3d printers

Either I am getting old or things are getting very weird. The concept of 3d printers (as covered by BBC World Service's Digital Planet recently) is like science fiction or an April Fool's Day joke.

A 3d printer is like the Star Trek transporter except it doesn't actually take a thing from anywhere: It creates an object from a reasonably small number of basic ingredients. It works by building up layers until eventually it creates an entire object. So come up with a design and you can send it half way round the world to be output as a physical object!

And this is not just for small things. According to Digital Planet it is possible to output a house using this system.

The Fordist production line concept has long been threatened by robotic machinery capable of producing one off objects with more or less equal efficiency to the production line process. This means there are no economies of scale (at least in production) and threatens the whole concept of large scale industry.

3d printers, if they exist now or ever will exist, are yet another way of making distance (or proximity) irrelevant. Consequently expect city house prices to slump as people realise they don't need to live in giant urban landscapes.

According to Digital Planet, the wackiest idea is a self replicating machine. You design one and then give it to someone with the instruction that they must produce one copy and give it to someone else instructing them to do exactly the same thing. Pretty soon everyone in the world has a 3d printer.

Sheffield

The devastatingly attractive Israeli woman introduced herself by saying 'can I be your partner'? Unfortunately I was at the front of a queue and she just wanted me to hold a place in the queue for her. That's what it was like at the Sheffield Doc Festival. Surprises at every turn. At the entrance I was handed a leaflet asking me to boycott Israeli cultural products. Does that mean I can't mention her video Jerusalem SOS about a motorcycle based emergency service run by Ultra Orthodox Jews with some help from Palestinians?
Then there was the guy from Bournemouth who had made a video about American clothes lines. Apparently he discovered on Wikkipedia that this is a highly contentious issue.
A few seconds later I met the lady who had registered thesea.com Never since the time of Neptune has anyone had the sea as a domain! She got it because she was making video docs about sharks.

Fighting crime with Y line

Y line DNA is not like most of the rest of your DNA. At conception most of your DNA gets mixed. Some of the DNA is extracted from your mother, some from your father. But Y Line isn't like that. It consists of the additional chromosome that belongs to the male alone. Women are usually XX. Men are usually XY. Since women don't have Y, male babies inherit the Y line unchanged from their father.

As a result, Y line DNA is identical to the father's Y line and his father's Y line. In theory this should go back to the beginning of the human species but in practice there are small modifications to the Y line, though these occur very infrequently.

The upshot of this is that if you find Y line DNA you have a good chance of knowing the surname of the person you are seeking (if that person has the same surname as his father). The individual may never have given a DNA sample, yet the fact that male relatives have given samples (or the family group can be found on one of the many genealogical sites specialising in this type of investigation) is sufficient.

All this makes more or less redundant all the human rights cases dedicated to preventing the police from having access to the DNA of people who they have come into contact with, but who have not subsequently been convicted of any crime.

And the police would be very foolish not to use this system. Suppose a serial killer is at work and the police had 10,000 names of contacts in a database. If it turned out following one of the murders that the police could have known the surname of the murderer (and perhaps cut down that 10,000 to less than half a dozen) the relatives of the victim may well sue the police for incompetence.

The 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined the right to life (from Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights) into British law. Is it possible that any police force failing to take into account Y line DNA would be risking contravening this act?

Doe nuts

Stunned. I just watched Meet John Doe, a Frank Capra film. This included an American convention standing to the strains of God Save the King, the unmistakable sound of The People's Flag is Deepest Red, but most disturbingly of all Gary Cooper saying he was bollocksed.... Apparently all these things meant something different in America at the time (1941). But all three in one film?

Incidentally, how come no-on told me Gary Cooper couldn't act? I've spent quite a lot of my life singing the theme from High Noon (Oh Don't Foresake Me Oh My Darling) out of respect for the man: small but perfectly formed. But in Meet John Doe Barbara Stanwyck had to virtually hold him up. It got so bad Capra had to shoot one whole scene with Cooper's back to us so we couldn't see him!

At two hours, this film is far too long and the script by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr. based on a screenplay by Robert Riskin is at best flabby (or so it appears in 2010). There are a lot of cute (Frank Capra) touches involving dogs and cats, a lovely montage and an almost unbelievably young Walter Brennan (who puts in one of the best performances of the film). A mixed bag. It is remarkable that Capra had to make so many compromises at a time when he must have been at the height of his prestige in Hollywood.

I used to think film was created by an auteur. That might be true now but it certainly wasn't in 1941.

She's stopped stooping?

