Euro-madness

I remember a session led by academics from Cranfield University.  It would have been 1998, in the run-up to the introduction of the euro, and my enlightened employer wanted an arbitrarily selected group to learn about world economic conditions.  It was made plain that the UK was in a reasonable position to join the euro, and certainly in a better position than some of the countries which were actually signed up to do so.

If we had joined in, and the weaker currencies had not, we would have had some uncomfortable moments as we aligned our cycles but would probably have gone on to reasonable success.  Adopting the euro along with the southern basket cases, given the observable unwillingness of all countries (including France and Germany) to follow the rules of the club, would have been very silly.

Letter to Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary

Dear Mr. Hunt,

Rupert Murdoch is a man who will change his citizenship to gain a business advantage - not a toehold, as an immigrant might do, but a dominant position.  He will kowtow to Chinese suppression of freedom to gain market share in Asia.

Now he wants to take full ownership of BSkyB - News Corporation is a large entity, but it is still a very personal fiefdom - and is wondering how much he will have to give for that.

He has come up with a proposal to separate himself formally from Sky News, thinking that this is the kind of small price that the UK will be satisfied with, and you have recognised that the letter of the contract does offer  some kind of protection.

This is a small price to pay.  UK media law does not allow TV news organisations to take positions, so the provision of a respectable news service - a necessary commitment in the early days to gain Sky's general position and licensing - can be supported by means of an arms-length body.

He would not accept the same separation from the Times or the Sun.

The current move to take over the whole of BSkyB may not - on the face of it - constitute an increase in his control of British media outlets.  My argument is that his control is already too great.

The current scandal of phone-hacking and its latest development with the Milly Dowler case is the first time Mr Murdoch has shown any sign of vulnerability.  So far he has been beyond any but the minor criticism of the courtiers in the PPC - the weight of News Corporation silences or sits upon business and political attacks.

I understand that you have been painted into a legal corner concerning the grounds on which you could refuse the current application, but I cannot believe that it is impossible to stop the process in the light of new developments.

A news organisation which apparently behaves with impunity while flouting the law should give you pause.  I am amazed that they have not already started briefing against other papers - the fact that they have not suggests to me that News International's culpability is so massive that they dare not.

Mr Murdoch's control over the British media is already disproportionate in percentage terms, but the major factor is the cold weight of control - not just power, but deadening influence.

A judge-led inquiry into hacking and its relationships with police and politics (just to begin with) should be established immediately.  And an organisation which is under such scrutiny should not complain if other processes that it is involved with are halted.

Ed Wilson

A boring old fart protests

Syrian authorities demand the facebook and gmail passwords of arrested protesters. Twitter is the backbone of revolutions.  White-hat hackers work on firewall busters to support Iranian demonstrations. The internet is a force for freedom.

Well yes, but...

We have electricity, water, internet... it's just another utility. And, just as our electricity is run by French and German companies, the big net services are served from the US.

There are plenty of email services, but every pensioner directed towards internet literacy is presented with a hotmail or gmail address. Facebook and Google may have achieved an unassailable critical mass in their fields. We talk of hoovering, and now we talk of googling.  And all of these are American companies.

So what?

Google and Facebook make billions from selling information about us without our informed consent, but even that's not the problem.

Does the world need more than one Facebook, one Google, one Ebay, one Amazon, one Twitter, one Blogger? Does the world need more than one GPS? Is the world outside China going to be run on Californian servers?

I use these services. I like them (mostly - watch it Zuckerberg). I am not anti-American. I am anti-oligopoly. It may be too late to think of an alternative but, if it is, "too late" suggests a power we have relinquished without thinking enough.

I fear I have offended someone tonight

Every Tuesday evening a dozen or so of us gather to discuss literature, our own literature. Plays, poems and stories we have written and which we would really like to see gaining a wider audience. It's a writers' group, a workshop ( http://manchester-writers.org.uk/ ) and it seems to improve our writing even if most of us remain unpublished.

In recent weeks we've tried a new technique. Rather than reading your own stuff and then looking up expectantly for helpful comments, you ask somebody else. You can select a reader or accept the next random volunteer, and you have to listen to your own deathless (or lifeless) prose while you watch the faces of your audience.

Another kind of artificiality you might say, but I've learned a lot. Think about the way you read a book.

The first time you see a page is almost always the last time you see it. You make just one attempt to read it, and if the intended meaning doesn't come through that one time, it's the last chance the writer has. And I've seen evidence here and elsewhere that some people don't get much out of reading - looking ahead, interpreting the syntax and punctuation as you go, are all unused skills.

