here the dark side of Sweden is manifest, through a history of falsified expert certificates which specified end user destinations that were safe countries but which everyone knew were exported onwards to warring or oppressive regimes: it is well known the government looks through its fingers on this.
In addition, Swedish arms firms have made a small reputation for themselves as champion bribers. The most notorious case was in the 1980s, when Sweden’s Bofors company won to many’s surprise an export order for 410 howitzers to India, ahead of a favoured French rival, Sofma.
Rajiv Gandhi, the newly elected and youthful Indian prime minister, had specifically and very publicly announced that no bribes must be paid on this deal, since he had been elected on Kennedyesque Mr Clean ticket. But bribes there were all the same, allegedly ending up in Gandhi’s own pocket. He was turfed out at the next election. For many years, the word Bofors entered the lexicon and became a synonym in India for everything rotten and stinking, as in “Hey, this mango tastes of Bofors.”..
And Rajiv might not have been the only political victim. A book recently published to good reviews in Sweden argues that Olof Palme was killed by Swedish military types with a stake in the bribes deal going through. Palme was rather an idealistic chap and the book builds up a convincing case that he was about to stop the deal happening. In the event, the contract was signed without problems two weeks after his assassination.
The Bofors scandal had huge reverberations not only in India but also in Sweden, yet Swedish arms firms continue the practice
Gripen International, which produces a small, relatively cheap, but advanced jetfighter has recently been revealed to have bribed the leaders of the Czech republic and Hungary to secure a deal over the heads of rivals such as the Lockheed F-16. The
To be fair, bribes are nothing new in the arms industry, but this tells us something new and, to me, oddly attractive about Sweden, which in most respects behaves like the perfect teacher’s pet in the global classroom of nation states. If you throw in the political assassinations – Anna Lindh, the foreign minister, was killed a few years ago – it builds up something of a picture of Sweden’s darker side.
In the brochures you have Swedish girls smiling and wearing bicycle helmets, cycling through forests. But when I went to Sweden a few years ago to investigate the Palme murder, I saw a different country: a fog and snow bound Stockholm where you could imagine every Volvo garlanding exhaust fumes was following you; where you met shady military types and fervent anti communist businessmen. I rather liked that. A place which only faces you with its bright side is dead, like the moon. (Which was photographed by astronauts using Swedish Hasselblad cameras.)
….but we’re is still pleased it has a dark side
I left Sweden in the 1980s when the self satisfaction started to get on my nerves.
There is a joke circulating in Brussels: a typical EU seminar of 27 experts, all exchanging ideas, except the Swedish delegate who sits, arms crossed, quietly. “Why don’t you make a contribution?” jokes her Italian neighbour. “Okay, well, why don’t you just do what we do,” says the Swedish delegate.
It took me a long time to accept that there was a sound basis for that smugness, but now I do.
One can have a lot of visual impressions of Sweden – distinctly unobese men and women sitting under parasols in old town squares, Pippi Long-stocking and her monkey, Stockholm stranded in ice and snow, King Carl Gustaf walking down the Nobel inscribed carpet, the deer in Lapland, the tanned youth sunbathing on the bare rocks of the western archipelago, the fashion models who appear to have a sideline in Olympic medals.
But here are the numbers: according the Economist Intelligence Unit, Sweden ranks in first place among 167 countries in democratic values. In the World Economic Forum gender gap study, Sweden is the most egalitarian country in the world. It nearly tops the UN index on development. Sweden has the world’s third most competitive economy and the world’s highest per capita spending on Research and development. It has the world’s lowest infant mortality rate and the second best environmental performance. And so it goes on.
Sweden is also the world’s top arms exporter, per capita, along with Israel, the grit in the oyster, as it may have contributed to the death of one prime minister and certainly destroyed the career of another.
* * *
HOW MANY countries with a population of under ten million produce one, let alone two, famous car manufacturers?
