Brian Micklethwait

Cricket lag will now be unavoidable

Oh dear. I’ve just discovered that this is happening, on Channel 4 TV:

You don’t need a jet to screw up your sleep patterns. Interesting television at 4am will do the job just as well.

I was just looking for daily highlights. Instead, I discover the whole thing.

For some reason this bit of computer graphics refused to allow Gadwin, my screen scanner, to scan it. So, I photoed it. “Rating 7”. Bloody cheek.

The game I’m now watching is this one. The very first thing I saw was Stokes getting out. Pujara nearly dropped it, but he didn’t. England now 431-4, with Root approaching his second double century in the space of three test matches.

And Root now has his two hundred, going to it with a six. 440-4. The stadium is empty, but he won’t care.

Fatah demands that Britain return Big Ben to its original Jerusalem home

Quotulatiousness has the story.

It seems I’m not the only one photoing taxis with adverts

Indeed:

Photoed by me last Tuesday, near to where I live.

A list of those “LA” pamphlets I published in the 1980s and 1990s

Ever since I was diagnosed with lung cancer, I have been in reminiscent mode. Having solicited compliments from others about what a splendid life I have lead, I was advised by my oldest friend (we were at Marlborough together in the 1960s) to do some public thinking along these lines myself. What do I think were my best achievements? Good advice, I think. If you want others to do something, start by doing that thing yourself.

Well, at the heart of anything good that I have done with my life was that burst of pamphleteering that I did on behalf of the Libertarian Alliance (Tame, Micklethwait, Gabb version) in the 1980s and 1990s, and thenabouts.

Because of the chaos that is unleashed whenever you search for “libertarian alliance”, caused by the idiotic feuding that broke out concerning who owned the Libertarian Alliance in the 1980s, between two factions, one lead by Chris Tame (my bit of the “LA”) and the one lead by David Ramsay Steele, both of whom subsequently ran their own distinct and diverging versions of the “Libertarian Alliance”, finding your way to any particular bit of “libertarian alliance” activity can be difficult. And, as I recounted in an earlier posting provoked by a piece of “libertarian alliance” writing, published by me, and written by Paul Staines, aka Guido, I thought that I had permanently lost the link to the list of these publications in .pdf form that lists all the various Libertarian Alliance (Fame, Micklethwait, Gabb version) pamphlets that I published at that time. But Rob Fisher supplied that exact link in a comment on that posting. And this is it.

And just to nail it all down, in a form that I will be able to find again, here is that list, with all the links to the various pamphlet sub-classifications:

Political Notes
Economic Notes
Philosophical Notes
Legal Notes
Cultural Notes
Historical Notes
Sociological Notes
Educational Notes
Psychological Notes
Scientific Notes
Atheist Notes
Religious Notes
Tactical Notes
Foreign Policy Perspectives
LA Pamphlets
Libertarian Reprints
Libertarian Heritage
Study Guides
Personal Perspectives
Libertarian Fictions

For some reason, the top one of those links, to “Political Notes”, doesn’t work, but all the others get you to a list of all the relevant pamphlets. You can get your way to each publication, starting with this one (Political Notes 1 and 2 never made it to .pdf form), but there’s a bit more contriving to do there.

Towards the end of some of the series, the design does a radical switch. These switches mark the moment when I stopped doing the design of these things. (Apologies, but I do not now recall who it was who took over from me.) I stopped doing these designs because the internet had arrived, and I felt that the age of “pamphleteering” was now over, and the age of blogging had arrived.

The one task that remained was somehow contriving to put all these .pdf files that I had “desktop published”, onto the internet. Sean Gabb did that. And once he had, I felt that my job as a Libertarian Alliance (Tame, Micklethwait, Gabb tendency) functionary was done.

Because of the chaos associated with the words “libertarian alliance”, my attitude to the Libertarian Alliance was that this brand was permanently fucked, and the only thing to do about that was walk away from it and to find some other way to be a libertarian, while hopefully extracting the pamphlets out from under the mess, and in general rescuing the best bits done by people on both sides of the great divide by gathering them up and flying different flags above them.

New blue

Indeed:

It’s called YInMn.

Like all good discoveries, the new inorganic pigment was identified by coincidence. A team of chemists at Oregon State University (OSU), led by Mas Subramanian, was experimenting with rare earth elements while developing materials for use in electronics in 2009 when the pigment was accidentally created.

Andrew Smith, a graduate student at the time, mixed Yttrium, Indium, Manganese, and Oxygen at about 2000 °F. What emerged from the furnace was a never-before-seen brilliant blue compound. Subramanian understood immediately that his team stumbled on a major discovery.

And now it is available commercially.

Good to see the graduate student who actually did this getting a name check, along with his boss.

Who (the boss) also says:

“The fact that this pigment was synthesized at such high temperatures signaled that this new compound was extremely stable, a property long sought in a blue pigment,” …

I wonder if this new blue will find its way into architecture, if only as a way to get some otherwise so-so building noticed. My bet is: soon.

Subramanian and his team are now trying to make further colour discoveries, this time on purpose, which may not work so well:

Since the discovery, Subramanian and his team have expanded their research, producing a range of new pigments, from bright oranges to shades of purple, turquoise, and green. They continue to search for a new stable, heat-reflecting, and brilliant red, calling it “the most elusive color to synthesize.”

But while they’re deliberately trying to do all that, who knows what a junior member of the team might stumble upon next?

Much of scientific advance seems to be rooted in the ability to spot the significance of a happy accident.

Late editorial edition at the bottom of this piece:

An earlier version of this article identified YInMn as the first shade of blue created in 200 years. However, it is instead the first inorganic blue pigment invented in the same time frame.

Still good stuff though, if the rest of the report is right.

You cannot be unconventional if there are no conventions

Last October, I wrote about, and quoted Misha Donat writing about, the astonishing outburst that happens during the Andantino movement of Schubert’s penultimate Piano Sonata, D959.

In Standpoint, Jonathan Gaisman reflects on the value of artistic conventions, while writing about that same amazing passage:

We live now in an age which congratulates itself on the fact that art has succeeded in dispensing with aesthetic boundaries; however we do not always recognise what an impoverishment such freedom brings with it. If there are no conventions, it is impossible to be unconventional. In the middle section of the andantino, Schubert flouts every compositional principle, every concert-goer’s expectation. No wonder that András Schiff has said that the piece’s “modernity is incredible even today”. It is in effect a nervous breakdown in music, all the more remarkable from a composer who was writing at the dawn of the Romantic era but whose idiom and language are still classical.

Had Schubert not been cut down in his prime by syphilis, and had he not seen this coming, but had he instead lived to a ripe old age, composing all the while, would that actually have been, for us listeners, unambiguously better? Would he ever have written music like that, and like the other “late” masterpieces that he did write?