According to the Forestry Commission (Massive survey probes the secrets of Britain's forests- August 26, 2009) there are now 2.75 million hectares of woodland covering 12% of Great Britain (about twice as much as in the early 20th century). This is not necessarily a great advance for society since the Forestry Commission (especially in the early years of its life) had a tendency to plant dead areas of monoculture (single species), including conifers which acidified the land. But it's probably better to have more tress than less. Certainly one of the best things about the London Borough of Waltham Forest (where I live) is the large number of trees (perhaps more than any other London borough).
But all is not well in the world of at least one tree species. Following in the wake of Dutch Elm's Disease another alien tree exterminator seems to be doing its worse: the leaf miner moth which attacks conker trees. Like the most recent financial crisis, this moth originated in Greece. There is no cure for it (hopefully unlike the financial crisis) and it has already infected one in two horse chestnut trees. According to the Royal Horticultural Society there soon won't be a single conker tree in Britain that doesn't suffer from the pest.
The moth doesn't kill trees but it does weaken them and make them more liable to suffer disease like bleeding canker, which kills trees.
It comes at just the wrong time because the kids have stopped playing conkers and an apparently healthy tree a few yards from my home is producing large quantities of crop but the local kids are just letting them lie on the ground until they rot or get swept up by the road sweeper. Is this a double wammy for the conker? Will it be lost as a result of a combination of an incurable alien invader and a lack of demand? Well, probably not. Most of these species manage to cling on somewhere (an isolated location or an island), ready to re-populate the mainland when there is an opportunity. But count on one thing: there will be fewer people stooping to conker in the next few decades.

I was wrong

About ten years ago I got the idea that companies were going to need videos for their web sites since people were unlikely to put up with wading through reams of type and would prefer to see moving pictures. If a national group had 100 local outlets then each one should have a couple of minutes of video to personalise them and introduce potential customers to the branch.

At the time the video production companies were not geared up to do this sort of work since they needed thousands of pounds to work on a job, whereas most small companies would probably only be able to pay hundreds. My idea was to do the job for about the price of a page advert in a trade magazine, perhaps £750.

Since then there has been an explosion in the number of companies offering to produce video and now some are advertising a £500 package, cheaper than the bargain basement price I envisaged a decade ago. Yet few companies have videos on their web sites. There doesn't seem to be much work out there.

Potential customers also seem to want a more polished and professional video than I imagined. But it is polished and professional in the style that they saw on tv 20 or 30 years ago. It's not what the professionals are doing now!

It seems to me that so long as the universities continue to run vast numbers of film production schools and there are relatively few opportunities in the shrinking tv and film industries, the situation will get more competitive. Not less.

As an aside, it seems doubly daft for universities to run film production or journalism courses. Firstly there is no point in them (other than financing the university) since there are very few jobs for their graduates, and most of the jobs that do exist are very low paid if they are paid at all. On a more fundamental note, vocational courses such as these, undermine the true purpose of universities as centres of academic learning and ground breaking research.

Pennies from Heaven

I like to pick up pennies in the street. It's a really good thing to do. Bending down to get the coin is great exercise and it makes me richer.

Sometimes I worry about the possibility of picking up germs along with the pennies, but if you can get diseases this way you can probably get them from any coin no matter where it comes from. A frightening thought!

For the most part the coins are there because kids throw them away. They don't like to clutter up their pockets with small change. It jangles when they walk (which is uncool) and makes their clothing bulge in unfashionable ways.

Just lately there seem to be more coins on the pavements than there used to be. Strange, really, considering we live in recessionary times with high unemployment and a great deal of fear about the future.

The last time I remember an epidemic of coin throwing, a time when the minimum value was regarded as too small a unit to be worth keeping, was in the mid 1960s. On my way to school in the morning I could nearly always find a half penny (or hapenny), sometimes several. At the time there were 480 half pennies to the pound (this was before decimalisation). Now there are 100 pennies to the pound.

Does this mean that inflation has made the currency worth about a fifth of its value in the 1960s?

Possibly, but it seems unlikely. In the 1970s I was interested in buying houses and spent some of my time writing about building inflation. At the time (I remember) the cheapest house in London cost about £10k. Today the same house would fetch about £200k. That would suggest prices have gone up by a factor of twenty, not five.


Perhaps the main difference was the size of the coin. In the 1960s the hapenny was exactly the same size as the modern 2p. As a consequence it made more of a bulge in the pockets than the current penny.

In the mid 1960s the years of austerity (the hungry 30s, the war years, the drab 50s) were coming to an end. Today the economy appears to be balanced on a knife edge with global depression as likely as a new era of technologically fuelled growth and prosperity. But no matter what the future holds I'm grateful for the exercise all those cool teenagers give me by throwing away their small change.

Going the extra mile for ratings

TV crime show host Wallace Souza went a little too far to boost ratings. He orchestrated murders so he could tip off camera crews who were in the area when the event happened.

But the strain of this lifestyle seems to have told on Souza. He died at a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, after having a heart attack.

Souza is not the only tv worker to bring about his own downfall, but his story is more dramatic than most. It's a tough business and not one for the faint hearted.

