More background, less news.
Topic: Misc.
Here's a great piece of writing from the first blog I ever read:

http://blog.bearstrong.net/001748.html

essentially arguing that it's more important to read about the background to world events than to follow the news day by day.

"See the news not as your primary source of information, but as suggestions for further reading."

Very good advice.

Flight, Speed and Sound.
Topic: Misc.
I live under the flightpath to Heathrow. It's a mixed blessing. Sometimes I sit on the balcony and gaze up in wonder at the planes overhead. Later, when back inside, I curse the noise they make. This week saw the first visit to the UK of the Airbus 380. It's designed to be bigger, more fuel efficient and best of all from my perspective, quieter than its predecessors.

Notice that I don't say faster. I was checking out its details on the BBC website and was reminded of something that Roger Kirkham wrote last year over at Roger's Rants:

http://rogers-rants.blogspot.com/2005/04/new-airbus.html

quote:

"[H]ere's a hard-to-believe dirty little secret about civil aviation known only to anoracks and insiders:

Over the past 40 years or so, civil aircraft have become slower. Yes, slower. Not just a fraction slower either - we're taking about 15% slower as compared to the faster models in service from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. And that 15% isn't trivial over the distances jets cover - add that amount to the ratbastard tedium of a ten hour flight back in 1965 and you get an extra hour and a half of bored-to-tears-misery in 2005. 90 minutes of time - the one commodity you can never buy back.

To make this regression even more painful, new slower aircraft are designed to have less space per person inside, and the inside itself is colder and less airconditioned than ever before (leg room, cabin heating, and a/c all cost money). There's no magic wand to solve all this overnight, but the A380 may be a step in the right direction. It's claimed to cruise at the very fast speed of 630mph, a useful 25mph faster than its rival Boeing 747, although incredibly, still slower than the legendary Convair 900 series from the 1960s, with hindsight the biggest lost opportunity in civil aviation history."

I'm therefore saddened to see that according to a comparison on the BBC's website, the Airbus 380 (Mach 0.85) is actually slower than the Boeing 747(Mach 0.855):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4990780.stm

Can anyone comment on this?

Some random poker thoughts.
Topic: Poker
Bunching in Online play.

I've been playing online solidly for about three months now and am starting to miss playing live (played cash at the Vic once since the start of February). One thing I can't understand about online players is why they all bunch together when games start. What I mean is that if someone starts a new game by sitting down in seat four, there's a very strong chance that the next person joins in seat five or three. If he comes into seat three, there's a great chance that the next person comes in at two or five. And so on.

"So what?" you might ask. Well the reason I think it's silly is that you can get situations where a nine handed table has 5 players seated at seats three through to seven. If someone is scanning through the lobby looking for a game to join and sees this, they might be put off joining if they are going to have to wait for the big blind for several hands because there is no gap. They might go to a game where they can get a seat sooner. That's why if I join a new game I will sit such that there are gaps on both sides of me. I want to leave a seat open for the action junkies. There may not be many people who are so desperate to get straight into action that it will affect their choice of table. But they're the ones I want to play against!

Money Mugged.

I've been thinking some more about 'Deal or No Deal'. Having read the excellent 'Fooled by Randomness', I continue to be impressed by Noel Edmonds' ability to make comments about the process of the game when it's pure chance. Things like 'We're on a knife edge here' and 'This could be the turning point' stand out. But neither is as good as 'If you get money greedy, you could get money mugged'. The latter could make an excellent theme for one of those T-Shirts you see for sale in the back pages of Private Eye or Viz: a picture of Noel Edmonds and the message 'Don't get money mugged'. Can't do any worse than the ones of Jim Bowen and Andrew Marr.

On the subject of T-Shirts, I would love to know whether anyone's got the guts to wear one of Andy Ward's more defeatist poker T-shirts in a big event. I mean the ones with one-line messages like 'Bokked', 'Felted', and 'Rivered'. I reckon that wearing one of them while playing a $10k event is the ultimate sign of confidence. It's telling the world that you're not supersticious and fear nothing. Good on you, if you're brave enough.

Coming back to 'Deal or No Deal' though, why can't people see that there is only one skill in this game of random choices? It's manipulating the banker. If you are prepared to take a deal that's below the value of the average remaining box, then you want that offer to be as high as possible. The banker is watching the player and will take any weakness as a sign that he can get away with a low offer. Players should fight back by dismissing his offers without an apparent consideration in the early rounds. It could make a difference of twenty grand or so later on. Nail-biting could cost you a lot of money here. So why do so many people display weakness?

