Caesar meets his end

There is an Australian election coming up on the 21st of August, which is exactly four weeks away. I am considering becoming involved in some way. You see, I’m not very happy with the way the world is, nor am I happy with the direction in which it is going. I would like to make some kind of contribution towards changing that direction for the better, and in many ways that is at the heart of the dilemma I’ve been facing since retiring from speed skating; how would I best accomplish this?

Regular readers of my website will know that this is something that I think about often. In fact, my whole stint in New York, doing the MA at Columbia University was pretty much undertaken with the intent to contribute to my “quest for world peace”. Of course, it isn’t ALL about world peace. It is also about long-term sustainability, reduction of poverty, and some kind of application of social justice. These are all lofty and difficult goals to achieve, and nobody seems to write a how-to manual for people such as myself who are out there to accomplish these things. I’m not even sure that there exists anyone in the world who would even be able to write that manual, or even a single chapter of it. The goals themselves seem to change over time, as we slowly understand ourselves better, and readers of the various philosophical rants that I often go off on know that I spend a lot of time simply grappling with the definitions and parameters of the problems I face. It’s just something that well-meaning people seem to muddle through all their lives, and if they’re lucky, they can affect a small, positive change on some small part of the world.

Being a statesman seems like an obvious choice for the career of someone who wants to change the world for the better. Although any recent observations of current politicians might make you think twice about that. It certainly makes me think twice. Being a statesman these days seems more like the cross between a sick joke and an elaborate board game, than a job. Perhaps part of the reason I perceive things in this way is because I don’t ordinarily think of jobs as things in which people’s lives are adversely affected. Obviously, sometimes there are unintended consequences, but that is very different. In politics, it is well known that one will often take actions which will intentionally violate Pareto optimality – in laymans terms, the job will sometimes necessarily involve screwing people over, and this is accepted.

Take for example the recent replacement of the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard. Rudd was not doing a bad job, but he made a small political misstep with regards to the mining industry. The mining industry, being very wealthy and (therefore, in the age of capitalism) powerful, began a smear campaign against the Labor government. I found out about this when I got a letter from Rio Tinto to shareholders which contained information which wasn’t technically untrue, but which I knew to be a misrepresentation of the facts. Of course, not everyone is as well-informed as I am about the misbehaviours of corporate PR campaigns, so this smear campaign began to undermine the legitimacy of the government. The higher-ups in the party (apparently, there are people higher up than the Prime minister) decided to sacrifice Rudd and replace him with a new PM, his deputy Gillard and change their policy with regard to the mining tax. Poor Kevin Rudd, fluent speaker of Mandarin, signer of the Kyoto Protocol, and sayer of the world “Sorry” to our indigenous population was a pawn in this game, and the controversy surrounding this abrupt replacement has probably done our international reputation no favours.

What’s the take-home lesson here? It is dangerous to be Prime Minister of Australia? The mining industry in Australia is far too politically powerful? Perhaps, but the real point I was trying to make is that politics is a dirty business, and that single politicians are often not particularly powerful. Why would I want to get into politics then? Well, I once had a conversation with a fellow by the name of Gareth [Gareth] Evans at the UN while attending a conference and was basically asking him this question. His response was simply that if people like me didn’t get into politics, then less-competent, less-qualified, and likely less-well-intentioned people would. The name of Steve Fielding immediately came to mind.

Steve Fielding, to put it briefly, is the bane of the Australian political scene. He is the perfect example of the damage that can be inflicted when an idiotic, ignorant, unintelligent, yet well-meaning person gets into a position of power. He is an Australian senator for a party called Family First, which is a front for a Christian, Evangelical, Pentecostalist political party. He is incapable of answering a question directly (a plus in the world of politics, I’m told) and he believes the world is less than 5000 years old. I have no doubt at all that he has good intentions, however he is the worst kind of ignoramus in that he understands nothing, yet believes that he understands everything. The problem is that for the last six years, he has held the deciding vote in the Australian Senate.

During this time, while John Howard’s Liberal (in Australia, that means “Conservative”) government were in power, he helped pass Voluntary Student Unionism, a bill which effectively killed any feeling of a shared community in Australian Universities. More recently, when Labor came to power under Kevin Rudd, he held up the Emissions Trading Scheme bill for long enough for the Liberals to implode and destroy any chance of it being passed. He doesn’t believe in climate change – not just the bit about it being man-made, but he doesn’t believe it at all. He even went on a “fact finding mission” to the US to learn about climate change – by going to a conference of climate change skeptics, run by the heartland institute, a libertarian think tank (I use the word “think” very loosely here) which is funded by oil companies. It is difficult for me to communicate just how idiotic this guy is. (For Americans who are reading this, just imagine if Sarah Palin had been elected to the Senate and held the crucial 60th filibuster-breaking vote.)

Why do I bring up the example of Steve Fielding? (it ain’t good for my blood pressure you know) Because I imagine that, had I been in the position that he had been in, I would have made better decisions and Australia would be a better place – simple. Sometimes one person really can make a big difference. It’s not only the decisions that they make, but how they carry themselves. These people get a lot of media exposure, and if kids watch these idiots running the country (into the ground) then they’re not going to want a part of it, and we’ll end up with even more drop-kicks in Australian Politics.

Yet I still have doubts. Would I be a good statesman? It seems that nearly everything I’ve done in my life up to this point has been geared in some way towards being able to answer “yes” to that question. I have an unusually diverse set of talents and have invested considerable time in developing them. My list of electives at Columbia speak as much – Contemporary Diplomacy, Game Theory, Economics of Information and Uncertainty, Human Rights and Development Policy, Introduction to International Development, Human Ecology and Sustainable Development. But not everything can be learned from books – I’ve volunteered with UNICEF, and with Amnesty International both in the US and Australia. I helped found the youth network in Australia, I was president of the Melbourne Uni group, I conceived of and ran a series of very large-scale comedy nights. Obviously doing all of that wasn’t enough pressure so I became a professional athlete for a while and tried to qualify for the Olympics, and failed. I’ve lived in four different cities, on four different continents, half of which didn’t have English as an official language. None of this is standard “work experience”, but I believe that it is the kind of “life experience” that many career politicians lack.

It’s strange; I seem to have become something that I always sort of avoided. When I was young, someone told me that to really make it in life, you need to be a good “people-person”. When I was young, I was also exposed to all manner of incompetent money-hungry types with more dollars than sense who would boast that they “got things done”. I think I wanted to avoid these labels because I felt, mostly because of the people who I associated with these labels, that they had to be good people-people or get-things-done because it was their way of compensating for not actually being good at anything (which was largely true in those early examples). I have since learned however, that those labels are often associated with me, which scares me.

Australian House of Representatives

It costs 500 Australian dollars and 50 signatures from voters in your electorate to run for the lower house in Australia as an independent. The lower house, or “house of representatives” is where government is formed, and MPs are elected based on geographical electorates. My electorate is “Melbourne” and the incumbent, Lindsay Tanner, of whom I’m a fan, is leaving politics, and thus leaving the race for Melbourne wide open. Curiously, this still won’t be an important seat in the election as far as I’m concerned because the battle will be between Labor and the Greens, and I don’t mind either. The real goal in this election is to ensure that the Liberals (conservatives, remember) don’t get elected.

Not all of my friends are left-leaning politically, and I sympathize. However, allow me to defend my current dislike for Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party. I receive regular emails from the Libs, because I once signed up for the Melbourne University Liberal Club as a joke. As it was, it was a pretty terrible joke, with members beginning sentences with “I don’t want to sound racist but…” During most of their time in opposition, the Liberals were lead by a guy named Malcom Turnbull, who, while I often disagreed with him, seemed a fairly respectable guy. However, recently the Liberal party leadership imploded and Turnbull was ousted. The matter over which the party divided was the Emissions Trading Scheme which I mentioned above. Basically, half of the party believed in climate change, and the other half did not. Abbott was on the side of the half that did not. He is either ignorant of the well-established science, which leads me to question his ability to listen to experts and come to good decisions, or he is aware of the truth yet pretends for whatever reason (although I’m just going throw it out there that oil company funding might have something to do with it), in which case I would question his ability to be a good person (although, to be honest, I’d already made up my mind about this aspect of Abbott).

p.s. if you’re still skeptical about climate change, please read these before bombarding me with nonsense.

Australian Senate

What else? There’s the Senate. Running for the Senate costs 1000 Australian dollars (edit: also requires 50 signatures of electors) and, by my calculations, is even more difficult to get into. Senate ballot papers are notoriously complex things and a very small percentage of people (of which I am numbered) bother to number all their senators below the lines, most people opting to simply write a “1” next to a political party above the line. In order for me to have any chance in the Senate, I would have to strike some kind of preference exchange “deal” with at least a few better-known candidates or parties. As an independent, I’m simply not politically “famous” enough for anyone to want to give their preferences to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I harbour no expectation of actually getting into either the Senate or the House of Representatives. At least not this time. But it might be fun and somewhat educational to have a “trial run” at it this time around. And to all my friends who have emailed me saying “I’d vote for you”, thank you for the support, it means a lot to me. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line I’ll find some kind of “career” that allows me to work towards my life goals, yet still allows me to avoid the mudslinging that is modern politics. You see, I think that’s one of the major obstacles that I would encounter – I’m just not that great at being nasty to people, I have this tendency to take responsibility for my own actions, and even to say sorry. If the current crop of politicians is anything to go by, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

But the world is what we make of it; Gandhi said “you must be the change you want to see in the world” so maybe I should just try being an honest and honourable politician? Now that would be something.

What do people think?