Nul points if you guessed Belgium or Switzerland. (with which Sweden is often confused. Totally understandable given the fact both countries have crosses in their flags, and are neutral.) Volvo and Saab work in close collaboration with legislators in parliament and the bureaucrats of the Swedish national roads administration (NRA), lead the way for Sweden in two areas in the automotive world: traffic safety, and alternative fuels.
. The country already has the lowest traffic mortality rates, but the government is committed to its zero vision of no road deaths at all.
.
Three years ago I was tooling around the northern town of Borlange (seat of the NRA) in a modified Volvo with a rather irritating woman’s voice telling me when I exceeded the speed limit for that kind of road, detected by automatic sensors. The gas pedal vibrated uncomfortably. It was easier just to keep to the speed limit; overtaking was, of course, impossible,
Before I started the car I was asked to breathe into a plastic mouthpiece attached by a coiled lead to an apparatus in the dashboard. This was an alcolock. Had I had any ethanol in my breath, the car would not have started. It was hard work.One impact assessment produced by the Dutch transport ministry laconically noted that alcolocks were not to be recommended to asthmatics. By the time the light showed green, my heart was pounding from exertion.
These bits of prototype technology were quite crude, but since the company which invented the modern seatbelt has made commercially available several safety enhancing modifications; they include lane departure warning, autobrakes (if you’re too close to the car in front), and driver alert control, which uses sensors and cameras to determine if the vehicle is driven in a controlled way: 50 pc of accidents are due to driver distractedness; when erratic control is indicated, a coffee cup signal lights up: a hint, I was informed recently by Anders Eugensson, a Volvo traffic analyst, to take a break.
[[[It is not known whether any of these safety measures will be available on entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft, which will begin commercial space flights in 2010 from the Laplandic space centre at Kiruna. For, $200,000 passengers will be launched into the aurora borealis and through to the edges of space at 115km above earth, where people will be able to enjoy six minutes of weightlessness – provided they take their seatbelts off, of course]]]
Volvo’s innovations do nothing to dispel Swedes’ image as serious and, well, sober, but Volvo’s designers sometimes flaunt their more light-hearted side: it assembled an all woman design team to make a concept car that women actually want. After consulting Volvo’s workforce, the all-female team led by designer Eva-Lisa Andersson (picture) produced a car that parks automatically, has an engine that automatically books an appointment at garage when needed – in fact the bonnet cannot be opened by non-professionals. It has changeable seat covers, cinema type rear seats, and gull wing remotely operated doors, to avoid the problem of shopping bags on the rainy pavement. The one thing it doesn’t seem to have is a system that prevents women from being overcharged at the aforementioned garages, although, as the world’s most egalitarian country, this probably happens less in Sweden than elsewhere.
In the second world war, with access to oil supplies cut off, Swedes pioneered the use of wood gas in their cars: the raw material was everywhere, since the country is 60 percent forest. These days though, Nicholas Gustafsson, Volvo’s alternative fuels expert tells me, the more common way of avoiding oil dependence is ethanol, where Sweden is the European leader, partly due to government’s passing of a law that required every petrol station in the country to provide ethanol pumps. The government also granted tax concessions, an exemption on the Stockholm congestion charge and a taxpayer funded cashback grant for individuals who stumped up for the slightly dearer ethanol-compatible cars.
There are more than 1,500 ethanol filling stations in Sweden (the UK has about 20), more than the rest of Europe put together, but most cars are sold as flexi-fuel models, which means they can run on either petrol or ethanol in any concentration: so if the tank is half full of ethanol and the owners fills up with petrol, the car’s system will adjust to the new 50-50 mix. Ethanol produces 60 percent less carbon dioxide than petrol. At a Chatham house conference I attended a few months ago it was made very clear to me that ethanol was a happy medium, since biogas and hydrogen cell fuel vehicles that produced less CO2 were currently more expensive. Financial incentives aside, Swedes do also benefit from a strong sene of national team spirit, and the desire to do the best thing – or better than the English anyway, with whom the Swedes compare themselves as much as the Scots, but with better success.