Everyone in the video industry should think about his case the next time they are asked by a prospective employer if they are prepared to go the extra mile or if they are totally committed. Souza clearly should have been committed and put in a mental institution, not a tv channel.

The Wave

Just saw Dennis Gansel's 2008 film The Wave. Powerful drama. It suggests that Fascism could easily be re-born in Germany and that liberalism and toleration is just skin deep. I guess that's right, but clearly it could happen in England just as easily.

The film was impressive from start to finish, experimenting with different styles with even a few seconds of spoof Hitchcock style suspense thrown into the mix. Despite the pot porri, it was all quality work. Clearly the German film industry has reached levels of sophistication and professionalism not seen in the UK. Don't get me wrong, great films are made here, but I haven't seen a film that has attempted to explore the range of The Wave.

Gansel clearly believes in the power of film: not 3d spectacular or computorised wizardry, but real actors in real drama on real film. Maybe this is the start of the Campaign for Real Film?

It is certainly a film every teacher should see. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, this film should be part of your vigilance kit!

Entropy

Entropy, entropy, how could a hen throw pea? It's quite possible to imagine a zero sum universe where there is no such thing as entropy. But that isn't our universe. In our universe it is a basic law that all energy decays so that even if the universe does not collapse on itself ending up with a Small Squelch, it will still come to an end some day when it runs out of energy. That's entropy.

It's all down to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: as Flanders and Swann explained "Heat will not of itself pass from one body to a hotter body."

Since energy can only degrade, once it reaches the lowest possible state it can only disappear. But what happens to all those little bits of decay. Do they really just disappear? That's hardly logical. If they disappear where do they disappear to?

Douglas Adams in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy models the Big Bang as sand running out of the plug hole of a conical, ebony bath filmed and the film run backwards. It's a crazy image and meant to be a joke. But who knows, maybe that's what the big bang was like: the bottom half of an egg timer.

Suppose the other half of that egg timer contains the decayed energy and entropy is simply the connection between our universe and another, the neck between the two conical ebony baths. So energy seeps out of one universe and into another.

It's a crazy idea and probably totally unprovable. But it is rather beautiful.

One objection might be that the Big Bang happened rather quickly whereas entropy is exceeding slow. But time and energy are variables in Einstein's famous equation. When the whole subject of the discussion is the destruction and creation of matter and energy, what does time mean? In one ebony bath 100 billion years elapses while in the other ebony bath only a hundred billionth of a second goes by!

In fact some have speculated that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is about the creation of time or perhaps the description of the fact that time exists.

The Egg Timer theory is certainly a lot more elegant than the idea of the Higgs Boson, but here's hoping no-one ever builds anything like that Large Hadron Collider to check it out. I think it should remain just a neat idea.

Image of Divine Feminine- in progress by Donna Raymond

Disintermediation

The future of broadcasting, if there is going to be one, is going to be disintermediated, or at least less intermediated than present. The gate keepers who determine channel schedules will gradually lose power. Content providers don't need them if they can talk directly to the audience. Disney and Fox, for example have already gone down this route becoming broadcasters with channels of their own as well as film makers.

Of course it is quite tricky to build an audience and it would be appalling to get rid of one set of gate keepers, the tv executives, only to find there is another, Google and the various alternative online broadcasting networks.

I have a video on Youtube about the Singing Ringing Tree, an artistic and sculptural installation in Burnley. Everyone says it is the best on Youtube. When a web site that spotlights architecture that makes a sound wanted to feature the Singing Ringing Tree they asked for permission to link to my video.

But if you search for my video on Youtube or Google you probably won't find it. This is not because the other videos have paid for a better position in the index-- at least I don't think it is. What is happening is that the searches are picking up the oldest entries before the newer ones. And, of course, the older ones have had more views so if 'hits' are significant in determining listing they also get a leg up from that. My video has had about 10,000 views. Trust me it is a lot better than the most popular video which has had considerably more than 1.5m views.

It seems the brave new world of unfiltered communication, of film makers talking directly to their audience, has one or two problems of its own.

Veils and Belgium

On May 22 I videoed the demonstration outside the Belgian embassy in London. The protest was about the decision by the Belgian parliament to ban the wearing of the veil in public places. Similar rules exist in Turkey, a Moslem country with an Islamic governing party, and the French have also been talking about a ban. So not all that controversial, probably.

As it happens I more or less agree with the protestors. I think women should be allowed to wear veils or masks or pretty much anything they want to in public, but I am less keen on children, particularly young children, wearing veils. I don't like girls of 11 or 12 being artificially introduced to the adult world of sexuality (which is what this is all about).

On the whole I agreed with the very small but highly passionate protest. I was quite proud of being British when I heard that a similar protest in France had been banned. Even if I had completely disagreed with the protest I would have thought it proper that they should have the right to demonstrate.