Does anyone remember Amy?
Topic: Misc.
I was reading the greatest blog ever the other day when I was reminded of a 1980s advertising campaign that caught the imagination of the boys at my school when I was a teenager.

It appeared on bus shelters and showed a small girl with the message 'My name is Amy and I like slugs and snails' written in a child's handwriting. All very cute, but what was unusual was that there was no product. Nothing.

Someone stole one of these posters from a bus shelter and stuck it on the back wall of class 4EP and it stayed there for a week or more. Looking back I'm surprised that the teachers didn't rip it down, but perhaps they were as perplexed as we were.

One morning on the bus ride in to school, I noticed that the Amy poster on the shelter in front of my school had been replaced with an advert for eggs. When I got into class 4EP for morning registration, the egg poster was on the back wall instead of Amy! If whoever did that is somehow reading this blog, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. That made my day.

Meanwhile I vaguely recall reading about the Amy campaign about a year later in one of the Sunday supplement magazines. Apparently it was some sort of advertising industry exercise to test the effectiveness of bus shelter advertising, or something like that.

I've tried finding reference to this Amy campaign through Google but haven't found anything. Am I the only person who remembers it?

Hojjatieh
Topic: Politics
Caught an interesting interview with American crime fiction writer Robert Ferrigno yesterday. I have read one of his books, a serial killer detective story called 'Flinch' and thought it was good. But his most recent book, "Prayers for the Assassin", is a departure from that genre. In it he describes an Islamified USA in 2025, with a broken-off Christian South and Nevada and Utah as independent states. He spent a year researching material for the novel so I was interested in his views on the situation in Iran. At the end of the interview he advises listeners to do a Google search on the word 'Hojjatieh'. That's the name of the sect to which Iran's president is said to belong. A search for it on Wikipedia reveals:

They believe that chaos must be created to hasten the return of the Mahdi, the 12th Shi'ite Imam. Only then, they argue, can a genuine Islamic republic be established.

Quite shocking stuff - a deliberate desire to create chaos in order to bring about the return of the 'hidden' 12th iman! If you're one of those people who thinks that George Bush wishes to bring about armageddon because of a prophesy in the book of Daniel, this ought to worry you a hundred times more!

Debunking a couple of poker myths.
Topic: Poker
Here are two myths concerning the British poker scene that I would like to debunk:

'You'll be all right!'

It's sad to see the otherwise brilliantly well informed Joe Beevers attributing the phrase 'You'll be all right' to Neil Channing. Although the latter uses it quite a lot, the phrase belongs firmly to Francis Rohan. I thought Miros had alluded to this somewhere on his blog, but I can't find it anywhere. Perhaps it was a comment on someone else's. Whatever the case, the next time you rubbish like this:

In the immortal words of the unknown Gutshot member 'You'll be alright'.

You'll know better.


The demise of UKPOKER

Another common myth is that Mark Strahan's poker website fell into decline after he made it pay-per-view. While it's probably true that this led to a fall in traffic, the more significant decline in its popularity and influence happened long before that. It was when he switched forum providers away from Bravenet towards some other system that readers found less user-friendly. Traffic nosedived immediately. Several people wrote in to request that he revert to Bravenet*, but Mark was adamant.

I recall seeing Jon Shoreman (who has rival site Poker In Europe) and hearing him say about it - 'It's great! The more people tell him he's made a mistake, the more stubbornly he sticks to it'. Mark did eventually revert to Bravenet about a year later, but the damage was irreversible. One reason for this was that not longer after the forum change, the Hendon Mob website started. Within a few weeks someone posted a piece about the failure of an attempted online poker site that had sought out investors from the British poker community. The post was taken down after a few days because it was considered defamatory. (I printed it because I could see this would happen). While it was on display, traffic to the Hendon Mob forum exploded and it grew from there. That was where Strahan blew it.

* The reason for the switch was that he wanted to save the $99 per annum fee to keep Bravenet free of pop-ups. I think this proved to be a false economy in the long run.

Some thoughts on Television
Topic: Television
Utility is non-linear.

'Deal or No Deal' has been a surprise hit. It's such a remarkably simple idea that it's a surprise it hadn't been done before. I've watched bits of it and to be fair, although I know it's drivel, it has held my attention for 15 minutes or so, which isn't bad.

As a gambler, what interests me is how people decide whether to deal or not. Most people are very risk-averse from what I've seen. For instance in the repeat I just saw today, a woman faced five boxes with a combined total worth of #61k. So her 'equity' was just under #12k. She took a deal at #6,125.