Although Swedes are a nation of proudly self conscious early adopters possessed of a government that pushes innovation in many ways, it would be a mistake to think of Swedes as pliable collectivists.
The country has an almost unparalleled tradition of individual innovators and inventors: the zip fastener, the ball bearing, the propeller, the refrigerator and the pacemaker are a few examples. It was the Swede Niklas Zennstrom who invented Skype, the technology that allows free calls worldwide via the internet. .I have heard the reasons put down to the long, lonely winters when people had nothing else to but think.
But the most famous inventor of modern times is arguably Hakan Lans, 60, recently named the best European inventor in the last 20 years, who invented the computer mouse, computer colour graphics and – above all – a revolutionary system of air navigation. .
Using GPS positioning, the system allows planes with the equipment installed to see the height, speed, location and direction of all other planes in the sky; currently they fly virtually blind, on verbal instructions from ground control
Lans’s system is truly revolutionary: it will reduce delays due to the current necessity of large flight distance separation and ground control error responsible for at least two bug runway accidents in the last few years – but it also comes up against huge vested interests. It also makes planes independent of centralised control, which no government in this post-911 era likes.
So while Lans’s computer navigation system is now the compulsory worldwide standard for ships, it has yet to be implemented in aviation outside Sweden and Russia, despite its evident superiority over the current technology.
If being a small country helps in being an early adopter of technology ,,the flipside is that small countries have, alas, less clout on the world stage when faced with the vested interests of larger powers.
Another disadvantage of being a small country is that any indigenous defence industry is extremely reliant on exports. Add this to neutrality and a purportedly ethical arms export policy and Sweden’s arms manufacturers face a double challenge.
Sweden, amazing though it may seem given the country’s image, is the world’s first or second biggest arms exporter per capita. Sweden after all gave the world the Nobel peace prize. But the country’s engineering culture and the self sufficiency imposed by neutrality has produced fine armaments across the whole range.
But here the dark side of Sweden is manifest, through a history of falsified expert certificates which specified end user destinations that were safe countries but which everyone knew were exported onwards to warring or oppressive regimes: it is well known the government looks through its fingers on this.
In addition, Swedish arms firms have made a small reputation for themselves as champion bribers. The most notorious case was in the 1980s, when Sweden’s Bofors company won to many’s surprise an export order for 410 howitzers to India, ahead of a favoured French rival, Sofma.
Rajiv Gandhi, the newly elected and youthful Indian prime minister, had specifically and very publicly announced that no bribes must be paid on this deal, since he had been elected on Kennedyesque Mr Clean ticket. But bribes there were all the same, allegedly ending up in Gandhi’s own pocket. He was turfed out at the next election. For many years, the word Bofors entered the lexicon and became a synonym in India for everything rotten and stinking, as in “Hey, this mango tastes of Bofors.”..
And Rajiv might not have been the only political victim. A book recently published to good reviews in Sweden argues that Olof Palme was killed by Swedish military types with a stake in the bribes deal going through. Palme was rather an idealistic chap and the book builds up a convincing case that he was about to stop the deal happening. In the event, the contract was signed without problems two weeks after his assassination.
The Bofors scandal had huge reverberations not only in India but also in Sweden, yet Swedish arms firms continue the practice
Gripen International, which produces a small, relatively cheap, but advanced jetfighter has recently been revealed to have bribed the leaders of the Czech republic and Hungary to secure a deal over the heads of rivals such as the Lockheed F-16. The
To be fair, bribes are nothing new in the arms industry, but this tells us something new and, to me, oddly attractive about Sweden, which in most respects behaves like the perfect teacher’s pet in the global classroom of nation states. If you throw in the political assassinations – Anna Lindh, the foreign minister, was killed a few years ago – it builds up something of a picture of Sweden’s darker side.