Parliament House

p.s. if anyone has any other serious career suggestions for me, please let me know

Take your pick

It’s been a while since I’ve penned a controversial post. Experience (and my web stats) have shown me that the most popular posts on this website are either slightly controversial (curiouser and curiouser, selection news, and on skating at altitude) or to do with photography (photo gear, and the truth behind the shutter are the most viewed articles on this site). This post will likely fall into the former category. Those readers who have been paying attention know that I’ve been very close to elite sport for a very long time now. I’m also quite an enthusiast when it comes to things like mathematics, and reading academic journals… which is not so common these days among professional athletes. I feel that this combination allows me to speak with at least a little bit of authority on these matters.

First up, I should mention that I can’t prove in a legal sense, any of the accusations that I will inevitably make or imply. I don’t think I’m going to get into any trouble for saying any of this, although if I were ever to become famous for whatever reason, I may be called up on it. If that happens, I won’t back down. You see, you don’t have to believe anything that I say. You could write me off as an embittered ex-athlete, except if you actually knew me, you would know that I don’t really care enough about sport, especially my own achievement in it, to ever really feel embittered about it. I’m just calling it as I see it, and those who know me well, know that I don’t miss much.

The first thing one needs to understand when one approaches sport these days is that, beyond amateur community league sport, sport has very little to do with all that “faster, higher, stronger” nonsense that you get fed as a kid, and really falls more under the category of entertainment (NBC’s budget for the winter games was north of a billion dollars). That is not to say that elite professional athletes aren’t faster, don’t jump higher, or aren’t stronger than your everyday club badminton player for example. But being good at sport, and I mean very good, is an expensive undertaking and only within the framework of sport-as-entertainment can that level of performance be sustained.

The Olympic Games, supposedly the pinnacle of sport, is basically a huge show. I apologize to anyone who still has any illusions about the Olympics being an amateur competition, because it is not. With very few exceptions (curling, for example), pretty much everyone who goes to the Olympics does their sport full time. How can they afford to do this? Easy – they are paid to. Often it isn’t much, and I would be lying if I were to give the impression that all professional athletes live very comfortable lives, but the truth of the matter is that hardly anyone at the Olympics is an amateur. Would Pierre de Coubertin have disapproved of what the modern Olympic games have become? Probably. But in a strange way, the influx of money into sport that comes with professionalism has become a great equalizer in the world of sport. Prior to this, participants at the games were mostly very wealthy people who could afford the “spare time” required to train properly for the games.

But what does this have anything to do with drugs in sport? Well, if I gave you some growth hormone, or EPO and said “here, take this” you probably wouldn’t do it. Why wouldn’t you do it? Well, you’re messing with your endocrine system, the viscosity of your blood, you might get caught, and the side-effects might leave you sterile or give you a heart attack. In short, it’s a risky thing to do. Maybe you can find a doctor to supervise your performance-enhancing drug taking, well then it starts to get expensive. All things considered, taking performance enhancing drugs effectively is an extremely expensive (the drugs themselves are also costly) and dangerous thing to do. In order for someone to make that kind of investment, and to take those kinds of risks, a very large reward is needed as incentive. So here’s where the money-in-sport equation starts to become relevant.

“Each one of the riders on the tour draws a salary of at least one million euros”

Take professional cycling as an example. The Tour de France is one of the most grueling and challenging sporting events ever dreamt up, and it is watched on TV by people all over the world. Because of this TV coverage, there is a huge potential for advertising on riders’ jerseys and, as a result of this, large and very well-run, and well-funded professional teams have formed who compete with each other. Each one of those bikes costs upwards of $10,000, and they have lots of bikes per rider for all kinds of situations and eventualities. Each one of the riders on the tour draws a salary of at least one million euros on top of all the free gear. Think about that for a second – one million euros a year just to get on a bike and ride all day. Riding is also fairly low-impact so a good rider can expect to have a career in excess of ten years. Six or seven good rides in le Tour during that time, and you may never have to worry about finances for the rest of your life. Does that create a strong incentive to dope? I would think so… and I would go so far as to say that everyone on the tour does it.

Don’t these people get tested? Of course they do, they just don’t get caught. The doping on the tour is systematic and the team doctors supervise it. Of course they do. Erythropoietin – better known as EPO increases your blood’s ability to carry oxygen, an obvious advantage in an endurance sport like road cycling. It also thickens the blood. I’m not exactly an endurance athlete (in fact, most would call me a “specialist sprinter”) and my resting heart rate is in the low 40s, a career endurance athlete would likely have a resting heart rate in the mid-to-low 30s. Think about that – that’s a beat every two seconds. Under normal blood pressure, if you’re running a beat every two seconds, if your blood is unusually thick, then it has a tendency to clot. If one of those clots ends up in a coronary artery, then your heart will stop. One of the roles of the team doctors these days is to wake up riders in the middle of the night, and get them onto the stationary bikes to keep their heart rates up to stop them from dying in their sleep. Of course, now that there’s a test for EPO, nobody uses it anymore, and another similar drug has almost certainly replaced it.

The trouble with tests is that you can only test for a known substance (you can obviously detect anything, but the quantities are so small that it would be impossible to show that any old anomaly was a performance-enhancing drug). Marion Jones doped for years on a designer steroid known as “The Clear” (tetrahydrogestrinone) and nobody would have ever known about it except that a sample of the stuff was turned in by a bitter coach and so a test was developed for it. If that sample had never been turned in, it would still be in use today, and remain undetectable. There is a very good chance that there are more designer steroids out there which may never be detected.

Does this ruin the world of sport? I don’t think so. It just makes it a little bit different. A lot of kids grow up thinking that being really good at sport is just a matter of training hard and being dedicated. When you slowly make your way up the ranks of elite sport, there is a point where you realize that this isn’t true, and a myriad of factors that are completely outside your control, like genetics, play a huge role in determining how successful you ultimately are at sport. Despite what he says, it is almost certainly true that Lance Armstrong, along with everyone who rides in the tour, is doped up to the eyeballs. That doesn’t make his achievement of winning seven tours any less remarkable. He still had to train very hard and be a bit of a genetic freak of nature to do all of those things. His battle with cancer is no less inspiring. There’s nothing “unfair” about the doping that goes on in the tour, because it is still very much a level playing field because everyone does it.

So which sports are rife with doping and which aren’t? As it is with most things these days, you have to follow the money. Anything that appears in the Olympics is a likely candidate because the exposure that the Olympics guarantee will raise the kind of money that makes doping “worth” it. Track and field is a good example of a sport in which not-doping places you at a severe disadvantage. Take Usain Bolt for example. I would contend that his world records are not “clean”. Of course, I don’t think any world records have been clean since the late 80s when athletics really started to become very financially lucrative because of sponsorships, endorsements, and the IAAF world athletics tour.

100m world record progression (try to ignore the background image lines)

As a side note, when viewing word record progressions in sports, it is always interesting to note that whenever a test is developed for a significant and widely used drug, such as testosterone, the frequency of world records suddenly drops, but always eventually catches up. The year before a sex test was developed for women there were about 15 women who ran 1500m in under 4 minutes. The year after the test was developed, that number dropped to 2.

The Jamaican case is an especially good example of doping evasion. One of the major advances in anti-doping efforts was the introduction of out of competition testing. Prior to this, people would dope for 3.9 years and then be “clean” for the Olympics (they often didn’t bother being clean for anything else – Carl Lewis, gold medalist in 1988 after Ben Johnson’s famous disqualification himself failed three tests in the two months prior to the Seoul Olympics). Out of competition testing involves randomly showing up to an athletes home or training facility and demanding a urine sample. This generally works very well, making it almost impossible to systematically take any detectable drugs. However, there is a flaw in the system – WADA, the world ant-doping agency requires respective countries’ IOCs to ensure that the testing is carried out. Countries like the USA have USADA and Australia has ASDA to conduct their out of competition testing. However, countries like Jamaica don’t have such an agency.

Again, I emphasize that I am not taking away from any of these guys’ achievements. In a perfect world where nobody doped, Usain Bolt would probably still have won his gold medals and set his world records. Those records would have been a little slower, sure, but no less impressive. The margins might also have not been so great because the absence of out-of-competition testing gives the Jamaicans a distinct advantage over their counterparts from other countries. One might be tempted to think that this advantage should be huge, and that the playing field is no longer level, but this isn’t quite true. Firstly, countries that have their own out of competition testing programs also tend to be a bit wealthier, and thus have better access to better drugs. Secondly, out of competition testing programs aren’t without their flaws.

Speed skaters get tested a lot. As do badminton players, I’m told. That’s because they don’t dope. I’ll get to why that is the case shortly. But my point here is that an out of competition testing program sets itself a goal of a certain number of tests. It them measures its “success” by how many positive tests it gets. Often (and I cannot prove this, but I’m pretty certain that it happens) when the doping is systematic and state-sanctioned, the “random” anti-doping program will be timed in such a way as to coincide with periods in a doping program where an athlete won’t test positive. During times when an athlete will test positive, the anti-doping agency will simply test other athletes. This way, they can still get to the end of their month or whatever, and say that they have a certain number of negative tests. Taking the randomness out of the system effectively renders it useless, and does so in a way that makes it seem like it still works.

So why don’t badminton players and speed skaters dope? Like I said before, not every elite athlete leads a luxurious life of multi-million dollar endorsements. Many sports also don’t benefit a great deal from doping. The greatest advantages to be had are in sports which require endurance, and muscle bulk. Badminton is great sport, and one must be quite fit to play it at the elite level, but the potential gains that doping would have on badminton, while they do exist, are probably not great enough to make the risks worth it.

Speed skating is an interesting example, and one that I’ve thought about for a while (for obvious reasons). I’m actually pretty sure that doping does exist in speed skating (apart from the obvious case of Claudia Pechstein) but that it is not very widespread. Curiously, Pechstein was only caught because of the introduction of the Biological Passport which doesn’t directly detect the presence of illegal substances in the blood, but rather it looks at the parameters of certain biological markers and sees how much they fluctuate over time. Strangely enough, Pechstein managed to get an injunction which allowed her to do one race at the Salt Lake City world cup in December 2009 (where I was also present, photos here) and, not surprisingly, she failed to qualify for the Vancouver 2010 games.

