This little bubble of thought reminded me that I have had in mind for some time a system for recording conversations in a more than linear fashion – because, after all, conversation is rarely as linear as we think. Instead you’d hook up some voice recognition software to a natural language parser which (being really far better than anything I’m aware of at the moment) could produce an abstract tree of the conversation and its junction points, perhaps being able to tag the junctions (the bits you’ll come back to later) by means of a search through the speaker’s web presence or indeed her other conversations… and could then project the whole thing in glorious 3D, allowing conversationalists not only to have a conversation, but to create one like a work of art, painted in front of them in real time. You could zip back frequently to things you’d meant to mention, and produce a densely branched structure… you could colour each speaker’s threads, and see which of you was more like to leap into monologue. Of course there are potential pitfalls. What if you discover you really do have the most dreadful habit of interrupting something significant with something trivial? Well, I suppose it’s better to learn it that not, although you might want to try out a few trial conversations before going public with your art.

I love the idea of being able to treat conversation as a durable art one could revisit or reopen. I love the idea of all the things you could do with a durable conversation. Cross-reference one to another. Invite people to join in later. Have time-lapsed conversations (a little like a Google Wave, but with something more like exclusive locking); have conversations with complete strangers. Have a public archive of good conversations and continue them yourselves, getting together with a few friends to tag a branch onto a chat about Nixon in China or public policy.

Then there’s all the aggregate information you could extract. What topic clusters are most likely to send you off on a tangent? How often do you lose track of your line of argument? On what topics are you most likely to underparticipate? Is there any correlation between how much you enjoyed a conversation and any other metric you can invent? What are the most common topics under discussion when conversations ABEND? How do they vary by country or geographic region?

And following on from that of course the privacy and security challenges that a sort of publicly available archive of conversations — which are, after all, some of our most private moments — would pose. I’m not suggesting that you’d have a conversation plotter running in the wee small hours to catch pillow talk and automatically uploading it all to Wikipedia; but even assuming we were limiting ourselves to willingly produced material, how do you manage the material? Do the participants have ownership? Is the addition of a new branch additive or transformative? Could branches be secured so that only certain people could follow them (which is similar to the “gevulot” concept which manages shared memory in Hannu Rajaniemi’s excellent The Quantum Thief), or so that only certain people could contribute….

I could yammer about this all night, but I’m jetlagged enough to be heading off to bed, so I shan’t. It’s worth dropping in, though, that the other obvious-ish message here is that all that stuff around privacy and managing sharing isn’t something uniquely posed by this new way of tracking conversation; it’s just that there are a set of existing rules and possibilities which we’re so used to we don’t see them (or call them basic social skills). As McLuhan had it, the environment is invisible. Good night!

Personally I’d like to know who the contractor was on the tunnel, because a tunnel of (veery roughly) some 500 miles (that’s more than 20 times longer than the channel tunnel), presumably running a couple of miles below the surface of the earth in consequence, sounds like a pretty good bargain. Especially when one estimate of the Channel Tunnel costs put them at £4650 million in 1985 money.

That gives you a construction cost of .. let’s see… £90,000/mile, compared to the Channel Tunnel costs of £148,000,000/mile (3 s.f.), or one one-thousand, six hundred and forty-fourth of the cost. I knew Italian builders were good, but this really does take the biscuit.

Also — who knew neutrinos needed a tunnel?

Sat on Richmond Green, enjoying an excellent pistachio ice-cream from Gelateria Danieli (genuinely extraordinarily good; drop by). Watching kids running around with footballs and dolls. It all seems incredibly far away from sovereign debt and credit default swaps and service-oriented architecture… Does this say more about how amazing humanity is at tackling complex stuff when it would really rather be in a park, or something vaguely zen-ish about maintaining room for a little bit of play and even silliness in life?

“As ridiculous as two walnuts judging a quilting competition and failing all entries for not resembling penguins.”

Most important: go to Texas, because virtually everything you think about Texas and Texans is wrong, and since coming back I’ve decided it’s actually Europeans who are dreadful people – snotty, self-important, dismissive, ignorant, petty, humourless nations with a proud history of persecution and a propensity to dictatorship. (Post-holiday blues, moi?)

Texans are great. Humour as dry as a bone, enormously hospitable and all consumed with an honest curiosity about why on earth anyone would come visit them.

I am going to be saying “Awesome!” a lot for the next couple weeks.

My mates are also great people. Ten days hanging around with such focused, straightforward, do-y people did me the power. Thanks, guys.

Swimming is awesome. I need to do more.