In the brochures you have Swedish girls smiling and wearing bicycle helmets, cycling through forests. But when I went to Sweden a few years ago to investigate the Palme murder, I saw a different country: a fog and snow bound Stockholm where you could imagine every Volvo garlanding exhaust fumes was following you; where you met shady military types and fervent anti communist businessmen. I rather liked that. A place which only faces you with its bright side is dead, like the moon. (Which was photographed by astronauts using Swedish Hasselblad cameras.)
Think back to Italy’s worst aviation disaster, at Milan’s Linate airport, in October 2001, when an SAS MD-87 jet taking off in thick fog and rain at 170 mph slammed into a . business Cessna taxi-ing on the wrong runway, the SAS jet lost its right engine and killed the four occupants of the smaller jet instantly.
The bigger plane then managed to take off, reaching a height of 12m; but because the remaining engine had ingested debris from the crash, reducing its thrust, the plane came down on to its destroyed landing gear and careered into a baggage handling hangar at 150mph, killing all 118 people on board. Four Italian ground personnel also died. Pilot Jonas Gustafsson’s manoeuvring of the controls was considered so skilful the sequence of his actions are now held up as an example in the SAS training manual.
Had the aircraft been able to see each other - in fog-proof electronic real-time on a cockpit computer screen, and not rely on radio instructions from a negligent control tower, the accident would surely have been avoided. In fact such a system had, in 2001, been up and running for five years, designed by Hakan Lans, often regarded as Sweden’s top inventor in the 20th century.
Yet in 2007, six years after Linate, there is still no progress in bringing his STDMA system on to the global aviation market. It's cheap to install and run; and allows planes to see each other whether in the ground or in the sky, regardless of clouds and weather - and even see ground vehicles. It's even an International civil aviation organisation (ICAO) standard, but it's a standard is only as good as the uptake of the system is broad.
And at the moment, use is compulsory only over Swedish and Russian airspace. Reason. "Nothing to do with its merits, it's excellent. But industry lobbying," says Bo Redeborn, director of Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic controllers across Europe.
Many who work in creative endeavour including science will have empathised with Lans. You spend fifteen years in a lab or garret perfecting your brilliant idea only to find it dumped because it is, how shall one put it, ahead of its time, attracting the ire of if not luddites then lobbyists. .
How does the Lans system work? Well, let’s look first at how the current system radar works. A rotating transmission antenna, using lots of electricity and spectrum, pumps out high energy pulses into the sky and picks up echoes from aircraft which are painted by the beams. It’s slow, taking up to half a minute for stressed ground controllers to give a reading from a screen full of dots over scratchy radios: it requires aircraft to cooperate, identify themselves and fly at a reasonably high altitude. It’s also not so accurate.
In contrast, Lans's system is a GPS "crystal ball", showing the location, direction of flight, call sigh of up 9,000 other craft in the sky, overlaid on a colour map of the region. Its astonishing system that allows free flight, allowing aircraft to negotiate with each other on a peer to peer basis, to figure out potential hazards and avoid them, as pilots routinely do in good weather by using their eyes and brains.
The system works by aircraft transmitting their own details, taken from readings from four satellites, and using his STDMA (Self organising Time Division Multiple Access) algorithm to divide transmissions into little packets or slots which ensures that, while information is sent out on the same frequency –necessarily so- only one aircraft is ever transmitting at any one time, also necessary, to avoid interference.
The genius of his algorithm is that it is self-organising, without the need for base stations, a process that is registered and worked out by a computer program existing in all aircraft. The craft would continually change time slots and inform others which time slot they would occupy next: His algorithm applied in onboard computers didn’t choose the best time slot, which would mean that two aircraft equidistant from a third would get the same time slot even if very close. Instead the inventor saw to that the algorithm gave a range of choices, then let a randomiser take the actual slot. This is endlessly repeated to give positions to other craft at short notice.