I mentioned before that riders on the tour earn upwards of a million euros a year, which over a long career can be a pretty strong incentive to dope. There are probably one, maybe two speed skaters in the world who make that kind of money. Everyone else kind of just scrapes by. The other factor at work here is income inequality. Speed skaters, by necessity, almost always come from fairly wealthy countries. This is because it is an expensive sport – the skates are expensive, ice time is expensive, the suits we wear are expensive. To even be able to compete, a huge amount of money needs to be invested first, over a long amount of time. The facilities also present a problem – I don’t know of a single long track in the world that doesn’t operate at a loss. Those things are extremely expensive to run, and most do it with government support, and a government has to be fairly wealthy in order to support that kind of sport.

This is why income inequality is important – it all comes down to a fairly simple equation: on the one hand, you have the enormous cost and risks, both legally and health-wise associated with taking drugs, and on the other you have the potential financial gain that may result from success gained by taking drugs. Most of the world’s speed skaters come from the Netherlands or Norway, both are very wealthy countries with high standards of living. In other words, it’s going to take huge amounts of money to make them want to dope, and while there is a lot of money in skating, there isn’t enough for that. Speed skating is also quite popular in many former eastern-bloc countries, and while the argument for doping in those cases is more plausible, it is still unlikely because, without the huge inequalities that used to exist, and without the massive state-driven systematic doping machine (whose last “product” was a young Claudia Pechstein) poor kids who want to make it in life have much better options (like internet scams) and the people who end up in speed skating tend to come from relatively wealthy families.

Contrast that to running, where athletes can come from very poor countries, and where entry-level equipment is very cheap. Compare a kid who is a talented runner in Jamaica with one from Norway. Who’s going to take the huge risks? Who stands to go from a life of poverty to one of unimaginable wealth? Who is going to receive help from their own sport’s governing bodies with systematic doping? Keeping this all in mind, I’m actually very optimistic about the eventual demise of systematic doping. Because in a perfect world, the monetary incentives just won’t be strong enough for people to want to take the risks. The only people left who will dope will be the crazy sociopathic people whose desire to win outweighs their sanity (at which point sport will obviously be only for entertainment purposes). Of course, such a world is still a very long way off. In the meantime, we’ll still have to put up with similarly crazy people who defend doping by being either ignorant of the way sport works (“but doping can only affect a 3% gain in performance at most”… uh duh, a 3m margin in a 100m race is kind of a big deal) or ignorant of the health risks involved, keeping in mind that those most at risk are also the poorest and least able to protect themselves from those risks.

At the moment, a lot of people “love” sport, but I suspect it is only because sport is their ticket out of poverty, which is what ultimately opens the door to the possibility of doping. In an ideal world, even though Olympic athletes would still be professionals, and would probably get fairly decent pay (as entertainers), it wouldn’t be so much that it would necessitate the need for performance enhancing drugs. In that sense at least, they would be doing it simply because they love the sport, which is where the word “amateur” originally comes from.

Further reading: “Positive” by Werner Reiterer, my own review here.

Of course, physics tells us that we cant pull ourselves up...

There’s a peculiar little saying that many of you have probably heard, and that is “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. The implication here is that, without any help from others, you can work hard and make it in the world etc. etc. It is an especially favourite refrain of libertarian and other politically-conservative movements who like to frame “I believe in hard work” against “I believe in government handouts”. Herein lies one of the fundamental problems with any kid of libertarianism-based economic doctrine, and that is that there is a tacit assumption of the independence of individuals in an economy. On the surface of it, this all seems great. Work hard and you’ll do well… and if you’re not doing well, then you’re obviously not working hard enough.

Of course, large scale economies inevitably have their ups and downs. When there’s a down, it’s all the fault of big bad government, and when there’s an up, it is all on the shoulders of the hard working people. It surprises me that such simplistic, and obviously incorrect, reasoning can still pass as an “argument” from a politician… although, having observed similarly simplistic “kindergarten politics” at work at the pointy-end of climate negotiations, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. The truth of the matter, is that no single person can be successful without the cooperation and help of many others. And I’m not just talking about the obvious sources of help, like your immediate family, or emotional support from friends or a spouse, I’m talking about countless numbers of complete strangers who you will never meet, and who may not even speak the same language as you.

This is the result of globalization, and it is a good thing. Globalization has allowed us to distribute labour and resources like never before. This allows for spectacular increases in efficiency, and therefore productivity. So why do so many people protest globalization? Well, the productivity pie has certainly gotten bigger, but the slices of that pie that people have been getting have not always followed suit. Why has this happened? It’s because of democracy. When people come to vote, it will always be for their own best interests and that will often mean that governments will be encouraged to pursue foreign policy which is “not nice” towards the interests of workers in other countries. I was recently in a discussion about an upcoming election (which may or may not have been mentioned previously on this website) and one of my friends asked me “should I vote for myself or for my country?”, implying that she had to choose between her own self interest and the longer term interest of the country. Of course, the choice of voting in the interests of “the world” isn’t even on the table.

Environmentalism pretty much never makes it to the table as far as election issues is concerned. Sometimes small pockets of voters will make it important to an equally small pocket of politicians, but it probably won’t become a major issue until the environment begins to affect everybody’s everyday lives in an obvious way. The economy is where it’s at. Anyone who’s had to sit through one or two elections in any country knows that the hip pocket is the surest way to any citizen’s vote. Whenever a politician has to frame a debate or a policy decision, it must always be in terms of a voter’s (often) first response – “what’s in it for me?”

Recently, something that everyone seems to be getting rather obsessed about is the budget deficit. I’m not referring to any country in particular in fact, as most countries run some amount of deficit. Everytime a government opens its purse strings to spend some money (as is inevitable in the running of a country), this falls under “deficit spending”. Deficits are easy tools for the politically-minded. First of all, the nonsensical comparison between personal debt and a national deficit is an easy one to make and use. It makes it easy to convince people that the deficit is “bad” and adding to it in any way is “worse”. The inability of most people to think much further than their own personal affairs only makes this psychological trick an easier one to pull off. Of course, if a government really needs to spend money, then this can be a problem.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this actually all means. I have concluded that these deficits are simply “tomorrow’s money” being spent today. We shouldn’t be frightened of large numbers, which is something that deficit scaremongers have a tendency to try to make us scared of. Deficit numbers are often very big, but they should be taken in context of other things, like growth and GDP, and happiness index, for example.

I was thinking about what money actually means. We make stuff, and we have to exchange it, so we start swapping bits of gold. Eventually, it becomes too inconvenient to cart around lots of bits of gold, so we swap it for receipts, and just swap those instead. So by that logic, we should have stayed on the gold standard right? Well, no. Gold was only a convenient medium of exchange because it was rare and didn’t corrode easily (at the time that currency was invented, it may have been the *only* metal that man had access to). It is only a medium of exchange, it doesn’t *mean* anything. This is no compelling reason to tie up our money supply to gold. I think the only reason that the gold standard appeared to work as well as it did for as long as it did, was because the world’s economic productivity remained essentially the same up until the industrial revolution.

Of course, fiat money has its own problems. Nobody really knows how much it is worth. In fact, the only real definition for how much it is worth is “how much you can get for it”. During my time at Columbia University, we had many and frequent discussions about ending poverty. One of the more insane ideas that came up was to print lots of money and give it to poor people. Obviously, this wouldn’t work because as you print more money, with nothing to back it, it is effectively worthless.

What does back our money up? Is it the amount of stuff in the world? I don’t think so. When we take a raw material and make it into something useful, we add value to it. Perhaps the amount of money is somehow reflective of the amount of capital + labour in the world? Maybe. I was thinking about the growth in financial markets recently and about the value of speculating. I have determined that there really isn’t very much value to all the speculating, and that all of this extra growth in the economy which has supposedly come from the financial sector is actually a fraud. Moreover, all the extra money has gone into the coffers of some very mediocre people who think the world of themselves in the form of obscene bonuses which are not-at-all representative of their contribution to the economy.

So if the value in our economy doesn’t come from ego-inflated investment bankers and hedge fund managers, then where does it come from? If we go back to the econ 101 definition of economics as the way in which we distribute scarce resources, then perhaps the value in our economy just comes from stuff. Or stuff + the value that is added by labour. However, if you think about this deeply for a while, you come to the inevitable conclusion that the system will blow up in our faces because we will eventually run out of stuff. Oil, metals, and minerals will eventually run out.

Of course, one can argue that we can recycle a lot of those things, but the truth of the matter is that we don’t. Our economic system should make it prohibitively expensive NOT to recycle these non-renewable resources, but it doesn’t, because the system is created and shaped by myopic idiots. Of course, that’s not exactly fair, the people who dreamed up this economic system never had to deal with 6 billion people and lived at a time when these resources were virtually limitless. Also, everything is renewable is you take a long enough time frame…

So what is really happening? When we burn oil, we’re not burning money, we’re simply borrowing it from the distant future at a time when that oil replenishes itself. The same can be said of other supposedly non-renewable sources. So now we’ve reduced all consumable resources into practically the same terms. Obviously, fish stocks replenish themselves much more quickly than iron ore would (but that doesn’t stop us from overfishing, does it?). Perhaps an interesting intellectual experiment would be to consider this “borrowing from the future” in the same terms as taking out a loan from a bank. The interest rate would be tied to how quickly you could pay it back AND how quickly the resource replenishes itself, which in the case of something like iron ore or oil, would be extremely slow, therefore making these loans extremely expensive. (which is how they should be)

So, for all resources, we have some kind of “sustainable” carrying capacity and anything above that is borrowing from the future. What determines this carrying capacity? Now I get to use a common refrain of the climate science skeptics – it’s the sun, stupid! Those of you who paid attention in high school physics will be familiar with the concept of the conservation of mass. Thanks to gravity, very little mass from the earth escapes into space (the weight of all our artificial satellites is negligible) and even on very long time-scales, very little mass is ever added to the earth. The sun provides all the energy for converting one kind of matter into another kind, therefore the “budget” of the earth is ultimately limited by what the sun provides (there is a rather big exception here, in nuclear energy, but I’m going to ignore it for the moment).