The offence I may have caused came when I said that I could have read my chapter better than the person who took that responsibility. I know what it's supposed to say, how it's supposed to be read.  I could perform it on stage or on radio.

But if all that isn't actually on the page, then either I'm not doing my job properly as a writer or I have unrealistic expectations of my readers. I can't judge how much of each is true, but it makes me think.

My brain bits move in mysterious ways

I'm writing a novel. Number seven as it happens, and it'll probably join the others on that great unpublished shelf in the sky. But I've also been reading, and listening to podcasts, about the way the brain works, and my writing "technique" seems to offer persuasive evidence for the idea that various parts of the brain work almost independently of each other. Each one goes its own sweet way, occasionally coming up with an idea, a decision, a bodily movement... Many of these are actioned, some of them actually come to the notice of the conscious part that we tend to think is the "real" me, and some come as complete surprises.

You'll hear authors (if you have any interest in listening) saying things like "I don't write the story:  it writes itself" or "then this character did something I wasn't expecting". I've used those lines too, and recently came out with "my main character hasn't told me what the story is about yet". Some of this is affectation, but it is surely a gloss on the feeling we have that the mental wheels keep on churning whether we are aware of it or not.

An idea comes to the fore - half-formed, fully-formed - and you find yourself typing it in. Sometimes it's a second or two before you realise what is coming out. Sometimes it's as if that idea "has always been there". It's because you have more than one pair of mental hands at work all the time. You're not on your own in there.

Electoral geeks are among the worst, but...

Why will I vote Yes to the Alternative Vote system?  For my own reasons.

1. We should establish the principle that things like this can change.  It would be good for us.
2. AV is a bit better than first-past-the-post at reflecting voter intentions.

But it's only a bit better. Some people, including me, would prefer a more proportional system, but my main objection is that both AV and the common forms of proportional representation depend on the idea that the least popular candidates are eliminated one by one until someone crosses a numerical threshold and gets elected.

That means that the second choices of the people who vote for the least popular candidates are taken into account when most people's other choices are ignored. That is the only logical justification I can think of for the No campaign's assertion that AV helps extremists - the BNP will be eliminated, but its supporters may have their votes counted again and again.

So my own geekish proposal is that every choice expressed by every voter should be taken into account right from the start:

• a first choice vote counts as 1
• a second choice vote counts as 1/2
• a third choice vote counts as 1/3
• etc

If there are four candidates, and you use all your choices, ranking them 1, 2, 3, 4, then you have 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 votes. Candidates get whole votes, half votes, etc and they are all added up, and the person with the highest total wins. It doesn't have to cross a notional 50% mark, just come top when everybody's choices have been taken into account.

Have I woken the sleeping geek within you?

You lot out there frighten me

Pollsters announce (or rather they occasionally let slip) that a large proportion of the adult population of the UK don't know that a referendum is to be held to decide on voting systems  for general elections.  Of those who do know, a large proportion don't intend to vote and another large proportion (not necessarily the same people) don't know how the Alternative Vote system works.

Rather than go off in a middle-class strop about the stupidity of the masses and "if they can't be bothered to understand they shouldn't even have the vote"...

I have some idea of how stupid I am, and who among us has never voted on something we don't fully understand?

...I will simply make a few observations.

• Some people somehow contrive to be unaware of even the headlines of current news.
• To some people, politics is somewhere between a criminal racket and a game which is of no interest to them.

Put like that, it's easy to understand.  I have no idea what's going on in the world of reality television and I consider investment banking to be somewhere between a criminal racket and a game which is of no interest to me.  My interests are obviously the right ones and other people's are simply depressing, but I have no right to criticise.

"I'm an American too"

I used to work with a man who was profoundly deaf.  When it came to meetings he needed a signing translator, and his usual helper was a Canadian (who must have had amazing stamina to do things like full-day conferences on his own).

On several occasions the translator objected to people's use of the word 'America' to mean 'USA'.  "I'm an American too,"  he protested.  To some extent, this was just an assertion of Canadian separateness, but to some extent also it was still a real point.

That was thirty years ago, and US ubiquity and hegemony is even more fully established today, to the point at which I can hear on a BBC news programme a reference to 'south and central America' meaning Alabama, Louisiana etc, rather than Mexico to Chile.