Aviation expert professor Eli Noam, director of the Columbia University Institute for Tele-information, argues that GPS navigation is so far superior to radar he even advises closing the stations to free up bandwidth for other purposes.
Others wouldn’t go as far. Redeborn of Eurocontrol says “We need GPS regardless of what happens to radar, in fact
For national security reasons, the military will continue to use it.”
So why the holdups?
Redeborn says:"Industry and other actors in aviation spread
disinformation because they have commercial and national interests to protect." Not only the radar industry, with its multibillion-dollar investments in equipment. He includes the US Federal Aviation Administration. "They haven't been supportive at all." As well as others.
The disinformation they spread is something supporters of Lans’s system such as Redeborn often have to deal with. A common criticism is that the system lacks "integrity", that it is not secure enough from prying and dangerous eyes. In the past aircraft position was a secret known only to air traffic controllers hunched over their radar monitors. Now, the story goes, anyone, for instance a terrorist, can buy a receiver and software costing a few hundred pounds and sit in their bedsit watching real-time a map of the world's aircraft movements. True? Wrong, says Redeborn, STDMA allows advanced encryption:
"Every time we answer an argument," says Redeborn, "the lobbyists come up with a new objection, ever more trivial. Probably more money has been spent in disinformation than on developing the system, in the first place."
In truth as Redeborn well knows, it is nothing to with about efficacy or fairness; everything to do with politics. Lans’s system was never going to be implemented as the standard in aircraft in the United States even if the radar industry were to greenlight GPS, because Lans is, to put it bluntly, not American.
While Lans patented his system in 1996, and has been successfully stalled since in the international aviation industry, the US is now developing a parallel system, UAT, which it expects to roll out by 2020; even then its inferior to Lans's invention, as it lacks "SMS" capacity between aircraft and ground control, which permit written take off commands and could avoid the misunderstandings in spoken commands. Never mind: the American political-industrial complex has come to some kind of mutually satisfactory agreement. Even though for many American enterprises it’s years too late: as long ago as 1999 the American branch of UPS, the parcel service, which had installed Lans’s transponders on its own fleet was complaining that that the FAA was not demanding it as standard on all aircraft.
In Europe, perhaps because it’s less corrupted, and things are at least supposed to be judged on merit, there is precisely for that reason less movement. STDMA is clearly a system that works. (It's been tested for 150,000 flight hours, and something very similar Is the worldwide standard on ships.) But, Redeborn says: .
"Sweden is a small country with not much clout, but the government also doesn't have a tradition of intervention and flying the flag on behalf of its business and research community. Unlike France, Germany, Italy and to some extent the UK -as we see now over the squabbles with who gets what in Galileo."
So, this is how it goes in the DG transport conference rooms, in the free-for-all of shifting alliances where national and industrial interests are pitted against and with each other, and a cheap and revolutionary system from an individual inventor from a small albeit innovative country already in existence that earns none of other big players any money stands less chance. Only its evident excellence prevents the last rites being read over it; and the deadlock being broken up, with some other air navigation system getting the European go-ahead. Eventually.
Something for the reader to think about the next time he steps on a plane and gazes through the window at a fogbound runway.
The bigger plane then managed to take off, reaching a height of 12m; but because the remaining engine had ingested debris from the crash, reducing its thrust, the plane came down on to its destroyed landing gear and careered into a baggage handling hangar at 150mph, killing all 118 people on board. Four Italian ground personnel also died. Pilot Jonas Gustafsson’s manoeuvring of the controls was considered so skilful the sequence of his actions are now held up as an example in the SAS training manual.
Had the aircraft been able to see each other - in fog-proof electronic real-time on a cockpit computer screen, and not rely on radio instructions from a negligent control tower, the accident would surely have been avoided. In fact such a system had, in 2001, been up and running for five years, designed by Hakan Lans, often regarded as Sweden’s top inventor in the 20th century.