So there you have it. Somewhat counterintuitively, the amount of value in the economy shouldn’t be determined by the amount of “stuff” in it. When you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. Under the current system if I dig a lump of gold out of the ground, I can sell it and become richer. If you really think about that for a while, you realize just how absurd the concept is. However, if I take the energy of the sun and use it to produce something that we can eat, then I am converting something that is useless into something that is useful and actually making a contribution towards the world economy. Likewise, any process requiring labour is using energy to add value to something and so contributes to the economy as a whole. Speculating can be useful to a point, because it encourages investment in (it is assumed) more efficient enterprises over less efficient ones (here, the questionable substitution of “efficient” for “profitable” is made) but we are well past that point.

Of course, you try explaining all of this to an i-banker… they’ll think you’re crazy, and you probably are. But this all sounds so crazy, it just might work.

The Infamous Hand of God

I’m just going to warn everyone now, this is going to be one of my least-coherent rants to date.

It is sometimes said that I have a “soft spot” for sport, and this is largely true. Why is this the case? I’m certainly not the typical “jock” and I’m not the sort of person who will go out of his way to watch every minute of every stage of the Tour de France, like some of my more enthusiastic friends might. I will, however, go out of my way to watch events from the Olympic games, and other important once-every-four-years sporting competitions like the World Cup. I think the real reason for my soft spot, is that I like seeing people who are very, very good at what they do, do it. It is certainly a welcome break from everyday happenings in the news, which are mostly the result of very wicked people who are very bad at what they do, making the worst of a terrible situation.

But that is for another post. The FIFA World Cup is an interesting beast and one that I have watched fairly closely since 1998. Some call it the most important sporting competition in the world and I am reluctantly inclined to agree. This might seem a strange thing to say, especially from a person who once tried to qualify for the Olympic Games, another competition which may, with good cause, lay claim to the title of “world’s most important sporting competition”. It’s certainly something to think about, and I’m sure many people would disagree, but if alien being were observing us from above and they wanted to get a good idea of what humanity was about, I wouldn’t tell them to watch the UN in session, or a music festival, or the Olympics, because none of those things will really give them a very broad sweep of the human condition, though the Olympics come close. The world cup, on the other hand, probably will. The next closest thing perhaps is total war, but that is a (thankfully) rare occurrence.

But what of the competition itself?

For this year’s world cup, I’ve managed to watch a little bit of almost every match. I’ve watched at least half of the matches in their entirety. This is no small feat in Hong Kong (that’s where I am at the moment). By some quirk of corrupt decision making, free-to-air television has managed to have the rights to only 3 matches of the entire competition while cable TV has the rights to all of the matches. I have thus been forced to watch most of the matches on (quite possibly illegal) streaming sites on the internet. The obvious downer to this is that the resolution isn’t so good, and there is a bit of a delay of 10-20 seconds, which is really annoying when you’re chatting to someone on the internet who is getting live without a significant delay and they say “oohhh!” before anything really happens on your screen. One of the pluses though, is that a popular telecast to stream is Australia’s SBS coverage, which I find to generally be very good as well as being in a comforting and familiar accent. I have a feeling that when I watch the upcoming semifinals on local TV, I will probably turn the sound off and, instead, listen to the sound from the stream because local commentators are generally clueless, talk a lot of smack¹, and have grating voices.

For me, the world cup REALLY started when Australia played Germany. Whenever the socceroos play, one of the greatest flaws in the game is revealed – the “art” of diving. Diving is against the rules, although you’ll hear a lot of people, including FIFA president Sep Blatter, tell you that it is part of the game. It shouldn’t be part of the game. This is similar to idiots who say that having a lot of long-term unemployed people in society is ok because that’s just the way it is. The trouble with diving is that, if successful, it can be hugely beneficial for your team. The trouble with the socceroos, is that they don’t dive much; not compared with other major teams in the competition. This makes them a better team in terms of their ability to follow the rules, however they are punished for their troubles by having lots of free kicks and the occasional penalty given against them. These can have a huge impact on the outcome of the game, for example in the last world cup they were tied at 0-0 when a questionable penalty was awarded to Italy which gave them a lead in the 94th minute. Italy then went on to lift the world cup. Of course, the Germans aren’t exactly the worst culprits in the diving stakes either. When the scoreline read 4-0 at full time, most people wrote it off as a lopsided pairing. Of course, anyone knows anything about how good Australia really are, and anyone who actually watched the game knows that the real reason for the scoreline was, firstly, because Tim Cahill was sent off, and secondly because Germany actually played very well. The scoreline would eventually come back to haunt us because we drew even on points with Ghana at the end of the group stage, but lost out on goal difference, and so missed out on advancing to the round of 16.

On the subject of questionable refereeing, this world cup has once again brought to light just how bad it can really be. Obviously, as a supporter of Australia, I disagree with the harshness of the penalties (red cards) handed out to Cahill and Kewell in the first two games of the group stage. Red cards are especially damaging because, not only does the team have to play a man down for the rest of the game, but the player to whom the card was given must also sit out the next game. Those are two of our most significant players and I have little doubt in my mind that the result of the matches would have been quite different had different coloured cards been handed out. Nowhere was refereeing error more apparent than in the round of 16 game between Germany and England. The score was 2-1 to Germany, and England had scored just minutes before when Frank Lampard struck the crossbar with such force that the ball bounced inside the line. That was a goal. Not only would 2-2 have changed the tone and momentum of the match, having a very obvious goal denied would have significantly impacted on team morale of the English. The scoreline eventually read 4-1.² All manner of unusual arguments have been forwarded against introducing technology to assist the refs, but it’s mostly rubbish. It may be human to make mistakes, but it is also well within the human condition to want to correct them.

The makeup of the final four is not what anyone would have predicted. The first “surprise” although it shouldn’t have been if anyone watched them play, was the neither France nor Italy made it into the final 16. Perhaps France is like the Star Trek movies, only doing well on every alternate incarnation. Recall that in 2002, France also failed to make it out of the group stage after winning in style over Brazil in 1998. New to the stage is Uruguay. Uruguay isn’t really “new” as it has won two world cups including the first ever one in Uruguay in 1930, and then again in 1950 against Brazil in the Rio’s Maracaña stadium (I’m surprised they made it out alive). The new Uruguayan side is a talented one, to be sure, but the manner in which they reached the final four has made them unpopular. While playing Ghana in a close and exciting game, their star striker Suarez used his hands to keep a goal out. He was given a red card and Ghana were awarded a penalty, but they failed to convert and it went into a penalty shootout, which Ghana lost quite badly. Without Suarez in the side for the semifinal match with the Netherlands, I suspect that this is the end of the Uruguayan’s world cup campaign.

That the Netherlands is in the final four is also a bit surprising. On paper, it perhaps shouldn’t be – they’ve won all of their last 13 consecutive games. However, their play has been uninspiring to say the least. Arjen Robben is the only player on their team with any real creative capacity, and he’s been scoring most of their goals. The team overall however has shown to be a sound unit, and a disciplined one. They certainly earned their place in the final having had to come through Brazil to get here. On that note… when they went 1-0 in the first half of their game against Brazil, they stayed calm and kept plugging away, but when Brazil went down 2-1 later in the same game, it fell apart at the seams. The Brazil-Netherlands game highlighted the fact that, as important as individual skill is, this is still a team sport. Every single one of the players on the Brazilian team have exceptional ball skills, but they’re just not so great at working as a team. Former captain-turned-coach, Dunga, had his work cut out for him, and is, in the author’s opinion, copping an unfair amount of the blame for the loss.

On the subject of coaching… coaching a national team in the era of modern football would be among one of the most difficult coaching challenges in all of sport. It would be extremely frustrating because you get a bunch of players with proven talent and ability, but who aren’t used to playing with each other, and you’ve somehow got to manufacture a good team out of them. Take England for example, who in 2002, and 2006 had the best midfield in the world… correction – they have a group of midfield players the sum of whose talents is greater than the sum of any other national side’s midfield. Yet, England have consistently sucked at recent world cups. Brazil is the classic example. If you simply measured the raw footballing talent of the individuals of a team, then Brazil should win every world cup, but that clearly doesn’t happen. An interesting debate that has arisen is one surrounding various different styles of coaching.

Diego Maradona, pictured above, has become coach of Argentina, which has been doing quite well until they were crushed by Germany 4-0 recently. He has endured sharp criticism because his coaching involves a lot less “technical” coaching, and a lot of the “psychological”… and it shows. He is often seen hugging players, and it is said that he gives stirring pep-talks before matches, and during half-time breaks. I don’t think this criticism is fair. In a world cup, when you’ve got talented players who are very experienced, but not necessarily with each other, it is important to “let them play” and not to try and force a particular style on them that they may be unfamiliar with. Brazil’s Dunga tried this, and got away with it briefly. It is also very underappreciated by members of the general public how significant the psychological aspect of the game really is. Especially in football, where team cohesion and momentum can make or break a game.

A few days ago, I said that whoever wins the game between Germany and Argentina would go on to win the tournament. I still believe this, and not just because Germany beat a pretty decent side 4-0. Argentina’s defense wasn’t great, but they’re not a bad side either. They did beat a pretty decent Mexican side 3-1, and the difference could have easily been much greater. Germany will face Spain in their semifinal. Span were the side that I tipped to win the tournament before it began. However, Spain have struggled, first losing out to Switzerland and really only making by the skin of their teeth for the rest of their matches. For such an incredibly talented team, they sure don’t score a lot of goals, which is why I think that Germany will make minced meat out of them in their semifinal match tomorrow. Close as the game might be, when it comes to taking advantage of opportunities to score, the Germans have a definite edge. I was quite worried that a German side without Michael Ballack might struggle, especially at a time when many young players are just moving into the ranks of the senior side, but as it happens, those youngsters can play just fine without Ballack. And with a prolific scorer in Miroslav Klose (now there’s a German name if ever I knew one) who has just surpassed Pele and is one short of the all-time record for goals in a world cup, the Germans are as dangerous as they’ve ever been.