But they were very difficult people to agree with. Inflamed by the Belgian ban, speakers called for the introduction of Sharia law quite clearly to replace the current legal code in Belgium, not to run alongside it. In addition they wanted to roll back feminism, and speakers also made it clear that they could not tolerate homosexuality.

Of course, I know that there are feminists who wear the veil in some circumstances and there are even Islamic women who support the general wearing of the veil but describe themselves as feminists.


The argument that women are exploited in the west is a very strong one. Sexual images of women are freely available everywhere and are even used to sell everything from vegetables to sports cars. But that is the nature of freedom. If you give people freedom they are liable to do things you don't like.

There were two really striking things about this demo. Firstly, some of the protestors took time off to pray, which was quite endearing. Secondly, the protest was segregated with a portable fence erected between the men and the women. The idea, no doubt, was to protect the women from any unpleasantness. There were even placards pointing out that the idea behind the veil, Sharia law and Islamic philosophy was to honour women.

Well, maybe. No doubt there were many proponents of separate development in apartheid South Africa who said that what they were doing was protecting black culture and enabling the blacks to fulfil their own unique destinies. I don't believe you can honour someone unless you accord them full civil rights, including the rights to marry who they like and dress any way they want without fear of persecution. Islamic societies like Saudi Arabia do not tend to define honour in this way.

Since the demo was about the wearing of the veil I made sure I got a lot of video of the veil wearing women. But this alarmed one of the young bucks on the demo. He warned me to stop videoing the women and to point my camera at the male speakers. "This is England mate," I said. "People who demonstrate can be videoed." Though, I am far from convinced this is actually the law.

He warned me that he would complain to the police about me. No doubt he did, but the police seemed to be taking a robustly sensible attitude. One officer was positively apologetic when he asked me what I intend to video. Considering the fuss there has been about section 44 (Anti Terrorism Act) this was quite refreshing. The officer also asked me to avoid videoing him: 'I've told my friends I'm in the SAS so I don't want them to see me in a policeman's uniform." A good joke and there was something very British about it.

Clearing the skies

The eruption of the volcano in southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier is one of those remarkable moments, like the destruction of the twin towers in New York or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The skies above London have been clear of aircraft for days and it is possible to hear the sound of birdsong: a timely reminder of just how much we have lost thanks to cheap air travel. Where I live the birds used to sing at night since they had given up trying to compete against the traffic and the roar of jet engines. We are also promised spectacular sunsets. Quite wonderful.

But it is not all good news. The World Health Organisation has warned people suffering from asthma to stay indoors and wear masks if they really have to go out. Are they going to have to do that for 18 months (the length of time the last major eruption lasted in 1821-23)?

The economic impact could be even worse. According to one of the most famous economic papers (written by Robert Fogel) the railways played a major role in America's development in the 19th century. Are the airlines playing a similar role in the global economy in the 21st century? If so the consequence of a prolonged shutdown of airports in northern Europe would be devastating. Coming so soon after the worst economic downturn since the 1930s with most economies at best in a fragile state of recovery, the consequences could be appalling-- especially if Governments set about reigning in public expenditure that was allowed to balloon as a Keynesian remedy to the destruction caused by the bursting of the American housing bubble.

Then there is the environmental impact. Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines is believed to have caused a 0.5°C drop in global temperatures as well as the depletion of atmospheric ozone, when it erupted in 1991.

Right now no-one knows how long this volcano will continue to erupt or how serious the impact will be. Even if it stops today, the affect will last a long time. For one thing it will take weeks to sort out the world's airlines and rescue passengers stranded far from home.

Some of the insurance companies have been throwing their hands up in horror and saying this it is not their fault but an act of God, presenting stranded passengers with the prospect of paying huge sums to get home. As a consequence I wonder if we will ever trust cheap flights again. So now that we know that it is riskier than we imagined, will we continue to dash across the globe in search of a few days of sun, sand and sea? Since we have seen that the skies can be cleared I'd certainly like to see perhaps a month a year in which air traffic is completely banned and all the London airports shut down. I believe there would be massive support for this idea, not least from the environmentalists who worry about air transport exacerbating climate change.

Malthusianism and all that

Malthusians are people who if they discovered a silver mine would go running around panicking about the dark cloud they expected to envelope them.

No matter how good things get they always view it as a sign that things are about to get worse.

Imagine the scene. It is Victorian London and a group of scholars is meeting to debate the forthcoming shortage of horseshoes. We have reached peak horseshoe production, one says. By the middle of the 20th century, perhaps as early as 1940, there will be no more horseshoes. London will come to a standstill. Agriculture will virtually cease!

One of the problems with predicting trends based on past events is that things change.

A century and a half ago there were towns in northern England with hundreds of factory chimneys pouring out an appalling cocktail of poisonous chemicals.