Tubing is not just awesome, it’s totally awesome, but doing it on the Guadalupe River at 40 Celsius is going to be rather nicer than doing it on the Thames in October, so that’s one to save for a future trip.

Aside: the ice-cream place where M bought me a bakewell tart ice-cream in Richmond today is also awesome, but is not Diet.

The Ford Escape is the worst, sorriest, most appalling excuse for a simulation of something which might under the right circumstances qualify as a vehicle that I want to write to its design team and invite them to explain themselves very briskly indeed. Whether it was drifting round corners if taken at above 2 mph, creaking as though it were ship-built, or just being completely and utterly gutless, it never once gave me a moment’s pleasure. Driving it for a week ought to be reserved for people who hurt kittens for pleasure.

I have now eaten in a revolving restaurant. (In the linked page, I am the diner on the right, enjoying a typically low-key soft drink.) And we got there by going along the River Walk — a successful urban regeneration project for once….

Perfect final activity: watching beer be bottled, sterilised, labelled and packed in the Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, “the cleanest little town in Texas”.

Texans are proud of things; it seems to come naturally to them. On the odd occasion they do have to go looking a little harder for the prize, though. I was constantly expecting women to mention in passing that their son, Skeeter, was the tallest pre-pubertal Caucasian teen born south of San Antonio on a Thursday since 1972.

Should more spring to mind, there will be updates.

Now to the meat:

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago

Good, so the subject is clear. From the context, you see, I thought it was about rioting. Silly me.

the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march

Oh, Nina, you silly romantic, I can hear the Internationale from here. How stirring!

and now unrest on the streets of the capital

… excuse me? So, framing this as a culmination of a trades union movement. Have you cleared this with the TUC?

(preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year)

*blank face*

Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures.

And indeed a backdrop of acceleration due to gravity being approximately 9.8 ms^2, my having nasal hair, and the MPAA bringing lawsuits. Putting two things in the same sentence doesn’t excuse you from showing reasons for your answer. Now, please explain the difference between “cuts” and “austerity measures” — because it looks a lot like they mean the same thing and you’re just using them to park some spare adjectives. Talking of which, “enforced” leaves me near-speechless. I’d love to know what that word is doing other than rather calculatedly sitting there, looking at me with big, soft eyes, welling up with tears as a jackbooted Tory hits it repeatedly with a chain for not being rich enough to care about. What appalling condescension.

The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven’t seen since the early 1980s.

Because the increases in spending planned aren’t large enough? Doesn’t it really risk sparking a strain of polemical journalism — of which I think both sides have more-or-less occasionally been guilty — which cares less about accuracy than about getting the Tories out no matter what? And isn’t it the wind-up articles and the argumentum ad nauseam which insidiously tells people that these things are “understandable” and “happening in context” which actually lower the moral barriers to mass unrest on that scale? In short, are you making a responsible use of free speech?

With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.

Sorry, you’ve lost me. Yet again, you’re putting two things in the same sentence and assuming this means they are related, or that it’s obvious they are. Let me bring bad news: it isn’t. I am reading this to learn. You are showing little evidence of being interested in teaching me.

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms

No, really, this simply won’t do. Please explain this division to me. I am interested. What is it? In which “extreme terms” has it been clarified? The most extreme things I can think of are the housing benefit changes and the ESA reassessments, and whilst I can understand there being a legitimate debate about them, I don’t read them as “extreme”.

but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police’s treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

I do believe you just actually made a point, presumably by accident — although I see you couldn’t resist a weaselly “ordinary” in there. Though I don’t necessarily agree with you — any policing policy which did not increase its levels of monitoring in response to an increase in an area’s gun crime rate, for instance, would have to produce a pretty convincing explanation of why doing so was a bad idea.

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.

The IPCC are not the Crown Prosecution Service, so they don’t decide whether to bring criminal proceedings or not. They are also not the courts. They are also not juries. You may well have identified one of the reasons to have suspicions of the IPCC’s “I”, but I don’t think you have given enough to achieve your “quite reasonable”.

Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)

I might not agree with it, but I could understand an argument which read protest as a product of poverty and unemployment. I could understand one which described a grieving and legitimately aggrieved community rising up. I think we both have to say that your account doesn’t provide very much in the way of explanation for looting. Or at least, if it does, you’re not prepared to help me get it.

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture:

Sorry again — “the events” is weaselling. Which ones? The riots? The looting? (Oh, all these terrible, loaded, negative terms for pilfering, committing larceny, having a relaxed sense of ownership….)