Addendum: It has taken me so long to write this, that the Netherlands-Uruguay game has not only started, but is almost over. As of the 84th minute, the score is 3-1 in favour of the Netherlands (who are playing the best that they’ve played all tournament). A Dutch-German final should be interesting.

Dutch election results by municipality

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like to be nasty to people. While it is certainly true that I have a pugnacious side to my nature, I am a generally peaceful and conflict-averse individual. The day that I departed the Netherlands also happened to be election day (I somehow timed my departure from my brief trip to the UK to coincide with their election as well). In this election, Geert Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom (Dutch pronounciation – partee for de fry-hide) won 24 seats, up from 9 in the previous election, making him non-trivially powerful in a parliament where government is formed by coalitions of many small parties. Geert is a particularly interesting figure because he is regarded as controversial owing to his strong anti-Muslim stance. Recently discussions I’ve had with friends who live in the Netherlands has revealed that part of his popularity stems from his perceived straight-talking nature, and because he says things that “everyone is thinking, but is too afraid to say”. Of course, most of these things turn my stomach, so I’m going to take this opportunity to read between the lines for all of those out there who have either been too lazy or too stupid to do so yet.

Geert Wilders

First off, this guy’s a fucking idiot. Unfortunately, he’s an idiot in a way that isn’t easy for ordinary people to detect, which makes him that very worst kind of idiot – the type that people take seriously. Sadly, these types are increasingly common in politics. The main thrust of what he says basically revolves around some rabid anti-Muslim sentiment with a bit of racism thrown in. This is really the main sticking point for me – regardless of what he actually says, and how sound his policies may sound, what he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims” (even though he has been known to explicitly state the opposite, I’ll believe him when he gives me good reason to). If you vote for him, you are, by extension, saying the same things. A lot of people, at this point, accuse me of being some kind of liberal, leftie, hippie, apologist, appeasement nutcase who’s too afraid to face up to the horrible truth, or other such nonsense like that. While I would certainly agree that I am fairly left-leaning, I’m certainly no bleeding heart, and I’m not afraid of facing the truth. In this case though, I would say that I have a clearer perception of the truth than most.

What he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims”. If you vote for him, you are by extension, saying the same things.

There is a very real issue here; that of the identity of a nation. These old white guys, who are used to being in charge of everything, feel threatened by all of these very different-looking, and different-behaving people. They don’t like their culture, customs, habits, and especially their religion. They don’t want them coming into their churches, their houses, or (god forbid) marrying their daughters. Obviously, enacting divisive social policies is going to fix all of this. If the concept of the Dutch national identity is based on some kind of ideal of a homogenized society based around a single religion, ethnicity, and culture, then obviously there is a problem. I would go so far as to say that, without realizing it at a conscious level, a large number of Dutch truly do perceive their national identity in those terms. There’s nothing very wrong with that, it just means that society needs to grow up a little bit and realize that things that are ordinarily viewed as traditions, and norms, are not immovable, fixed concepts that have been around for time immemorial (which is what conservatives always seem to imply with their “traditional values” nonsense), but they are dynamic and increasingly-rapidly changing things.

There are also secondary issues. Like the freedom to practice religion in general, and whether or not we can really place value judgements on the validity of religions in the world today. Various friends of mine assert that there is something fundamental about Islam that makes it more dangerous, or in some way inferior to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Without going into too much detail of the arguments for or against religion in general, as opposed to a completely secular society, and having read all of the Bible and most of the Koran, as well as religious texts of various other major world religions, I would say that none are particularly superior to any of the others. Wilders once said that Muslims should tear out half the Koran before coming to the Netherlands, which may be a valid point, but a great deal of the Bible would have to be removed as well if we were to be consistent in our application of religious discrimination.

The real problem is that while most of the very visible Christian extremism in the world today involves crazy people in the US getting their knickers in a knot over gay marriage and trying to repeal Roe vs Wade (and Sarah Palin, did I mention her?), the visible examples of Islamic extremism involve large fiery explosions. There are various reasons that the extremism has taken on the form that it has, and most are related to the fairly random distribution of wealth and, in particular, wealth inequality that exists around the world today. It is my opinion (and you’ll find that I have very strong opinions about this) that religion, at least as far as the belief in God is concerned, has absolutely nothing to do with the reprehensible behaviour of those who supposedly act on their God’s behalf. Religion has always been a convenient tool for wealthy, powerful people to use poor people to kill other poor people for profit; in all religions.

But the dirty world of politics is diluting these important issues. The “debate” isn’t about what’s really going on at all. It’s posturing about terrorism and national security. It is playing to the politics of fear, because using fear is a much easier way to control people than using rationality. Aristotle recommended two parts logos, one part ethos, and one part pathos, but modern politicians seem only to ever use pathos in their rhetoric; it’s cheap. The slightest logical scrutiny of the arguments involved quickly reveals them to be quite nonsensical. But why should that matter to the electorate? They don’t want to hear that there is a very important difference between the statements “all terrorists are Muslims” and “all Muslims are terrorists”; no, they want to believe that their scary brown neighbors who speak a different language are dangerous but it’s ok because the government is going to do something about it, thereby improving national security.

Everyone seems to want an excuse to be nasty to everyone else, so a religion, and now anti-a-religion has become the tool of choice. The power-hungry are simply trying to create an pitched battle where only small misunderstandings exist. Perhaps they truly believe all of what they say, in which case they are simply very stupid, but I don’t buy that; I think they know what they are doing, and that is more morally reprehensible than any of the crimes that they accuse the “other” of committing. But we must not allow ourselves to be sucked into this ridiculous game of political point-scoring based on ill-founded emotional appeals. Very real and complex issues that require considerable thought and introspection are being simplified and externalized and one of the world’s major religions is being used as a scapegoat. We could be level-headed about this, or we could slip into blame-game finger-pointing reminiscent of the world of playground bullying that most of us (but not all politicians) grow out of. People don’t want to think, and they’re giving that responsibility to their “leaders”. The world “leader” seems to imply that some kind of progress is being made, but in the case of Geert Wilders, anyone foolish enough to follow him is only being lead off a very steep cliff.

Wilders calls his party the party for freedom, but I say he is offering the opposite. Aung San Suu Kyi once said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”. If you really want a free country, the first thing you must do is free your mind from fear, and the first thing that the Dutch should do, is free itself from Geert Wilders.

beyone petroleum... but not bullshit

It’s that time of the year again, and I am once again in a reflective mood about the state of the world in which we live. That state, to put it mildly, is “not good”. We are rapidly headed towards a nasty collision with mother nature and the worst part about it, is that we’re really not doing much to stop ourselves. The problems we face are very large and multi-faceted, and it will take all of our human ingenuity (and then some) to fix these problems, however I foresee disaster not so much because I think we lack the ability to solve these problems (although that is a distinct and rather scary possibility) but because, even before we get to that, we will probably manage to stop ourselves from making a good attempt at it.

Take for example the incident in the Gulf of Mexico involving BP. There are many layers of badness here. First of all, at the most basic level, there is a lot of crude oil spilling into the ocean. More than has ever been spilled before and it will have profound effects on the ecosystems of the gulf. The other, in many ways more disturbing, thing about this incident is that almost every day, it is revealed that there was some kind of systematic cover-up. Sometimes we hear about regulators not being tough on BP, other times we hear about corners being cut by BP, and sometimes we even hear of very unusual things like the chemicals that are being pumped into the stream to “break it up into smaller particles” which serves to do nothing other than mask the true size of the spill. However, one of the worst things that I have heard recently, is when people stick up for the bad guys.

There seems to be an interesting sub-group of the human population who are either deluded from reading too much Ayn Rand and learning all their econ from Mises.org (or worse, Rush Limbaugh) who seem to feel that it is their duty to stand up for the “underdog”. In this case, the underdog is poor BP which is taking a hammering in the media at the moment. I hear cries of “what do you know about drilling for oil”, and “leave them alone, and let them clean it up” etc. One of the most unfortunate side-effects of the morally reprehensible PR campaigns of tobacco companies, who for a long time published fake scientific papers which basically said that smoking isn’t such a bad thing, is that it has become acceptable, even normal, for large corporations (who have the kind of money you need to make talented people lie like that) to stage expensive publicity campaigns to cover up their mistakes. This has a follow-on effect of making people believe the lies, and perpetuate them. The liars are always easy to spot, for the same reason that dumb high-schoolers who cheat on their homework are easy to spot – because they say the same thing, often not even bothering to change the wording. The number of times I’ve had the same fake climate science papers cited by climate change deniers is kind of amazing.

I find it incredible that human civilization, and all it’s wonderful achievements in science, technology, invention and so on can’t seem to get over this hurdle. At school (at least in Australia) we are taught “media analysis”, the object of which is the better equip us to separate the stuff from the fluff. When you watch Fox News for example, it’s mostly fluff and a quick analysis of the language used, without even checking their “facts” (which are mostly made-up), can usually reveal the true nature of the “news” being reported. Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that not everybody who is taught this at school actually learns it, or retains the ability. Even if they did, what match is an increasingly poorly-funded education system against an obscenely well-funded publicity machine with the backing of a large multinational corporation? I’ve thought about the strategy of giving proper scientists PR departments. Of course, that is a battle that nobody can win – an oil company who wants to deny climate change will ALWAYS have more money than the combined R&D spending of the entire planet.