Yet in 2007, six years after Linate, there is still no progress in bringing his STDMA system on to the global aviation market. It's cheap to install and run; and allows planes to see each other whether in the ground or in the sky, regardless of clouds and weather - and even see ground vehicles. It's even an International civil aviation organisation (ICAO) standard, but it's a standard is only as good as the uptake of the system is broad.
And at the moment, use is compulsory only over Swedish and Russian airspace. Reason. "Nothing to do with its merits, it's excellent. But industry lobbying," says Bo Redeborn, director of Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic controllers across Europe.
Many who work in creative endeavour including science will have empathised with Lans. You spend fifteen years in a lab or garret perfecting your brilliant idea only to find it dumped because it is, how shall one put it, ahead of its time, attracting the ire of if not luddites then lobbyists. .
How does the Lans system work? Well, let’s look first at how the current system radar works. A rotating transmission antenna, using lots of electricity and spectrum, pumps out high energy pulses into the sky and picks up echoes from aircraft which are painted by the beams. It’s slow, taking up to half a minute for stressed ground controllers to give a reading from a screen full of dots over scratchy radios: it requires aircraft to cooperate, identify themselves and fly at a reasonably high altitude. It’s also not so accurate.
In contrast, Lans's system is a GPS "crystal ball", showing the location, direction of flight, call sigh of up 9,000 other craft in the sky, overlaid on a colour map of the region. Its astonishing system that allows free flight, allowing aircraft to negotiate with each other on a peer to peer basis, to figure out potential hazards and avoid them, as pilots routinely do in good weather by using their eyes and brains.
The system works by aircraft transmitting their own details, taken from readings from four satellites, and using his STDMA (Self organising Time Division Multiple Access) algorithm to divide transmissions into little packets or slots which ensures that, while information is sent out on the same frequency –necessarily so- only one aircraft is ever transmitting at any one time, also necessary, to avoid interference.
The genius of his algorithm is that it is self-organising, without the need for base stations, a process that is registered and worked out by a computer program existing in all aircraft. The craft would continually change time slots and inform others which time slot they would occupy next: His algorithm applied in onboard computers didn’t choose the best time slot, which would mean that two aircraft equidistant from a third would get the same time slot even if very close. Instead the inventor saw to that the algorithm gave a range of choices, then let a randomiser take the actual slot. This is endlessly repeated to give positions to other craft at short notice.
Aviation expert professor Eli Noam, director of the Columbia University Institute for Tele-information, argues that GPS navigation is so far superior to radar he even advises closing the stations to free up bandwidth for other purposes.
Others wouldn’t go as far. Redeborn of Eurocontrol says “We need GPS regardless of what happens to radar, in fact
For national security reasons, the military will continue to use it.”
So why the holdups?
Redeborn says:"Industry and other actors in aviation spread
disinformation because they have commercial and national interests to protect." Not only the radar industry, with its multibillion-dollar investments in equipment. He includes the US Federal Aviation Administration. "They haven't been supportive at all." As well as others.
The disinformation they spread is something supporters of Lans’s system such as Redeborn often have to deal with. A common criticism is that the system lacks "integrity", that it is not secure enough from prying and dangerous eyes. In the past aircraft position was a secret known only to air traffic controllers hunched over their radar monitors. Now, the story goes, anyone, for instance a terrorist, can buy a receiver and software costing a few hundred pounds and sit in their bedsit watching real-time a map of the world's aircraft movements. True? Wrong, says Redeborn, STDMA allows advanced encryption:
"Every time we answer an argument," says Redeborn, "the lobbyists come up with a new objection, ever more trivial. Probably more money has been spent in disinformation than on developing the system, in the first place."
In truth as Redeborn well knows, it is nothing to with about efficacy or fairness; everything to do with politics. Lans’s system was never going to be implemented as the standard in aircraft in the United States even if the radar industry were to greenlight GPS, because Lans is, to put it bluntly, not American.