Should she be criticised for this? I think many people would take a deal that was below their equity. In fact, I reckon that the show should be retitled to refect that. I propose 'Utility is non-linear'. Catchy isn't it?

It's obviously the case that your happiness would increase more if your net worth rose from nothing to #1m than if it rose from #1m to #2m. But where do we draw the line? What would influence us? I think that the presence of a live audience makes people take poor deals. I think some people are afraid of looking stupid and walking away with 10p after being offered #6k.

"If it's 9.30, then that's not the disease".

I'm a big fan of the medical drama House on Channel Five, Thursday nights. Hugh Laurie is brilliant as the misanthropic doctor - a truly inspired piece of casting. Having made his living playing stupid English men, who would have thought of having him as an intelligent American? Not me, that's for sure.

But much as a I love the show, it has a big flaw that is common to other "detective" stories. You know that the solution will only be discovered three minutes before the end of the show. So when it looks like the patient is only suffering from a simple lung infection and a course of antibiotics will do the trick, you can be absolutely sure he'll convulse on the floor with a bleeding foot fifteen seconds later.

I first noticed this problem when I used to watch WWF wrestling years ago when Dominic shared the flat with me. We could tell that the main event wasn't over by looking at the clock. So the fact that The Undertaker was pinning Val Venus to the canvas at 11.51pm meant absolutely nothing. There was at least 6 minutes left to go. I found there was more suspense when we taped the show and watched it the next day. I'm not sure how that works for House, Morse, Prime Suspect etc. Probably best to watch a tape of it and cover up all the clocks in the room.

Team Poker

I was idly scanning the channels a couple of nights ago when I suddenly realised that I was watching John Kabbaj's wife playing poker. It was part of some dire 'team' poker show. It was such crap that I'm not going to bother looking up its name. Apart from the obvious fact that poker is not a team event, I hated it anyway. In the Russia vs Ireland heat that I was watching, they had given the Russians red shirts to wear ... with the Hammer and Sickle embossed over the chest!

The Soviet Union was disbanded in 1991. Has nobody told Sky this? I felt genuinely embarrassed for the Russians. Some of them may have lost family members to the salt mines of Siberia or the famines of the early 20th century. Will they give the Germans swastikas to wear?

Energy? Oh that's free!
Topic: Misc.
I was looking at Wikipedia this morning, doing some background reading as I do every day, when I decided to check out estimates of the oil deposits under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I'm interested to know how long the US could survive without foreign oil. The estimate I found is that there is enough to supply 100 per cent of the US's needs for between 215 and 590 days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Refuge_drilling_controversy

Taking one year as a rough mid-range and adding this to the stocks held privately and in the Strategic Petroleum reserve (another five months combined) gives 17 months, excluding production from California and Texas, for which I don't have the figures. That gives America about a year and a half of independent foreign policy.

Of course in reality it's hard to imagine the US not being supplied by Canada, which is already its largest foreign supplier. And there's Mexico too, which is unlikely to cut supplies to the US. I reckon that the US could survive without Middle-Eastern oil longer than the Middle-East could survive without US money.

But it's all irrelevant as it turns out, at least if the British hacker wanted for extradition to the US is correct. He insists that while hacking into the computers of all the US armed forces, plus the Department of Defence and NASA, he uncovered evidence that the US is covering up the discovery of alien technology

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4977134.stm

So that's it folks. No need to worry about Hubbert's peak, the Chinese in Sudan or any of the other bugbears that bother my most persistent readers. Just get that alien technology in your car!

It would be great if it were true. Alas I fear someone is setting up a great insanity defence.

Mohammed Afroze.
Topic: Politics
Hat tip to James Feeny for pointing me to a page on the British National Party's website, which claims that a fifth bomb was intended to explode in the London Tube network on July 7th, directly underneath the Thames, thereby drowning thousands of passengers. Allegedly the police foiled the attack the day before.

I can't give a lot of credence to the story, given its source. While I don't want to call the Party liars on my blog, I can imagine some readers of this blog drawing the conclusion that the story has been fabricated to create animosity towards foreigners and non-white Britons. So that isn't why I mention it.

Instead, what I find interesting about the whole affair is that there is someone in jail right now charged with plotting to destroy Tower Bridge and the House of Commons on September 11th 2001. And I'm fairly sure that most people have never heard of him. His name is Mohammed Afroze and he's serving a seven-year jail term in India for "criminal conspiracy, conspiracy to disturb relations between friendly nations, and forging documents".

The Times has the story here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1705386,00.html

I find it remarkable that this story is never discussed. If someone in the BNP thought that a scare story about more bombings in London would get them publicity, they were wrong.