Bank report published: bank shares rise

Many commentators are saying that the independent banking commission's analysis may be good but its prescriptions weak.  Some kind of firewall/Chinese wall/ring fence between retail banking and investment banking is required, the big brains declare, but we're not saying exactly what kind and, provided the capitalisation of the retail bank is up to scratch, any surplus can be thrown over the wall/fence for dubious use by the denizens of the worldwide casino.

And you can tell how frightening this prospect is to the bankers by their organisations' share prices, which rose in the wake of yesterday's announcements.  Even Lloyds Banking Group was steady, though Vickers recommended that it should be forced to sell a further (also unspecified) number of branches.  The suspension of competition rules at the height of the crisis, which allowed Lloyds to swallow HBOS, was a "bad thing".

In passing I would suggest that Brown and Darling were not stupid or corrupt when they adopted this wheeze:  more likely it was a matter of desperation.  Without Lloyds' help, the government would have been left with a crippled HBOS on its hands and on its books as well as all the other financial flotsam and jetsam.

Regulating any kind of wall, fence or even last ditch would be horribly complicated, so why not "let the market do it"?

Announce that from - say - April 2013 there will be no government support for bank deposits in any organisation which is not properly independent of investment bank encumbrances.  Depositors would vote with their feet, walking away from any "institution" which looked less than enthusiastic to cut itself off.  I haven't worked out what to do for borrowers yet, but there must be a way.

Bring back secondary moderns!

Yet again I hear a vox pop with a parent saying that if there's no good local school for their child then they'll have to move to an area with grammar schools.  As if that will guarantee the child a place in a grammar school (and as if you can actually depend on the grammar school giving a good education)!

It certainly seems to be true that the non-grammar schools in selective areas are better than the old secondary moderns, but people should remember the entrance exams.  If you support the "grammar-school system" your proposal for the majority is a "secondary modern system".

Health select committee report

On the face of it, the recommendations of the Commons health select committee seem to be a good contribution to the argument. But Andrew Lansley surely can't accept the presence of hospital doctors on the boards of the commissioning authorities (PCTs 2.0?). It would be hard to manage competing interests if a "local" and "public" supplier had a representative on the commissioner. The purchasing of non-NHS services would still be possible, of course, but it would be embedded in a public service and therefore protected from the rawest competition. As I said, a useful contribution.

Tediously inconsistent

When it suits them, coalition spokespeople can reel off great lists of cuts planned by Labour before last May's election.  Then, almost in the next breath, they yell and scream that the new opposition has not let anybody into the secrets of "what they would cut".  It's about as edifying as the Ed Balls show.

Strangely selective

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary is a fine, upstanding body, says the government when they hear that the police could save 12% of their budget without hitting "front line services".  Yet, when the same body points out that 20% cuts would make that rather "hard" you hear all sorts of spluttering from Downing St.  The HMIC seems to have morphed into a bunch of fools and charlatans.  Which is it, Davey baby?

Be gentle when you tell the grown-ups...

...that things just aren't that simple.

Teresa May was today forced to acknowledge that the hundreds of police officers and staff behind the scenes during the various demonstrations on Saturday (march for the Alternative, UK Uncut, Class War...) were just as vital as those out on the streets.  Whatever you think of the various actions and the policing policy, the observation is much the same - pretty clear evidence that the simple-minded injunction to "save money by cutting the back office" is just that - simple-minded.

And today, Warwickshire police are reported to be taking uniformed officers off the streets to do the jobs whose holders have been made redundant.

There are two problems (at least) with the cuts programme:

• the separation between front and back office is artificial
• changes of this type might be possible, but to do them properly would require more time than they have been given

Distracted from the wonders of the universe

Brian Cox couldn't keep my attention for ever (or even for the full hour), but he always makes me think.  So I thought:  if the sun could ever get out from behind his Madchester hairdo, how much of its light might we get here on earth?

Simplifying madly (and probably dropping the odd decimal place here and there), this is how I went about it.

1. Imagine a sphere as big as the earth's orbit round the sun:  the sun at its centre and a radius of 150 million kilometres.
2. Think of the earth as a circle on the surface of that sphere:  a radius of 6370 kilometres.
3. The surface area of the big sphere is 283 quadrillion (282,743,338,823,081,391) km^2.
4. The area of the "earth disc" is 127 million km^2.
5. Which is 0.000000045% of the surface area of the big sphere.
6. OK, that's meaningless, so how do we translate it into terms that people might understand?
7. Start with a standard football and imagine it with a tiny sun at its centre and the earth disc on its surface.
8. But that makes earth really, really tiny, and I couldn't find out the area of a pin point.
9. So move up a bit:  imagine the earth with a tiny sun at its centre and the "earth disc" on its surface.
10. A few sums later, and I determine that the earth disc has an area of 230,000 m².
11. Which is 32 football pitches, and everybody understands that.
12. But the basic truth is that the amount of the sun's light that can ever hit the earth is less than half of one ten-millionth of one per cent.