Even thirty years ago there were scare stories about acid rain (as a result of the smoke pollution) destroying the forests of Scandinavia.

But these days in England there are few large factory chimneys and many of those that remain are protected by preservation orders. There is still a lot of talk about acid rain (more than 4 million pages mentioning it can be found listed in Google) but somehow it is not the hot topic it once was.

Another problem with predicting trends is that people are not very good at it. When it comes to building computer models, for example, they seem to need a lot of tweaking to make them work. Just think of dark matter or the Higgs Boson, in astrophysics, for example. These are just correcting factors thrown into the pot to make the maths work.

Of course, just because Malthusians have generally proved to be wrong in the past, it doesn't mean to say they will be wrong in the future. But there does seem to be a pessimistic, fearful streak in human nature that needs to be factored into these discussions.

Sexing up a campaign?

Silvio Berlusconi, would be the richest and most powerful man in Italy, even if he wasn't president. But maybe he would be in jail.

Many believe that his prime motive for becoming a politician was to avoid prosecution.

From a British perspective he appears to be far too much like Mussolini, the war time fascist dictator of Italy. Of course, Berlusconi is no fascist: he just happens to own or run most of the Italian tv stations and use them to promote his business and political interests.

Despite his virtual stranglehold over the media, he has recently been the subject of several sex scandals. Proof positive that Italy still has a flourishing media capable of exposing even the most powerful to scrutiny? Well, maybe.

At the age of 72 it is possible some might suspect that Berlusconi was getting a bit old for the job. Possibly the best way to counter such a slur would be to have a few sex scandals. After all no ordinary septuagenarian gets attacked for having too many lovers.

Certainly the stories seem to have done him no harm. His supporters did extremely well in recent Italian regional elections.

In a general election in the 1860s, Benjamin Disraeli was running against Lord Palmerston, who was still Prime Minister well into his 80s. Palmerston had fathered an illegitimate child with a working class woman in his constituency. Disraeli's campaign manager urged him to reveal Palmerston's shocking debauchery to the electorate. Disraeli refused categorically. "If we do," he answered, "the old man will win a landslide!"

Expect British political spin masters to learn the lesson: look out for unexpected sex scandals.

My cat can tell the time!

I have scientific proof that my cat, Charlie, can tell the time. He knows that it is his feeding time at about 6pm and every day at about that time he seeks attention, by doing charming things like tripping me up.

What's remarkable about that? Nothing really, except when the clocks change. On Sunday they went back an hour. Summer time and the living is easy, as the song says. Well maybe!

Anyway, to get back to the plot: you'd imagine that Charlie would wait until 7pm before starting the kamikaze cat routine. After all, the Government didn't bother to notify cats about the time change. But nothing doing: Charlie is up to his usual range of tricks bang on time.

How does he know? Ironically, he adapts to the new time quicker than I do (I find it tough to get up at a reasonable time in the morning on the first week of summer time, as opposed to summertime, because, of course, British Summer Time starts in spring. Genuine summertime is a long way off. I hope you are getting this, I may ask questions!).

Since he adapts quicker than I do, he can't be taking his cues from me. And as a house cat (he has cat aids, so he's not supposed to go out), he only meets me.

Proof, I believe that he reads the clock! Now if only I could teach him how to use a keyboard....

Another night in Leyton

Last night on the way to the pub was passed by an ambulance. It sped by a parked police car just as the officer dangerously jumped out and rushed across the road, fishing a much larger man than himself out of a take away and pinning him against a wall. In the pub one bloke said: "that's the man who hit your father."A little later the pub was disturbed by a blood spattered woman who burst in, fell over, muttering incoherently. Another night in Leyton.

Marketing by passwords

A friend of mine is going through a crisis. Her computer won't let her get access because it's suddenly decided she has to enter a password and she doesn't know what the password is. It all happened because someone installed a USB card (it's a very old computer).

She will probably need to get a new (or at least a newer) computer. What an effective method of marketing the password is. So far as data protection is concerned, it is more or less useless. It probably won't stop your computer being hacked via the internet. And your data is unlikely to be at risk from physical attack unless your home (or office) is burgled. 

No doubt some keep secret stuff on computers but how valuable is this material? Is someone really going to spend hours (probably days) trawling through a stolen computer to find secret information. Perhaps, but very unlikely. In any case if the computer has been removed, you've lost the data (password or not).

Since it is extremely hard to back up a computer (I find about half of my back up DVDs fail, especially any aged about two years or more), the whole philosophy that you can keep data safely on computers is thrown into doubt by passwords.

But companies who sell software and hardware, have a lot to gain from them. A lot of people make the final decision to buy something new because they are locked out of their old system.