Poker sponsorship.
Topic: Poker
This is very funny. Because it's all true:

http://www.thepokerchronicles.com/archives/000773.html

Moral comparisons.
Topic: Politics
Does anyone here read Juan Cole? I do from time to time. I respect the fact that he can read and speak Arabic (more the former than the latter) and that he puts in a lot of effort to pick up stories from the middle eastern media. But I'm often left baffled by the moral comparisons that he draws. Here is an instance from June 26th last year (see bottom of page):

"By the way, rightwing US commentators often slam Iranian elections because the candidates are vetted by the clerical Guardian Council for their loyalty to the Khomeinist ideology. In the past two years, the vetting has grown ever more rigorous, excluding relative liberals from running for parliament or president. The commentators are correct.

However, in the United States the "first past the post" system of winner-takes-all elections and the two-party system play a similar role in limiting voters' choices of candidates. Neither libertarians nor socialists are likely to be serious contenders for the presidency in the United States, since neither of the two dominant parties will run them. The US approach to limiting voter choice is systemic and so looks "natural," but US voters have a narrower range of practical choices in candidates than virtually any other democratic society."

Bizarre! He's equating direct 'vetting' of candidates by the Guardian Council for conformance with the ideology of one person, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, with indirect 'vetting' of candidates for conformance with the views of the majority of American voters! His comparison takes no account of the fact that in the former case, candidates get rejected for having views that might actually be popular with voters, while in the latter case they are rejected because their views won't be. How can someone so otherwise intelligent make such a fatuous comparison? The world of academia seems to be full of this.

Steyn on the Palestine panacea.
Topic: Politics
A writer to Mark Steyn says what some people, including some readers of this blog, think:

Thanks, for your opinions. My, opinion, is: give back Palestine, to the Palestinians. Then the Middle East problems would be gone. And, no 9-11.

Dave Salvador
Hanford, California


MARK REPLIES: Who's gonna "give" it back? You? Is it yours? Is it the international community’s? And if you're giving it "back" to someone, shouldn't the British and the Turks be first in line? And, if we have to "give back" territory, can we give back your town to the Mexicans? Oh, and if you think Palestine is the root cause of 9/11 then perhaps you should read the texts of Osama bin Laden's various keynote addresses, where it's a lower priority than the US troops in Saudi Arabia and the end of the Caliphate in 1922 and the fall of Andalucia in 1492 and even the independence of East Timor. A whole lotta givin' back in there.

It's easy to take refuge in the "soft option". Even assuming you could take Palestine off the Israelis and give it to someone else, that would make not a jot of difference to the spread of the Islamist ideology. Indeed, in Europe – which is, after all, where the 9/11 cell was formed – Bosnia and Chechnya were far bigger motivators for Islamism. But dream on. A lot of other folks are.

I should stress that this isn't an argument against Palestinians getting something called Palestine. That may or may not be the right thing. The point is that it's not the cure-for-all-ills that some people think it is.

Have they looked behind the curtains?
Topic: Politics
As I hope readers will now realise, while I dislike Islamism and Islamists, I trust the 'Arab street' enough to think that if actally allowed to see Islamists in power, they will lose faith in them. And so it is that I'm actually quite pleased that Hamas won the Palestinian election, as it starts the process of disillusionment now rather than later.

It's looking good so far! The Palestinian Authority's Foreign Minister has managed to lose $450,000 in cash from his hotel room while on a trip to Kuwait. Yep, could have happened to anyone I suppose.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/709679.html

Remember that the authority is supposed to be broke and unable to pay its own staff's wages. No wonder the minister was so keen to keep this under wraps. It wasn't likely to stay secret in Kuwait though, as Kuwaitis remember how the Palestinian workers there welcomed the invasion by Saddam in 1990. They were not too popular after that and I'm sure the authorities didn't mind embarrassing them with exposure.

What was the money intended for? What will the unpaid civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank make of this? Or the voters in a place where GDP per head is under $1,000 per year? They deserve an answer.

World? Poker Tour.
Topic: Poker
Congratulations to regular Sleepless in Fulham reader Roland de Wolfe for winning just over $1 million at the WPT championship event in Las Vegas on Monday. It says something about the buoyancy of the poker economy that he got his million for coming third! Since learning of his big win, I've had a few thoughts about these big field poker events and I'm not sure I'm happy about my conclusions.

Firstly, the fact that he got his seven figure payout on day seven suggests to me that poker is starting to resemble those dance marathons of the depression era of America, where endurance was the key factor. This has to be to the benefit of local players, because of the jet lag and sleep adjustment factor. When I went to Austria in March to play the €2,000 NL event, I arrived the day before and got a good night's sleep. I walked to the casino from my hotel and felt lively and confident. However after nine hours I was exhausted. Clearly I'd needed more rest.