Does that help?

Not the BBC's finest hour

Failure to understand scientific and statistical points was paraded across the BBC this morning.

First, James Naughtie asked John Beddington to explain the difference between Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl, when the chief scientific advisor had already done so in considerable detail.

Then, John Humphrys interviewed David Nutt about the trouble he found himself in after comparing the risks of ecstasy and horse-riding.  Exasperation showing clearly through the politeness, Professor Nutt sought to explain that he was doing no more nor less than presenting the statistics as established by a proper meta-analysis.

Finally, Martha Carney completely misunderstood the representative of the World Nuclear Association.  He said the diesel generators at the power station had not been designed to withstand the size of tsunami which hit it:  she concluded that he had said that the generators should not have been there at all.

Trident roadblocked - just about

Every now and then the Defence Minister Liam Fox comes out with a declaration that the Trident project is still alive. Today he announced the spending of a whole £25 million!

And yet the work is still formally suspended, in that the final go-ahead (the "main gate" decision - why does the military-industrial complex come up with such stupid phrases, and why do doe-eyed politicians go along with them?) has been postponed until after the next election.

I hold out no great hope, because...

• Conservative and Labour are signed up to the "independent nuclear deterrent" (Jeremy Corbyn and a few other honourable exceptions notwithstanding).
• Governments since the 40s have spent and spent on these phallic beasts whatever they declare in public.
• Whatever the official status of the accounting stream (and Mr Corbyn asked an interesting parliamentary question on that subject today, which may have some mileage given the coalition's declared commitment to "transparency"), somehow nukes always find the money to keep going - rather like MI5.

It's worth noting that the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is managed by Lockheed Martin (that fine not-British company that's running our census as well), Jacobs Engineering Group (another US corporation, not well known, looks like a mini-Halliburton) and Serco (fairly British, but originally a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America). That's the "independent nuclear deterrent" for you!

The fact remains, however, that the Lib Dems have managed (with the fortuitous support of a painfully diminished defence budget) to get the commitment to major expenditure delayed. They sit there not saying anything - I fully expect to see Nick Harvey studying the ceiling and whistling on the front bench. Clutching at straws, certainly, hoping that something will turn up, but it's worth having that slight chance.

Godel, Escher, Bach

Starting the book again for perhaps the fourth time, I want to see whether the experience of the second half (approximately) of my life can make up for the undoubted assaults on my brain capacity suffered during the earlier years...
... and whether, this time, I can finish it.

I think I'm a teenager

Stargazy Pie is a fine, but painfully understated, institution. Every couple of months an amazing variety of performers give of their best.

Ignoring my own contribution, I felt that one group might have put two too many choruses into each song, and that another group might have performed two too many sweet songs. In both cases there was little wrong with each chorus, each song, but am I starting to exhibit the symptom I really don't believe in - the curtailed attention span?

Life... don't talk to me about life

When you dip into lots of things, you run the risk of doing them all badly. Multi-tasking is a great - and vital - thing, but for the dipper... it can end in confusion and nothingness.

I'm too hard on myself (by implication). For weeks, the overriding priority has been just one night's performance.
It's done now, and other things have to be gathered up and got on with.

It's done, but it didn't go right. Two types of audio and one of video simply did not work, but what I could perform I did well, and I'm happy with that.

Thoughts for next time...?

• Set your sights lower? No!
• Rehearse more? Maybe.
• Prove the technology in advance? Yes, yes, yes!

The Conservatives keep sending me letters

...but then so do the LibDems.  They seem to have lumped together all their lists of anybody who contacted either of them at any point during the election (like Obama without the brain) and they desperately send out scattergun emails, though they do have different formats and different messages.  Know the person who wants you to think he's your friend, at least as well as your enemy.

This is a lie!

Andrew Lansley claims to be banning below-cost selling of alcoholic drinks.  This is simply not true.

The limit of duty plus VAT takes no account of the costs of manufacture, distribution, storage and selling and therefore allows alcohol to be sold at a price below cost.

Is this a rapid change?

That emblem of standard English, Radio 4, is worrying me (again). The word "estimate" is pronounced to rhyme with "mutt" not "mate" when it's a verb. "Contribute" and "distribute" are pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable: I was always taught to stress the second, and I think I still do.