While Lans patented his system in 1996, and has been successfully stalled since in the international aviation industry, the US is now developing a parallel system, UAT, which it expects to roll out by 2020; even then its inferior to Lans's invention, as it lacks "SMS" capacity between aircraft and ground control, which permit written take off commands and could avoid the misunderstandings in spoken commands. Never mind: the American political-industrial complex has come to some kind of mutually satisfactory agreement. Even though for many American enterprises it’s years too late: as long ago as 1999 the American branch of UPS, the parcel service, which had installed Lans’s transponders on its own fleet was complaining that that the FAA was not demanding it as standard on all aircraft.
In Europe, perhaps because it’s less corrupted, and things are at least supposed to be judged on merit, there is precisely for that reason less movement. STDMA is clearly a system that works. (It's been tested for 150,000 flight hours, and something very similar Is the worldwide standard on ships.) But, Redeborn says: .
"Sweden is a small country with not much clout, but the government also doesn't have a tradition of intervention and flying the flag on behalf of its business and research community. Unlike France, Germany, Italy and to some extent the UK -as we see now over the squabbles with who gets what in Galileo."
So, this is how it goes in the DG transport conference rooms, in the free-for-all of shifting alliances where national and industrial interests are pitted against and with each other, and a cheap and revolutionary system from an individual inventor from a small albeit innovative country already in existence that earns none of other big players any money stands less chance. Only its evident excellence prevents the last rites being read over it; and the deadlock being broken up, with some other air navigation system getting the European go-ahead. Eventually.
Something for the reader to think about the next time he steps on a plane and gazes through the window at a fogbound runway.
Good in theory
My experiences of Europe
Europe, I used to think, was essentially a clockwork engineering operation (The clockwork Brusssels sprout perhaps?) where public opinion in the form of the tabloids is nothing so much as a wrecking operation. I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and rightful in its place. The European Commission proposed; European parliament amended, with the insight from impact assessments; law proposals went on to the council of ministers, which represented the nation states. There was input from the committee of the regions and the European social and economic committee. Numerous lobbyists and members of civil society also had their input arrows; there was COREPER, the nation states’ embassies to the EU, and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, when the institutions failed to agree. It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics. It seemed a liberation. There were differences between different groups wanted, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
And coming back to London and picking up the redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a Rottweiler. The contrast between the intellectual sophistication and mild personalities of the commission officials I knew and the thuggish rage of their critics was striking There was a strong element of bullying I felt: even the eurosceptic Telegraph’s correspondent was once minded to comment that the commission was the fat boy in class who never hit back
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for the ingrates: and the more time I spent commuting to Brussels, the more the acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as an obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule applies to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature of decision-making.
And commission officials told me: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver? It broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulated technical innovation. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG Transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network. It funded a bridge between Sicily and the mainland, between Sweden and Denmark. It was responsible for the ITER fusion reactor, which aims to provide an inexhaustible supply of clean energy by 2050, and now the Galileo global positioning satellites. There were large sums of money to get European universities to collaborate so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication of scientific effort, which countries can ill afford when competing with the US: The EU also funded student exchange programmes and drove through the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, enabling architects, doctors and engineers to settle in Berlin or Biarritz according to their fancy.
For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, better food labelling, cheap European flights, and better bureaucracy in the European sunbelt: there was right to travel for free healthcare abroad for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said: “What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply could be: “Watch the life of Brian”.
* * *
Now, these days, my enthusiasm has moderated considerably.
There have been times when I have despaired of the British, with their insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that cynicism is either merited or is a useful intellectual stance towards the institutions..
Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to realise there are individuals –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends.
Instead of a multilateral system based on different insti tutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns powerfully.
I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the13th year running, I have heard the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – bigger than any national science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money. .Instead of winelakes, think scientific paper mountains.
While Europe certainly has many achievements, the picture even here is tempered somewhat: n fact, several of the trans European networks are as yet unrealised, and many of these schemes are critcised for involving nation states’ money that comes back to them minus the wastage it’s endured in its progress through the bureaucracy.