I used to think that the truth would always win out because, well… it was the truth. Now I’m not so sure. In economic terms, it should be much easier to pay someone to publicize the truth than to publicize a lie. How much less expensive should it be? Well, it comes down to how much our society values the truth compared to how much our society values money – and now we start to see some of the problem. In an ideal world, you shouldn’t be able to pay someone to lie… but we all know that everyone has a price. I would like to think that my price would be more than the anyone could pay, and this may be true in monetary terms… but not all payment has to take the form of money. A death threat, for example; not to myself, but to someone very close, would conceivably force me to lie in a meaningful way. Corporations have been known to do this from time to time. Is it legal? It is if you don’t get caught; you would be surprised the number and types of things that can be bought if you have enough money and a bit of imagination.

That is, of course, only half of the problem. People are much more receptive to some things than others. If two people of equal standing were to present you the following conflicting “facts” – on the one hand, you have potentially catastrophic climate change where the solution involves developing whole new industries, and making drastic lifestyle changes, while on the other hand, you’re told that everything is going to be ok… I know what I would *rather* believe. Now add the fact that scientists, for some inexplicable reason, are not held in very high standing in the public eye, at least not next to smooth-talking celebrity talk show hosts. Yes Houston, we have a problem.

For a long time in my life, I only ever considered the problem of world peace on my long-term agenda (you can tell that I’m not a very ambitious person). World peace is one of those problems for which a “technical” solution doesn’t exist. That means, in my mind, that no amount of science or technology is going to achieve world peace, but the solution instead involves, in the immediate sphere, a lot of compromise, negotiation, and tit-for-tat, while in the long term, it will require an evolution of the way that a lot of people think. I have come to the conclusion that climate change is similar.

True, there are technological advances that can potentially solve the problem overnight. But those solutions are a long way into the future, and in many ways that would be “cheating”. Why? Because current technology is able to solve our problem (yes, I’m quite serious here) but it will take a lot of negotiation, and compromise to make that happen. Climate change is not a problem for which no technical solution exists, but the “best” solution is the non-technical one. Though it is likely that this crisis will end, or drastically reduce our large and complex civilization, it also has the potential to make us take the next step in our evolution, and that is to learn how to get along on a global scale. Climate change could be just the kick in the ass that we all need.

It is sometimes said that uniting against a common enemy can bring people closer together. I think that’s a bit childish. What if that common enemy is all of humanity itself? We are our own worst enemy. What would aliens think if they happened on our planet? They probably wouldn’t want anything to do with us, they’d probably leave, thinking “oh well, in a few hundred years they would have wiped themselves out and we can have this planet”. History constantly repeats itself, yet we never seem to learn anything from it. Is it because we’re too lazy to study history? I don’t think so. I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that we’re all fed a lot of bad information, and we have an overinflated sense of self-importance. I’ve been in a slightly cynical and somewhat philosophical move lately and if you were to ask me what my message to the people of the earth would be if I was some kind of all-powerful being who was somehow in a position to deliver a message to the people of earth that they would listen to, it would be “get over yourselves”.

While it is unlikely that people who happen on this website are the despicable types I mention above who whore out their consciences and voices to the highest bidder in defence of the misdeeds of corporations; if you are one of them, and have read this far, I encourage you to post a comment; because you have a lot to answer for. C’mon, bring it… my pugnacious streak is in need of some attention.

And to the rest (because those I mention above are generally beyond help) I leave you with two instructive footnotes. One of my favourite Carl Sagan quotes – pale blue dot, and one of my favourite speeches, JFK’s “peace speech“.

Jente and Josh

Photographs are very powerful things. I am only really just starting to appreciate that. One thing you can always do is just take a lot of photos randomly, and hope for the best. With digital photography, this strategy is much less expensive than it used to be, but even so, when reviewing the photos, you still need to know what you’re looking for. For the purposes of this discussion, we shall refer to that extra little bit as the “magic”. The photo above of Jente and Josh was taken at a small Christmas celebration with the Aussies in Holland. There was something about that party, it wasn’t raucous or anything (although there were raucous moments), but it was quite subdued in mood (and lighting). I really wanted to try to capture that in my photographs and this photograph seemed to capture it best. This might sound strange, but you just sort of have to “feel” the moment.

Everyone probably knows what I mean if I talk about the mood in a room changing when someone walks in or out. The same can sometimes be said of individuals smiling, or when a decisive moment is reached in a game of poker. This “mood” is often reflected in people’s faces and expressions, which in turn contribute to the mood itself (there are probably differential equations describing this). Thing about a photograph, is that at any one time it only captures a very small part of the room. Moreover, it’s capture is limited to things that can only be perceived with your eyes. So the photographer’s challenge (as I see it) is to somehow capture a very complex emotion, which is the sum of events leading up to a point as well as the product of multiple things, perceived through multiple senses, and to capture it in a two dimensional visual representation.

I tried a lot of different things that night; taking pictures of ornaments, taking very wide-angle shots with a lot of dead space, taking very close-crop face-shots. All in an effort to convey this mood of contentment, yet with a nagging sense of loneliness. I already knew that I was going to make all my photos black and white, or at least desaturate them considerably. It was not the right kind of mood for colour photographs. Feeling moods and emotions is one thing, and it is very important for a photographer to be able to do that, as well as sensing the emotions of others. But capturing it in such a way that similar emotions are triggered in the viewer of your photographs is extremely difficult. There is no formula for doing it, you just have to feel the magic.

Silver medal

This might sound strange, but I’m not a huge fan of sports photography. I find it a bit boring. You see, if you’re a sports photographer for a newspaper, there are certain kinds of shots that they are after, and they are mostly boring. In speed skating, where a perfect race looks almost identical to a not-so-great race, the photographer’s task is challenging. If I were a sports photographer for a newspaper, I would probably be fired very quickly because I would submit lots of non-standard photos, such as the one above. Without context… it still works. You’ve got a girl who looks a little disappointed. Notice the flag, indicating that she was probably a medalist… obviously not a gold medalist. If this accompanied a newspaper article, you would know that her name is Jenny Wolf, the current world record holder, who has held that record for a few years now, who is the leader in standings for this event at world cups, and who was heavy favourite for the gold medal. Now the photo makes even more sense. She has that distant look in her eyes, that “what if” look. I’m sure she was happy with her silver medal but I’d bet a lot of money that at the moment when this photo was taken, she was thinking more about the gold medal that she didn’t get, than the silver that she did. With a photograph, you’re not just trying to tell a story with the image, but you’re also trying to convey emotions.

Obvious emotional moments

Sport photography shouldn’t be boring, because there’s something about sport that brings out a very complex range of emotions in people, and not just the athletes. Sometimes, you’re lucky and you get moments like the one above, which happen during the course a sporting event. Moments where the emotion and the context are (literally) screamingly obvious.

a less-obvious moment

And at other times… between the hurly-burly of the action. Maybe it’s when someone is getting ready on the start line and has some kind of strange ritual, or perhaps it’s the moment when they recognize someone in the crowd, but these moments are much more interesting, because they remind us that athletes are also human. This is one of my favourite photos from the 2010 winter Olympics because it captures the moment when Annette realized that her olympic dream (at least in the 500m) was over. She did bounce back later and get a silver medal in the 1000m (missing gold by only 0.02 of a second!)

Eric Heiden

The portrait is easily one of the most challenging types of photos to take. It is relatively easy to teach someone how to take a technically-sound photograph, but teaching someone how to take a good portrait is difficult. Why? Because being a good portrait photographer depends a lot less on your technical skills with a camera, but much more on you ability to connect with and interact with people. Most people freak out in front of a camera, and even if they don’t, their behaviour changes noticeably when they’ve got a large camera pointed at them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re trying to distill the very essence of a person in a photograph, and sometimes (often) you will hardly know the person you are photographing. Of course, it helps to remember that the person you are photographing is themselves, so you can hardly capture a photograph that doesn’t communicate *some* of their essence.

The first step is to get the subject relaxed. The best way to do this is to talk to them. This accomplishes two things – firstly, it relaxes them so they are more “themselves” and less “them reacting strangely to a camera”; secondly, it gives you the opportunity to try to get to know them a bit better. The ideal portrait photograph is one where a close friend of the subject looks at the photo and say “that is SOOOO [insert subject's name here]“. The above photo is one that I took of Eric Heiden (who I encourage everyone to look up if you don’t already know who he is). Eric is such a chilled-out, down to earth guy that I didn’t realize who he was when he came to sit with us for lunch. I eventually realized and was somewhat awestruck by how totally cool and accessible this guy was considering he is the greatest speed skater ever to have lived. I wanted to capture his very relaxed nature, which was difficult because the room where we ate our lunch was also next to the warm up/down bikes at the Utah Olympic Oval, so the background was always very cluttered and busy. I employed a very simple trick which was to shoot from a lower angle so that only the upper part of the wall and the ceiling would be in the background of the shot. He now uses this photo as his profile pic on facebook.

The real key to finding the magic has nothing to do with lenses, sensors, focal lengths and whatnot. That’s like saying that the key to good poetry is all about good punctuation and vocabulary. Obviously you will need to learn about all those technical aspects in order to take technically sound photographs. But really good photographs, the ones that reach out of their two-dimensional confines and speak to our hearts, rely on… well… our hearts. You need to have an open heart, and connect with the subject matter, be it a landscape, a flower, or another person; and you have to have to the courage to let your heart speak through your photos. It’s about noticing the small details, the quiet moments, and being able to hear the whispers in the crowd, but it’s also about seeing the bigger picture at the same time, giving context. It should be like poetry, or music, always speaking to our hearts and always finding something new, something different… and occasionally something beautiful.