The actual change is not much of a worry. It was always a bit daft to say conTRIbute but contriBUtion, but then how much better is CONtribute and contriBUtion? The speed of the change is surprising, however. Either I haven't been listening properly, or this has happened in about five years.

Tuition fees? Who pays?

Opponents of the coalition government scream that tuition fees have been trebled, and "good" universities do little to disabuse them. A new generation is politicised - in an initially scattergun/scatterbrained direction - and Aaron Porter is kidnapped/kettled by the people he was elected to represent. Another day on the political front line.

First the good bits...

• the coalition government is piling more resources into further education
• the coalition government is including part-time students in the loans/grants scheme, where before they really did have to pay up-front
• given where they start from, the new loan repayment scheme is much "fairer" than what it follows (it doesn't change anything for those who are already facing a levy when they get to £15k pa)
• that's about it, though it isn't nothing

Now the bad bits...

• withdrawing most, or all, government funding from university teaching is a powerfully symbolic move which I would also label despicable
• expecting a large proportion of young people - from whatever background - to start their working lives with a sizeable loan hanging over them goes against every change we need to make in our thinking about money
• hey kid, it's OK to have a loan, it's OK that you never had to prove you could pay it back, and - you know what's best about this? - most of you won't have to!

I'm laughing all the way to hell.

Sex offenders get up the nose

The UK Supreme Court has decreed that sex offenders should have the right to seek to be removed from the sexual offenders' register, the right to demonstrate that they have changed. Parliament - all three main front benches - strutted its opposition to the idea. I have no doubt that the Sun's presses are melting with indignation as I write.

This is a difficult subject, but the establishment reaction to it is predictably ridiculous. The decision was that there should be a right to "seek" a change, not to expect one. The convicted offender would have to demonstrate a change.  The last figures I saw suggested that only a third of convicted sex offenders actually re-offend.  How is this different from an application for parole?

From observation of actual cases and from a lot of reading, my conclusion is that there is a spectrum here. A "paedophile" is someone who feels sexual attraction to inappropriately young people (how young is defined differently by various groups).  Not all "paedophiles" actually do anything about it, and not all of those that do repeat the offence.

Some "paedophiles" are extremely nasty and extremely dangerous.  Some are not so bad.  And some people on the sex offenders register were sixteen-year-old boys caught having sex with their fifteen-year-old girlfriends. I've given up on the tabloids, but it's Parliament's job to think carefully about things like this.

The ratchet effect in politics

As a citizen of the UK it is far too easy to...

1. lay into the Conservatives for their ideological obsession with privatisation
2. support the aims and some of the methods of the coalition because you are (still, just about) a LibDem
3. lay into public bodies because of your own experience
4. suspect private bodies for the same reason
5. lay into the Labour party for just carrying on Thatcher's work

... but (as I once delighted in reminding a Conservative MP twice my age) life isn't that simple.

One of the main strands of coalition thinking is to offer the opportunity to deliver public services to "any willing provider". As well as opening up the profit pot for the United Healths, Bupas, Capitas and Sercos of this world, much is made of the idea that people currently working in the public sector will set up cooperatives to do what they know so well, but do it better.

The health sector is perhaps the biggest and most symbolic example of this move, but there are also free schools (inspired by local groups of parents and teachers they say, but also an opportunity for faith groups to spread their influence, and in many cases managed by private companies - see the names above), and others.

Many arguments can be had here, but the thing that worries me tonight is - cruel cliche - the slippery slope. Once you open up a public service to competition (started a long time before the current government and promoted energetically by Labour), it is hard to imagine that change being reversed. When the market has its claws in, and European competition law is the regime, is there really more than one possible direction of travel?

What happens when the group of parents who started the free school breaks up - people move on, Toby Young's kids get their A-levels? What happens when one of the driving individuals who makes your health co-op sing leaves to look after a baby?

A new parent, with children of the right age, a new consultant may step up and everything may carry on beautifully. But if the recruit is not there the critical mass may be lost, and if the school or the service has worked well so far, somebody has to decide how to support and maintain it. A new set of parents has not come forward, a new co-operative is hardly likely to spring up in the same area and the same speciality, so who is left to do the job?

A big organisation, probably, which can easily reallocate resources to take on a new responsibility. The NHS, the Department for Education... why not? Because once these services are out in the free market world it is perhaps even illegal to bring them back in. Again, the names above, these organisations will suffer no such restrictions.