Anyway, you’re warning me: I would do well to look at the bigger picture. If I don’t, you imply, there will be Consequences. And they are:

a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

Right, I’m still waiting for you to make a point. Too many people are poor: I agree. Yes, bad. Jolly good, you’ve said something we can all agree on. What’s that? Ah, you’re objecting to the rich, not the poor. I think that’s rather a silly focus, personally. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Jones! Your poverty may be crushing, but rest assured that we think people having a lot of money is bad.” Anyway, back to your argument. The consequences are:

As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, phenomena usually described as “social problems” (crime, ill-health, imprisonment rates, mental illness) are far more common in unequal societies than ones with better economic distribution and less gap between the richest and the poorest. Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.

Oh Lord, you’ve read a book. You’re so happy about it, you’ve decided to put the consequences off for another paragraph. But anyway, let’s tackle this one. I’ve not read The Spirit Level but I’m aware it’s this year’s Nudge and I am bad for not having read it. You’re saying: there’s no such thing as [society *cough*] “social” problems; they are at root economic ones. Although you do manage to mangle equality and financial equality, which I think is rather a limit in your view of humanity. In those countries where the poor are not so very poor, you have less crime, better health, etc. (Alternatively, you’re saying that if Bill Gates moved to Britain tomorrow, I would be statistically slightly more ill than I am at present.) Because you’re not going to let an interesting point get away unruined, you repeat yourself (“better distribution … less gap”).

You then list some things you think are bad (Boo! to individualism & competition) and then run off on a different limb for a while (“state-encouraged selfishness” is going to keep you out of the speechwriting trade for a while)… until you get to yet another point — that we are unequal! Huzzah for paragraphs. Bear in mind though that the inequality in your terms is caused by “selfishness” and “competition”, which is good, because it relieves you of the moral duty to actually do anything about poverty per se and gives you the simple option of passing the buck. Phew!

Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if we ignore the history and the context in which they occur

Oh, those nasty demonising media. Thank heavens you’re not up for any demonising yourself.

I approach this as a piece of persuasive writing and I think it fails. It is too woolly, too ineptly rhetorical, too polemic. It makes claims greater than it can deliver. It is overbroad. It is lazily structured. It is self-satisfied and unquestioning and incurious and coercive and utterly dismaying that this is something the Guardian would publish with every appearance of intending people should read it.

I am an equal opportunities fisker and will happily fisk anything I find this annoying. Please send me things you think might enrage me and I will happily fisk them for you if they do.

In some ways this is nice; it’s a little trip down memory lane. But in other ways it’s actually slightly scary: the amount of sentiment stored up in what is, at root, junk, is pretty impressive. Of course some of it is good old fashioned false-economy… “Maybe I’ll need that, one day….” One never specifies what contingency might render it necessary to have (say) three feet of sealed-air anti-shock packaging so immediately available that having to order some would constitute personal or professional disaster. But still, there are little tendrils — and let’s get this in perspective, I’m talking about the very tiniest of barely-detectable twinges, not great wracking aches here — of guilt or regret or something like them, wrapped cobweb-like around these things in their places.

I suppose in a way this is like moving. Every time I did it as a kid (plenty, though not obscenely frequently) I felt (in retrospect) the freedom of complete self-reinvention, the discarding of a previous life like an outgrown shell. This is how I came out: on my first day at sixth form, four hundred miles from my comprehensive, I mentioned it in passing, was an object of headline curiosity for a month, and carried on with everything else in life with an iron self-confidence borne of that reinvention. And though I’ve moved since I’ve been in London, it’s always been within the same job, or within West London, or in some way just not really a “proper” move: there has been no sense of daring, with all due love and respect to my former (and brilliant) housemates, no real sense of jumping in the deep end or changing horses.

So perhaps this is my ode to doing something a bit more quotes-unquotes dangerous….

Personally, I spent 8 minutes yelling “ASK HER MORE ABOUT THAT BIT!!!!” at my former self, but hearing her voice again after getting on for 17 years was pretty extraordinary in itself. Thanks I guess are due to whichever of my teachers at Treviglas got me to do it; I suppose it must have been Mr. Firmston (history), but it could equally have been Mrs. Sleep (English).

Anyway, my own personal blast-from-the-past. 1991 or 1992 vintage. I rescued this off tape; how long will an mp3 on the internet last? Makes you feel like a donation to the Wayback Machine, or “rogue archivist” Carl Malamud, or if you like the big picture, the Long Now foundation.

Plymouth in the Blitz

Plymouth in the Blitz

Do yell if this doesn’t work in your browser.

Moral of story:
Do not stay in tourist hotels. Ring ahead and check that they think they’ve sold you what they’ve actually contracted to supply. Never dip below four stars.

I feel like a freed hostage.