A new genre

It is difficult to create a new genre: but a feminist film about bullfighting probably qualifies. She Is The Bullfighter (Gemma Cubero del Barrio, Director, Producer, Executive Producer, Talcual Films) is a strange, rough and ready sort of film. The type of film where you feel they deliberately put dirt on the lens to give that all action feel. But there are a few highly memorable images, notably highly grainy film of a naked woman bullfighting.

It's an odd film because it asks an interesting question (why can't women be top level Matadors in Spain?) and then answers the question quite convincingly (because many of the audience like to see dishy blokes risking their lives and flaunting their masculinity). It's a bit like asking why can't men be strippers at some of the more fashionable gentlemen's clubs. OK they can do hen nights, but they never really make the big time, do they? Someone will probably make a film about that now!

Strangely there was an interesting film to be made. In Latin America, apparently, women Matadors are accepted. Why? What's the difference?

But for myself I'd be quite pleased if no woman ever made it as a matador. In fact I'd be quite pleased if Bullfighting, a barbaric practice, came to an end. Call me a male chauvinist, if you like!

It was Mandelson what done it....

Despite all the Punch and Judy politics about bully boy Brown, it is pretty obvious that it was the Labour Party and specifically Peter Mandelson who leaked the story. He was not stabbing Brown in the back but acting under the instructions of the PM.

The reason the story was leaked was that focus groups were showing that people did not warm to Brown because they saw him as a speak your weight automaton. The back room boys put on their thinking caps and designed a strategy to make Brown look like a colourful, flamboyant character... or at least the nearest they could get to it.

First we had the unedifying spectacle of Brown talking about his despair on the death of his child, then we learned that he bullies Downing Street staff. Most recently we have had the transparently fake story about the Brown/Darling row. All three stories are calculated to make the Prime Minister look emotional.

But surely you say bullying staff is a bad story for Brown? Well, up to a point Lord Copper...

It would be possible to form a society to prevent ill treatment to rats in this country, if you wanted to do it. But it would not be possible to raise 5p in a save the Whitehall Mandarin collection. You would be lucky if you got your collecting tin back.

Brown is hardly likely to be seen in a bad light for bullying aparatchiks. Brown cossets and supports his Downing Street staff... now that sort of a headline really would get him in trouble.

Politics, like comedy, is all about timing and it is quite clear that Peter Mandelson decided to keep his powder dry until the start of this year.

His first stunt was the Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt rebellion. This had two objects (1) to see if there were any potential rebels out there who might break cover so that they could be dealt with when the mock rebellion collapsed (2) to reveal that anyone planning a coup would get precious little support so they might as well abandon the project.

Expect more stunts, partly designed to move public opinion and partly to deny the Conservatives the oxygen of publicity, until the formal election campaign starts in April.

The irony is that this strategy is almost certainly misplaced. For a long time the mood in the country has been that it is time for a change. The Tories as the most credible agent of change (the only party who can defeat Labour and win the election) are heading towards a landslide victory. As they say, the election is Cameron's to lose.

Strangely, given enough rope to hang himself, Cameron does seem capable of doing just that: losing the election. Crackpot schemes like the Conservative proposal to give publicly employed workers the right to form self managing teams so that teachers could get together and sack the head if they didn't like him or her, unwound almost as soon as they were revealed.

Denied the spotlight, Cameron is also denied the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As the wicked witch of the west says when she is liquidated by Dorothy: what a world!

Emergency

For most of my adult life this country has been in one emergency or another. In the 20th century it was usually the IRA, though the Argentinians and animal activists were capable of raising the pulse from time to time. In the last decade it has been the so called war against terror and the all too real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, there have been brief moments of respite, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall when people talked about a peace dividend. But these did not last long.

After such a sustained period of emergencies is it not time to wonder if these conditions suit our politicians? As Shakespeare has the cynical ruler say in Henry IV part II, governments aim to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels".

When I walk out of my home I am immediately picked up by a cctv camera. There are many of them where I live.

This reminds me of George Orwell's version of Big Brother, not perhaps as terrifying as the prospect of being forced to watch the tv version of Big Brother, but almost as bad.

In Orwell's "1984", the three world powers are constantly at war with each other. These wars seem to have very little to do with the population's lives on a day to day basis. But they do permit extraordinary abuses of civil liberty. After all, surely it is worth sacrificing a few freedoms in the pursuit of a victory against an enemy as terrible as... Here you can fill in your own name: Argies, provos, Taliban, Sadaam, whatever.

If the process of government leads to a requirement to keep populations permanently cowed by the fear of a terrible enemy, then government is very dangerous. It's OK to tweak the tiger's tail when the tiger can't really do you much harm.

But these days it's quite possible to conceive of one of these so called enemies getting hold of truly devastating weapons. Once the scientific and technical genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back. Nuclear weapons, for example, are within the technical grasp of quite small nations (like North Korea).