I put it no more strongly than to ask: is this really what we want?

What's wrong with the idea of UFOs?

Nothing.  It could be a jumbo jet, a cricket ball or an alien space craft.  If it abducts you, cricks your neck or hits you in the face you might have some evidence, but otherwise it's just something in the sky that you CAN'T IDENTIFY.

Mubarak and British banks

Apparently the Bank of England cannot freeze Mubarak's many millions in London banks without an external request (from the EU, UN or a new Egyptian government).  So Mr Cameron should have a quick word with the appropriate EU commissioner to suggest this move.  In fact, the request should have been made several times already.

Fish heal heart damage!

This looks like an interesting field of study, but some of the media coverage behind the image of a plucky (almost cuddly) little fish has rested on some strange pseudo-science.

To study the mechanisms by which zebra fish can rebuild damaged heart muscle may well be valuable. (Newts have the same capacity, but are perhaps a little less sexy.) We may not want to address the question of how the damage is initially inflicted.

Most of the descriptions of the project seem to have been quite reasonable. In fact, most of them were just regurgitations of the same press release. However, at least one BBC report suggested this was a capability we humans had lost over the millennia (now what would the selective advantage of that be?) since - as we all know - we were all fish once. They don't seem to have realised that not all fish can do this so, unless most species in the world have also lost it in development, it wasn't a very sensible addition to the story.

By the way, experiments with rats (even less sexy) in 2008 showed that injecting a drug cocktail into a damaged heart could stimulate some regrowth. But this is a new campaign, and I wish it well while feeling some sympathy for the zebra fish who will be laying down their lives for us.

When prices rise...

The price of wheat and other basic food commodities is rising again. Does that mean everybody in the world pays more for their daily bread? No, it means that there isn't enough to go round, so those who can afford it pay the higher price and those who can't afford it go without.

Humour me for a moment

Greek civilisation preceded West European expansion by many years and it is often accorded a further kind of precedence. The Greeks made so many early steps in maths, philosophy and literature, it is argued. We just end up recycling their ideas in so many fields. They were therefore "better", and modern civilisation is degenerate by comparison.

Imagine for a moment that these things happened in a different order, with Britain, France, Germany etc developing the resources to support a rich country by 100BCE and Greece following on 1500 years later. Might Shakespeare and his contemporaries have developed all the basic themes of poetry and drama, and Roger Bacon of philosophy? Might Euripides have written a version of Hamlet? Might the French have had a word for it?

As counterfactuals go, this one is so hard to set up that it falls almost immediately. Just hold on to it for long enough to wonder whether the "superiority" of a culture relates to anything more than its coming first.

I'm glad you bought that up

We’ve all heard somebody on the news talking about the priminister at the generelection. It’s because they’re in a hurry, so words get run together. We all do it in normal conversation – things like I’ll be back, bacon neggs.

There are some long words that lose whole syllables as a matter of course. People say vetinarian instead of veterinarian, respitory instead of respiratory. Homogenous is just about accepted as a synonym for homogeneous, and it’s not exactly surprising that a reporter faced with the phrase quantitative easing comes out with quantitive.

Going the other way, coverage of the Cleveland child abuse scandal in 1987 featured the word dilatation, which I took to be an incorrect form of dilation. My paper dictionary has it as the preferred word, which seems daft, considering the normal way we play with Latin words in English, but dilation is definitely the commoner.

Does any of this matter? Most of the time, not much, though it would be depressing if people were to become incapable of using the full words, in writing particularly (or particuly as you sometimes hear).

A closely related observation is the increasing disappearance of the letter r in words such as brought. For some time, this was the only example I noticed (and Sebastian Faulks wrote about it a few years ago in the Observer), but the movement appears to be accelerating. I’ve heard boardcasting and infastructure, perlifically for prolifically, and many more.

Again, this is rather lazy, and it could become confusing when people move from simply reading the word without the r to wondering why the letter is there on the page at all. In the case of bought/brought, however, there is a difference of meaning. These are two different words which can often be used correctly in the same context to mean different things. I heard someone respond to the observation that she had bought some items with a rather acerbic “Yes, I bought them and brought them.”.

A window on the world

I was listening to some Bartok on Youtube (Cantata Profana) when a panel came up to say Mubarak was about to speak. Click and over to alJazeera English, some thrilling crowd noises then Mubarak’s disappointing TV address. That crowd can bellow!

The alJazeera commentators are saying that the protests will grow tomorrow. What’s the betting that things will start getting hotter tonight?