Secondly, the name World Poker Tour is increasingly inappropriate when about 90 per cent of the events are in one country. I appreciate that the US is the biggest market for the game, but some attempt to broaden the geographical base is required. This year Ultimatebet's Aruba competition, one of the few previous non-US events, drops off the schedule. So unless I'm mistaken, that only leaves Paris and the Bahamas.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that there is much that the WPT can do about it. Europe has enough players to support another event, but where is there the free space? I believe that Amsterdam has turned them down, while the EPT has signed up Barcelona, the Victoria, Baden, Copenhagen and Monte Carlo. Ireland has held some large events, but looking forward there are major legal uncertainties about the status of Irish gaming clubs. Germany has some casinos that are unsigned, but their staff are notoriously rude and unhelpful. The rake in any side games would be a joke. What does this leave? Helsinki?

For all the talk of a poker explosion, it's sad to see that there aren't many places where you can stage big events in Europe.

Provision does not require ownership.
Topic: Politics
Remember the last time that you had a really lousy time in a restaurant; rude service, poor food, dirty tables, unhygienic lavatories and over-priced drinks? Remember how you swore that you would go there again and give their accountant more money, cross your fingers and blithely hope that things would get better for your next visit?

Didn't you? OK, please yourself then. Perhaps you're one of those normal people who decided to take their business elsewhere. Like anyone would actually.

Well that's the problem with the NHS in a nutshell. You don't need to know anything about fundholding, waiting lists, citizens' charters or brain surgery. You just need to know that you pay for it in a way that’s totally different to the way you pay for everything else in life. That’s enough to make you realise that it’s doomed. It was poor under the Tories and after nearly nine years of a Labour government it’s still poor. And that’s after huge increases in tax. Why is this?

Well dare I say it, but maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that you can’t take your money away if you’re dissatisfied? Not if, like most people, you can’t afford private care. You have no threat. Targets can come and go, but the poor punter doesn’t have a choice.

I know that many people reading this will argue that the NHS was underfunded under the Tories. Maybe it was. I have no idea what the ‘correct’ budget should have been. Neither do you. Perhaps you think it would improve with more money now. Maybe it would. I don't know. But if you’ve followed the newspapers or just looked at their Jobs sections, you’ll realise that there has been a big increase in hospital administration. Was this really what the voters wanted when they booted out Major in 1997?

When health is politicised, but not privatised, politicians will still attempt to improve it. But without a free market, the mechanism to ensure that the money is well spent is very indirect. If you don’t like what the politicians are doing to the Health Service on which your life depends you can vote them out at the next election in up to five years time, but wouldn’t you rather have the option to take your business to a better performing service now?

Many Britons are proud of the NHS, believing that it’s right and proper that everyone should be able to get treatment that’s free at the point-of-service. I can understand that. So it’s fine by me if you want to make it free for everyone. But that doesn’t mean that the government needs to own the hospitals or employ any of the doctors and nurses. Provision doesn't require ownership. They are totally different concepts.

Anyone who’s travelled to the US knows this intuitively anyway. The last time I went there I had a travel insurance policy that I'd bought at the Post Office. It covered me for potential medical costs up to $10m. That is what I needed. I was under no illusion that the British Post Office actually owned any hospitals in the US, nor that it employed any doctors there. I just knew that it had made arrangements to pay for its policyholders to receive treatment should they need it. Why can't the NHS work like that either? Why can't I have insurance coverage guaranteed by the government, but with me having the choice of various competing insurance companies to select from? Hospitals that employed too many administrators and too few nurses would slowly lose custom to those who did the opposite. And this would give the health providers the incentive to cut paperwork and focus on hiring those who actually roll up their sleeves and care for the sick, instead of paper pushers. That’s what I’m interested in paying for.

It’s hard to discuss the NHS. Over the years it’s gone beyond rational discussion. But discussion is need if we’re to change it so that it saves more lives than it does. Don't take my word for it if you don't want to. See what the Observer's Health Editor said in 2001.

Why the NHS is bad for us, by Anthony Browne – Observer Health Editor 2001

In the meantime, I must weep for the opportunity that the Tories have wasted to promote this philosophy. Hague had no chance of winning the 2001 election. The voters were clearly in a mood to punish the Tories for the Major era for years to come. That was the ideal time to promote the idea of reform. It takes years for voters to consider radical change. So it’s tragic that the opposition party didn’t make the case years ago.