As I said before, it is difficult to describe. I spend a lot of time looking at the work of other photographers (and not just internet porn) for inspiration. Whenever I look at a photo I ask myself “what was the photographer thinking?”, “why did she make the photo like this?”, and I often ask the same questions of my own photos. It is important to allow yourself to “feel” the emotion of the image; try to be the image, and feel what it feels. Maybe it’s crying out in pain, frying some greasy bacon for breakfast, or maybe it’s giving you the cold shoulder, then try to communicate that. Also, keep it simple. It’s just a photograph. You look at it. That’s all. And practice, this is perhaps the most important thing.

Maybe none of what I just said makes any sense at all. That is probably part of the reason that people consider me a better photographer than a writer. But many have asked me about photography, and when I point them to the article about photo gear, and the two preceding articles – “The Truth Behind the Shutter” and “More Truth Behind the Shutter“, I am told that I haven’t said enough. Now I’ll probably be told that what I’ve said makes no sense… oh well. I guess it goes to show that you can’t learn how to be a good photographer just from reading. Good luck!

File exchange on a distributed network

Torrents are wonderful things. For those who are unfamiliar (and it is entirely possible to be unfamiliar yet still be a regular user), torrents are a system by which files are shared over a network of computers. If the Internet is the era-defining black swan of our generation, then torrents are the cargo trucks on our superhighway. They are the natural evolution of the solution to the problem of moving files from place to place.

First, a bit of context and technical background. Back in the good old days when the Internet was just starting up and a gigabyte was considered huge for a hard disk, bandwidth was very limited. Most people connected via modems using telephone lines with carrier signals that sounded like faxes. To send large files from computer to computer was difficult, HTTP (or hyper text transfer protocol) was limited in this capacity and FTP (file transfer protocol) was clumsy and often required the swapping of passwords and connections between trusted computers. This basically meant that you had to “know” in some sense, the person with whom you exchanged files, or else download files over slow and unreliable connections.

Then came P2P, or peer-to-peer networks. You’ve probably heard of Napster, which was one of the first widely-used P2P networks. The nature of P2P is exactly what it sounds like. In the case of Napster, the tracking of clients was still centralized, but once a request for a file and a computer with that file had been identified, then these two computers would be able to connect to each other and the file transfer could take place. Although Napster was eventually shut down, it paved the way for other P2P systems such as gnutella, which are decentralized and allow downloading of a single file from multiple hosts who also have that file, further speeding up the spread of data.

Then came bit torrent. In a technical sense, the whole mechanism for how torrents works fascinates me. With something like the gnutella network, you can download a file from as many different computers as have the file, which is great, and can be very fast although… think about what happens when a file first hits the net.

One person has the file, great. Lets say you’ve got a network of 10 computers who all want the file. The other nine start downloading the file from this one dude so the this one guy’s network connection gets maxed out until everyone else has the file. We can make this interesting and say that it takes one hour to transfer this file from one computer to another (to define our bandwidth), and so it will take nine hours (because the first computer’s bandwidth is split into nine) to transfer this file from one computer to the other nine simultaneously. You could be very clever about it, and transfer it to three computers first (taking three hours) then having those four computers with a complete copy of the file transfer it on to the remaining six (taking one and a half hours) for a total of four and a half hours. Actually, given the above constraints, the quickest way of doing it is for the first host to simply download to one other host (one hour) then for those two to download to one each (one more hour) then for those four to download to the remaining six (one and a half hours) for a total of three and a half hours.

As you can see, the main difficulty is that a computer needs a complete copy of the file before it can begin to give it away to another computer. In the case of very large files, this can become problematic, especially if the network has a lot of computers and connections between any two are not always reliable. This is where torrenting comes in. In a torrent, a file is split into many different, very small pieces, and “seeded” to the “swarm”. The real kicker with a torrent is that a computer may begin to upload different pieces of a file to other computers before it has completely downloaded the original file. It seems like a very small adjustment to the original parameters, but the implications are mind-boggling. Reconsider our original situation.

The original file host splits the file into nine pieces and distributes a different piece each to the other nine computers (taking only an hour). Each of the nine computers sends their “ninth” to the eight other computers in the network (taking possibly a little less than an hour) and we’re done. But it gets better – because you don’t have to wait until you have the full copy of a file before you can send bits of it onwards, consider what happens when the pieces are smaller. Say the original host splits the file into thirty six pieces and distributes the first nine to the nine other computers during the first fifteen minutes, in the next fifteen minutes, the next nine pieces are distributed from the original host AND all of the first nine pieces are distributed among the nine. So, fifteen minutes after the first hour (the time it takes for the host to fully upload all the pieces of the original file). It is easy to see that, the smaller the pieces you split the file into, the shorter the amount of time after the initial download it takes before all the computers in the network have their own complete copy of the file. Another beautiful thing about this system is that once a few full downloads have been completed, especially on very large networks, computers can drop out and come back with minimal disruption to the whole deal whereas before, the dropping out of a computer with the complete file would slow things down considerably.

There’s something nice about the way this all works. You could, in theory, have a very large network in which no one computer has the complete file yet still be able to complete the download from the fragments.

Now most bit torrent programs keep a record of your upload/download ratio, and some people won’t let you download from them unless your ratio is above a certain number. I was thinking about this the other day, and came to the conclusion that these demands were, in theory, mathematically unreasonable to ask of anyone. In the above example, the original host would have uploaded one complete file and downloaded none, while the other nine would have downloaded one complete file and uploaded a ninth of one. Of course, they uploaded that ninth eight times giving a total of eight uploads between the nine of them and nine downloads of course. The ratio for the downloaders is and the total “global” (for a very small globe of ten computers) ratio is therefore one-to-one.

This is, of course, an average. As the number of computers (let’s call it n) approaches infinity, the ratio for the downloading computers approaches . But in the real world, these aren’t closed systems, some people stay on the network and continue to seed packets to computers with incomplete files, while others bugger off as soon as their download is complete. If we assume that everyone eventually has complete copies of the files being distributed (which is one of the only reasonable assumptions we can make here) then the global ratio has to be 1:1. If you’re one of the system admins out there who leaves their computers on the network all the time and basically seeds files forever, you’re going to have a huge upload-to-download ratio. If you then insist that anyone who downloads from you has a ratio of at least one-to-one, then you create a small problem – where is everyone else going to get the high ratio from? If the global average is one, then, given that these large superseeders exist, getting a ratio of one would depend on there being many people out there with very low ratios indeed, which is probably not what these sysadmins are trying to promote with these ratio restrictions.

The clever among you may have already spotted a way out – continuous growth. If the network constantly expands, then it is possible for everyone to eventually have access to file hosts who stipulate a ratio greater than or equal to one. At the moment, this seems plausible, but obviously there are eventual limits to the size of the network. Eventually, users will probably be forced to set up “sockpuppets”¹ in order to increase the users’ ratios, which is counter-productive because the whole idea of coming up with the system was to more-efficiently use system resources.

I guess this rant probably wasn’t what you were expecting. I suspect that most were expecting some kind of philosophical rambling about intellectual property and copyright and the evils of the RIAA. Instead, you got a technical description of how torrents work which you may or (more likely) may not be interested in. Oh well. Access to information and the rules regarding intellectual property are thing that I care deeply about, so I’m sure I will eventually go on a very long rant about it… maybe next time.

Blurring the line between Food and Art

Barely twenty days after my sublime experience at the famed Fat Duck restaurant I returned to the rarefied climes of Michelin 3-star dining with my skating coach and team manager to one of only two 3-star-rated restaurants in all of the Netherlands – De Librije. De Librije is located in a building that used to house a monastery in Zwolle, which is fortunately quite close to Heerenveen (where I currently live). One of us had never dined in a restaurant which had received any Michelin stars, let alone three, while another had dined here once before. I was in the interesting position of having dined at six 3-star restaurants in the past, making De Librije my seventh. With the memory of the Fat Duck still firmly in my mind, as well as the knowledge of its formidable reputation as one of the very best even among Michelin 3-stars, I was almost afraid that this experience would somehow “let me down”. It didn’t, not at all in fact.

It certainly wasn’t experimental on the level that the Fat Duck was. Each dish was not a chemistry experiment, and there was no liquid nitrogen. (there was dry ice though). In many ways, this restaurant was much more “old-school” and in that sense was more similar an experience to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. Diners are greeted with a barrage of “appetizing” courses on being seated, and after a few of these, they are finally greeted with the menu. The menu basically gives the choice between four, six, and eight “main” courses depending on one’s hunger level. Naturally, since I was part of the group, and since the others were taking a very “we’re here, we might as well try everything” attitude, we went for the maximum, and I was well-pleased.

Dry ice and Eel

Zwolle, despite its current inland location, actually used to be a coastal city (everything to the north and west of the city is reclaimed from the sea). I’m not sure if it was the chef’s intention of reminding us of this fact, but there was a lot of seafood on the menu. In the picture above, was an interesting dish consisting of eel, and… eel. One was a cold preparation while the other was hot. In addition, the hot version was served in a bowl with vents for steamy, dry-ice assisted, liquorice-infused smoke to add to the sensual experience of consuming this food. Throughout the meal, our minds’ expectations of the aesthetic of what food *should* look like was continually tested. It was remarked once “it doesn’t look particularly appetizing, but so far everything has tasted incredible, so I’m going to try it”.