Constant warfare, or anti-terror campaigns, brings forward the day when a nuke, or some even more devastating weapon, will be used. It does not have to be this way. After the Second World War America committed huge resources to re-building Germany in the Marshall plan. A new Marshall plan in the middle east would probably make the world a lot safer than chasing Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida or Al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan, and it would almost certainly cost a lot less.

Freestyle

Freestyle (director Kolton Lee & producer Lincia Daniel), a Microwave funded production (http://www.filmlondon.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=779) was made for the sort of budget Avotar probably spent on its end of production party. Most of the cast have never acted before and the best known name is Danny John-Jules, who played the cat in Red Dwarf.

Shot entirely on a Red video camera, it is about to open on general release, but only at five London cinemas. It appears to be caught in the current war between distributors and cinema operators. Distributors are allegedly seeking shorter runs for films (or an earlier date for DVD release) and most of the cinema chains are resisting this. The difference is fairly marginal (a couple of weeks?) but it's the sort of thing that gets people excited in the distribution world. Freestyle is going into the system as a short run production, which may have helped it get funding since those wanting the shorter terms may have given it a leg up.

A teen flick that is designed to appeal to mums and dads, Freestyle is that oddity a British basketball movie, probably a new genre. Made for £100k or less, Freestyle is uneven in both acting and lighting (was this video graded?). This is hardly surprising since many of the cast are first timers chosen for their basketball skills rather than their acting experience.The theme is that eternal verity: boy meets girl, trouble ensues but everything seems to end happily with a dramatic climax. Think Grange Hill rather than Romeo & Juliet.

That said, Freestyle is emotionally engaging and pushes all the buttons quite successfully.

It contains 30 musical tracks. To obtain so much on such a small budget is probably as close to genius as the British film industry gets right now.

Freestyle has three or four set pieces (a bit like music videos within the movie) made to an extremely high standard, evidently showing what the team could do if it had a sensible budget. Each such section would probably have cost £100k plus to make if it had been made as a stand alone video by someone specialising in such things.

http://www.freestylemovie.co.uk/

The Bitter Taste of Tea

Tom Heinemann's The Bitter Taste of Tea (http://www.flipthecoin.org/) is a truly remarkable film. In many ways it is similar to Black Gold (the coffee film by Nick and Marc Francis) but it is more watchable, despite the fact that Heinemann says he is a journalist not a film maker.

What makes it outstanding is the fact that Heinemann says it cost him £15k to make, including the post production, yet it has been shown by 15 tv channels. Now that is what I call budget film making.

It's central point is that the Fairtrade system does more or less nothing for the tea pickers. The only people who get anything out of it are the tea estate bosses who swindle the workers and the middle class Europeans who run the system. Very depressing but not really surprising.

Of course the film does look and sound a little old fashioned, even though much of it is shot hand held in what is the more or less obligatory documentary style. But it has clearly had a major impact and got the Fairtrade industry rattled. Even though it's quite likely nothing will change, it is a major achievement to confront such powerful commercial interests. To do it for £15k is quite extraordinary.

Olympics and civil liberties

I am thinking about making a video on the subject of civil liberties and The Olympics. Apparently a lot of people are thinking along the same lines, so there's no point in keeping it a secret.

The first thing I'm told is that I'm almost certain to get arrested and put in jail for the duration, anything up to six months before the event. It may happen.

You can't make a video like this secretly since you need to talk to the authorities, or at least ask them for comments.

But given the huge amount of money being poured into the project (enough to make a banker blanche) you can well understand why the authorities are sensitive.

It is a curious thing. If I am right and this is dangerous, then we are clearly seeing a full frontal attack on civil liberties. In the past civil liberties have been compromised and eroded as part of the campaign against the IRA and the War on Terror, but this is the first time in my life that civil liberties have been threatened so that people can run or swim races!

It is quite obvious that the Olympics should never have come to London or any big city for that matter. It is simply impossible to organise the necessary facilities (security, transport, accommodation) in the time available. As a result corners have to get cut and civil liberties threatened.

If the Olympics has to be held then it seems to me it should be done well outside any urban area and in a place where cheap transport and accommodation can easily and cheaply be constructed.

Probably the best idea would be to have it in a single place (perhaps in Greece) constructed by the international community on a scale that would fit the event.

Give the possibility of disasters of various kinds occurring in 2012, I wonder if more people will start to think along these lines soon.

Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself

Franklin D Roosevelt said it in 1932. He was talking about the economy when he made his there is nothing to fear but fear itself remark. But he might have been talking about crime.

For Home Office figures recorded 8% fewer crimes overall between July and September 2009 than in the three months previous, with burglaries down by 8% and robberies by 9%.

Car crime fell by 20% over the same period.

In all, police in England and Wales dealt with 1,107,500 offences, 100,000 fewer than in the same quarter of 2008.