I still like Europe as a continent – not necessarily when used as a shorthand for the metastasising institutional framework based in Brussels, where a new office block or skyscraper to house more technocrats seems to rise very few months. I sometimes squint and look down rue de la Loi, wondering what the parade route through Albert Speer’s planned Germania – Berlin - would have looked like.
* * *
Still, here are moments when I still hearken back to my simple idealism of those early days several years ago, when I arrived and was enchanted by Brussels. the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted on the cobbles of the spire-infested Grand Place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with the gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows with your 27-year-old commission girlfriend. And tomorrow you will go to the European parliament with its gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the young parliamentary assistants, the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together, plan a better world, one that looks splendid on paper
Europe, I used to think, was essentially a clockwork engineering operation (The clockwork Brusssels sprout perhaps?) where public opinion in the form of the tabloids is nothing so much as a wrecking operation. I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and rightful in its place. The European Commission proposed; European parliament amended, with the insight from impact assessments; law proposals went on to the council of ministers, which represented the nation states. There was input from the committee of the regions and the European social and economic committee. Numerous lobbyists and members of civil society also had their input arrows; there was COREPER, the nation states’ embassies to the EU, and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, when the institutions failed to agree. It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics. It seemed a liberation. There were differences between different groups wanted, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
And coming back to London and picking up the redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a Rottweiler. The contrast between the intellectual sophistication and mild personalities of the commission officials I knew and the thuggish rage of their critics was striking There was a strong element of bullying I felt: even the eurosceptic Telegraph’s correspondent was once minded to comment that the commission was the fat boy in class who never hit back
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for the ingrates: and the more time I spent commuting to Brussels, the more the acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as an obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule applies to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature of decision-making.
And commission officials told me: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver? It broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulated technical innovation. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG Transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network. It funded a bridge between Sicily and the mainland, between Sweden and Denmark. It was responsible for the ITER fusion reactor, which aims to provide an inexhaustible supply of clean energy by 2050, and now the Galileo global positioning satellites. There were large sums of money to get European universities to collaborate so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication of scientific effort, which countries can ill afford when competing with the US: The EU also funded student exchange programmes and drove through the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, enabling architects, doctors and engineers to settle in Berlin or Biarritz according to their fancy.
For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, better food labelling, cheap European flights, and better bureaucracy in the European sunbelt: there was right to travel for free healthcare abroad for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said: “What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply could be: “Watch the life of Brian”.
* * *
Now, these days, my enthusiasm has moderated considerably.
There have been times when I have despaired of the British, with their insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that cynicism is either merited or is a useful intellectual stance towards the institutions..
Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to realise there are individuals –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends.
Instead of a multilateral system based on different insti tutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns powerfully.
I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the13th year running, I have heard the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – bigger than any national science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money. .Instead of winelakes, think scientific paper mountains.
While Europe certainly has many achievements, the picture even here is tempered somewhat: n fact, several of the trans European networks are as yet unrealised, and many of these schemes are critcised for involving nation states’ money that comes back to them minus the wastage it’s endured in its progress through the bureaucracy.
I still like Europe as a continent – not necessarily when used as a shorthand for the metastasising institutional framework based in Brussels, where a new office block or skyscraper to house more technocrats seems to rise very few months. I sometimes squint and look down rue de la Loi, wondering what the parade route through Albert Speer’s planned Germania – Berlin - would have looked like.
* * *
Still, here are moments when I still hearken back to my simple idealism of those early days several years ago, when I arrived and was enchanted by Brussels. the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted on the cobbles of the spire-infested Grand Place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with the gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows with your 27-year-old commission girlfriend. And tomorrow you will go to the European parliament with its gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the young parliamentary assistants, the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together, plan a better world, one that looks splendid on paper
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