Looks can be deceiving

At the end of the day, it isn’t about looks, but is about how the food tastes. This food tasted good. “Good” doesn’t really do it justice actually. The execution of all the dishes was perfect, and the tools of the trade were mostly the same – creams, consommés, foams, extracts, mousses, and so on. An interesting addition which I had not seen previously, was the use of flowers. As can be seen in the title image, flower petals were used extensively in some of the dishes. Perhaps it was a way of signing the dishes as “Dutch” and distinguishing them somehow. I must say that the flowers actually tasted quite nice, and I’ll think twice before I call another dutchie a “tulip muncher”. Still, despite the old-school methodology, the dishes themselves were still innovative and unique. The dish from the title image was one of my favourites being built around the very simple concept of small Dutch shrimps and shrimp sauce, and adding other stuff… like flower petals. Underneath the dish, there was another dish which was made up mostly of garden vegetables (mostly grown in their own garden) which was a refreshing way to end a dish which was made up of very strong savoury tastes and textures. (stacking the dishes on top of one another was also a clever way to control the order in which you consumed the food)

The Lobster Dish

All in all, it was another exceptional food experience. It was so exceptional, in fact, that it made all three of us late for our next scheduled appointments. It was so exceptional, in fact, that none of us really cared. Curiously, it is almost impossible to get a booking here for dinner, yet the lunch service is surprisingly empty on most weekdays (those crazy Dutch). The meal is identical. This is very much like Tetsuya’s was in Sydney, except that I still needed almost a full month’s advance notice to even book lunch there. What I’m basically trying to say is that this may be the most accessible 3-star Michelin experience in the world. I know of no other Michelin 3-star where you can walk-in and expect to be seated. The service is also quite exceptional, which, while expected of 3-star establishments, is slightly unusual for the Dutch, who are almost famous for slowness of their restaurant service. As for the standard of the food, I would rate it very highly. How highly? I would rate it just above Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant (but that is probably because I have a thing for seafood, if you’re not as crazy about seafood as I am, then it might fall just behind Gordo’s in the ranking), but below Per Se and the Fat Duck… placing it very near the top of a very short list – Highly recommended, and I’m definitely storing the number in my phonebook.

A feast for all the senses...

Heston Blumenthal is a chef well known amongst those who are into fine dining. His restaurant “The Fat Duck” has won numerous awards including three Michelin Stars, and Restaurant of the Year. When I say “Restaurant of the Year”, I don’t just mean restaurant of the year in Bray, Berkshire, or even all of the UK. This is a ranking that rates the most highly-regarded restaurants in the world. In this list, it has consistently placed highly, often coming second, and this year slipping to third with the remarkable rise of København restaurant “Noma“. Also often placing highly on this list are Per Se, Tetsuya’s, and Jean Georges, all restaurants that have been mentioned somewhere on this site.

I made the journey with the same two friends who I visited Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant with about nine months ago, and while they spent the intervening time getting engaged, I was getting hungry. In the context of timing, the visit was well-placed. I had recently returned from New York (a foodie’s wonder-city) to Heerenveen where I had very nearly cried when presented with the “provided dinner” (a.k.a. boarding house slop) that our building insists on serving to us. Unsurprisingly, I am taking every opportunity possible to escape and the Fat Duck came to the rescue in a timely manner.

mist from dry ice

To describe Heston Blumenthal’s creation as a “restaurant” and the dinner service as “food” is to sell it quite short. The restaurant is a theater, and the meal is an experience, an adventure even. Someone recently asked me what constitutes “good food”. I responded that truly good food must be an experience which encompasses as many of the senses as possible in a cohesive and immersive (and presumably pleasurable) way. Each scene in Blumenthal’s play on food was distinct, and beautiful in its own way, with many different and varied characters making an appearance, and almost (but not quite) to the point of distracting it from the primary objective – the food.

The Fat Duck is one of two restaurants in the world (the other being El Bulli in Spain) that practices what is known as “molecular gastronomy”. All this means is that the process of “cooking” a meal is taken to another level. The ingredients are treated more as parts of an intricate chemistry set. Our appetizing palette cleanser was a case in point. Green tea, lime, and a bit of vodka. Normal so far? Now make it into a foam. Weirded out yet? Now take that foam, and dunk it into a tub of liquid nitrogen to create a frozen foam ball. When brought into contact with a human mouth, after a split second of my-tongue-is-stuck-to-the-freezer sensation, this frozen ball explodes in an icy inferno of refreshing limey green tea goodness. Only the outer shell is really frozen, everything inside is mostly gassy allowing it to travel up to your nose and enhance the flavor sensations experienced by your tongue, with subtle smells experienced by your nose. As an amusing side effect, I also puffed smoke through my nose during my initial bite, indicating a tendency for me to bring my sense of smell to bear when sampling new food.

Roast foie gras - staple food for the gourmand

You know a dish is interesting if it has truffles in it and they’re NOT the main thing that stands out about the dish. The truffle toast was merely there to keep the “Jelly of Quail, Crayfish Cream” company. A piece of chicken liver parfait cunningly disguised as ice cream (I’m not kidding) rested upon a carefully layered concoction consisting of crayfish cream on the surface, jelly of quail in the middle, and pea puree at the bottom. The combination was an interesting one, and quite overpowering. The preparation of the jelly caused it to dissolve in your mouth and “sneak” up towards your nostrils in a manner similar to wasabi, except instead of a mustardy kick, this one came with a cool, refreshing assault on my sense of smell.

Alice in Wonderland was written by Lewis Carroll, a pot-smoking mathematician from Cambridge. Even he would never have dreamed of Blumenthal’s take on “turtle soup”. We were presented with what looked like pocket watches (actually, they looked more like chocolate coins with a chain attached) which we were instructed to dip into some hot water and stir. Rather like dipping a watch in a cup of tea – OOOOOOOooooohhhhhhh!!!! The watch promptly dissolved and turned our hot water into turtle soup with gold leaf, which we then poured into our bowls filled with jiggly stuff. Taste-wise, this was less spectacular than the other courses, but it gets full marks for artistic impression.

Food as Art

The sense of theatre never waned. Our next dish, presumably a fish dish (we were able to guess from the cutlery provided to us) first came to us in the form of a large shell from one side of which protruded ipod headphones. The “Sound of the Sea” dish adds sound to the palette of senses touched with what is ostensibly simply a plate of food. Well first of all, it wasn’t really on a plate, it was served on a pane of glass suspended above a box of sand. The chefs had gone to great pains to make the whole experience reminiscent of a day at the beach – something that struck us, as Australians, at the heart of our psyches. There was “sand”, and bits of seaweed, and fish. Of course, this was unlike any beach I had ever been to (even in Australia), because I could eat the sand, and it tasted good. Of course it did, it was made of dried, powdered baby eel…

Even the foam tasted good

Though I was sad to finish that course, and its complex yet strongly themed combination of tastes, smells (and sounds), our next course was also (mostly) seafood. I wouldn’t have picked it just by looking at the dish, but it was salmon, one of my favorite fish. Keeping it company on the plate were bits of grapefruit mixed with olive oil (no, really, it worked!) with asparagus, vanilla mayonnaise, and fish eggs. Strange a combination as this was, it was beautiful. The liquorice that the salmon was poached in was, thankfully, not overpowering. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it an aftertaste… more like, an afterthought.

would you believe... salmon poached in liquorice?

Something that struck me, was that the dishes were all stunningly well executed. Of course, you expect that at a restaurant of this caliber, but it is often too easy to get distracted by the exotic ingredients and preparation methods (liquid nitrogen? really?) and forget about the simple things. The salmon is a case in point, it was perfectly cooked and just a little rare on the inside allowing it to be juicy and the bring out the very best of the salmon flavor.

Black Forest Gateau

Throughout the meal, whenever each new dish was presented, there always seemed a bit of a danger that it would be too gimmicky, and that there wasn’t enough emphasis placed on how it actually would taste. Every time, I would cautiously bite into whatever it was, and be relieved. Some of the dishes are a little bit intense, or overwhelming with regards to the taste. In fact, it was the simpler dishes (like the snail porridge) that were regarded as the best. The desserts especially were awe-inspiring in that they were simple, or that their complexity was not overt but much more subtle. The black forest gateau for example was topped with a cherry… except that it wasn’t a cherry, but was simply made to look like one and tasted like one, except stronger (I must sound insane right about now). The telltale sign was that the stem was not a real cherry stem in that it did not attach to the cherry in the way that a stem should.

Whiskey Gums

Anyone who has ever accompanied me on a long train trip will know that I’m a big fan of wine gums. The Fat Duck takes this concept a step further with Whiskey Gums. Then they take it a step even further by making whiskey gums that are distinctive to different scotch-producing regions. Tasting these different flavor sensations and the way that some of them were smoky, while others tickled your tongue was a nice way to wind down.

Bray, Berkshire is a short drive from Maidenhead train station which is a non-trivial (about ten pound) train trip from Paddington train station in London. Apparently “small villages are big” in England… according to Joan, who I think meant to say that putting things like this in small villages instead of more obvious and convenient places (like central London) is fashionable these days. Nearly an hour of traveling each way almost demands a good reason for the trip (nevermind the 200 euro 8-hour train transit from Heerenveen, the Netherlands to London St Pancras station). Was it worth it? Yes.

Wax-sealed envelope containing our menus

The verdict? Heston is a name I have only ever encountered as a last name, as in Charlton Heston. Mr Blumenthal uses it as a first name. His name however is not the first and last name you need to know in the restauranting business. Although the circumstances of my trip to Per Se by Thomas Keller were not typical, thereby making the comparison slightly unfair, the New York Restaurant retains its place at the top of my own restaurant ranking, despite every other professional published restaurant ranking list disagreeing with me. The approaches are very different, and in a paradoxical way reflect different American and British approaches to food. Per Se is situated on the 4th floor of the Time Warner building overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park, while Fat Duck is in Bray, Berkshire… a town that I would struggle to find on a map (and we struggled to find the restaurant for a few minutes, despite being dropped off within 10 meters of it!).

But in the end, it is about the food, and both… in fact all of my Michelin 3-star experiences are extraordinarily exemplary examples of fine dining, and the very best food that I have ever eaten (and I’ve eaten a LOT of food). I would rank it above Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant, although that was not a unanimous assessment of my dining group. I rate innovation and strong tastes delivered to the palette in varied ways very highly. I can definitely see what all the fuss is about regarding the molecular gastronomy, and the copious use of unusual techniques and ingredient combinations definitely adds to the experience more than it detracts. But when you’ve stripped all of that away, gotten rid of all the distraction, and focus on the food, you’ve still got one of the very best restaurants in the world. Not my top pick, but very close to it.