The number of murders also dropped to the lowest rate since 1998-9, with 651 in 2008-9, a fall of 100 on the year before.

Sex crimes did increase (by 5% compared to the previous quarter) but police spokesmen suggested this was due to their efforts to persuade more victims to come forward and report this type of crime.

Yet the media has been dominated by the case of a couple of lads who tortured in a most brutal fashion some other boys. Appalling, yes. Horrible, yes. Typical, no.

Thanks to modern security levels (much stronger glazing, improved locks, cctv etc.) it is becoming much harder to be a criminal. In fact these days, the middle class crime of fraud is probably the most serious threat to society.

Yet many old ladies cower in terror and feel unsafe to venture into the streets. Is FDR right? Do they have nothing to fear but fear itself?

The question came to mind when watching a film called Back-Room Boy starring Arthur Askey and made in 1942. In this film Askey shows his cowardice by attempting to barge into the room of a young girl and spend the night with her. All entirely innocent and anyone involved with the film would have been shocked that any sexual undertone had been discovered. I'm sure they would have said that it was not they who had the problem but the people who saw the sexual innuendo.

But these days we have sexualised children to such an extent that it is impossible not to be slightly shocked by Arthur Askey's behaviour. I very much doubt if this film could be shown on a mainstream tv channel.

Why has this happened? Michael Moore (Fehrenheit 9/11, Bowling For Columbine) suggests it may almost be a political conspiracy, that the ruling classes find it easier to pass anti civil liberty legislation thanks to the fact that we are all constantly in a state of heightened fear.

That may be true. Many cherished ancient freedoms have been lost during the term in office of this so-called Labour Government.

But I think the medium is the message, that modern mass communications thrive on fear. The politicians merely jump on the band wagon, because that is what their job is (band wagon jumping). That's what democracy means.

Dumbed down tv

It is often said that tv is full of rubbish, silly prattlings of celebrities famous simply for being famous. Nothing could be further from the truth thanks to the BBC iPlayer. There has always been a sprinkling of good quality tv, the trouble was you had to sit through a lot of rubbish to get to it (or govern your viewing by an alarm clock). This is no longer true. Thanks to the iPlayer you can watch what you want, more or less when you want to watch it, so long as it is no more than seven days after transmission (28 days if you download it).

So yesterday I watched The Secret Life of Chaos (producer/director Nick Stacey) in which Professor Jim Al-Khalili explains the history of an idea, chaos theory and self organisation, in a truly intelligent way. This is not like any other documentary you may have seen on chaos theory. All the rest were filled with pregnant, unanswerable questions. This offers real insight. It also contained many stunning, yet relevant images. Must see tv for anyone interested in science.

Then there was Why Do Viruses Kill. This was really radio 4 on tv for the most part, but what radio! We got introduced to the man who saved 300m lives! We also heard the story of the man who created life! He really did create his own virus from a bunch of ingredients he ordered over the internet. Jurassic Park in real life. As tv the best thing about this rather wonderful documentary was the talking heads, the scientists themselves. Fabulous to see them describe some of the strangest and most challenging ideas in the Zeitgeist. The thing I took away from this is that maybe the planet is run in the interests of the viruses, not us. We are simply their hosts. A strange but compelling idea.

Finally there was Three Men Go to Ireland (director/producer Andrew Fettis), which is amazing tv. How anyone persuaded three stellar personalities like Griff Rhys Jones, Dara O’Briain and Rory McGrath to work together on the series is beyond me. But this was wonderful tv with the lads each getting to do a turn amidst beautiful landscapes and interesting technology (a slow barge and a car that takes to water). A very pleasant way to spend 59 minutes..

Dans Paris

Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris (made in 2006 and lasting 90 minutes) is a very accomplished work that is also enjoyable to watch. From an English perspective it is quite interesting that two characters demonstrate they are mad by jumping into the river, they are in Seine! I believe Christophe Honoré is probably perfectly well aware of the English pun.

The film is really a love story to Paris, as so many French films seem to be. There are a lot of attractive young men and women who seem to spend quite a lot of the time semi naked, which is easy on the eye. But what makes it worth talking about is the techniques which aim to disorientate the audience. The leading character (Louis Garrel) in a very Godard moment talks directly to the audience, telling us he's not the leading character. Well maybe! He certainly doesn't suffer as much on screen angst as his brother (played by Romain Duris) but he gets to bed most of the leading ladies...

Jump cuts are used almost randomly, not to take the action on faster but seemingly saying to the audience that you have watched so many movies you are no longer capable of seeing what's going on. Your visual palate is jaded. Look at this and see it anew.

Another technique used for the same purpose is to have the characters talking but you can see that their lips are not moving. This is not a soliloquy but normal conversation presented in a disorientating way.

It sounds tricksy and silly but in practice it works (for me anyway).