Month: August 2003

I’d normally treat email as private correspondence, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Fiona is apparently reading this book, about a line of horses from which hers is descended (bear with me, it’s worth it). Ada Lovelace is involved, which is bizarre enough, but Fiona’s mail consists of the following quote:

In the winter of 1873 they travelled into the Algerian desert where Lady Anne fell seriously ill. A potentially akward situation was saved only by the arrival of Ralph Wentworth who was following behind and came to the rescue swathed, as his custom was, in a multitude of coats and cloaks, but bare headed and without any other luggage than his violin, a filter and a huge Bologna sausage purchased in Italy.

Genius. Bonus marks for spotting the titular reference of this post, incidentally.

Having annoyingly missed the first showing on BBC4, I was determined to catch the adaptation of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen tonight. Well worth the time – it’s a crying shame it’s not already as famous as the seminal Life Story dramatisation of the discovery of the structure of DNA, since it’s clearly in the same league.

Without doing a whole heap of research, I’m not sure sure what to make of the central premise. The play is based around a meeting between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg – two of the prime movers behind quantum theory, and colleagues before war divided them – in Copenhagen, in 1941. Heisenberg was running the German nuclear programme, and he visited his old mentor… why?

Frayn reaches not so much a conclusion as an observation. Had the two of them fallen into their old ways, he posits, they’d have realised that the then-common assumption about the quantity of uranium-235 needed to make a critical mass was false. Had Heisenberg worked out that only about fifty kilogrammes of fissile material was needed, we may now discuss ‘London’ and ‘Paris’ rather than ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nagasaki.’ There are, of course, a whole bundle of suppositions in there, but nevertheless it’s a chillingly fascinating thought experiment.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded how much I miss doodling with quantum mechanics. All those Schrödinger equation squiggles, Hermitian operators, psi-squared probability functions. It’s glorious, insane, beautiful, incomprehensible, tantalising stuff, as a model of the world – still the best model we have – flits across the page, always slightly out of reach.

It’s a good thing my copy of Gasiorowicz is 200 miles away, else I’d be flicking through it and reminding myself just how much I’ve forgotten in the last decade.

It’s a fair cop. This I think does satisfy me that irony is alive and well and favoured by… the Republican party? Apparently so. As the Inquirer notes with traditional ill grammar, the party is fundraising through:

underpaid people in Harayana helping robots to call possibly out of work Americans because of a widespread policy of corporate outsourcing

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’ve missed the other flat I saw at the weekend. It was on the market a whole five days, gosh. Two more viewings tonight…

[sigh] So, since reading about Greg Dyke’s plan to put the BBC archive online, I’ve been wondering what they plan to do about rights. In the rush to praise the Beeb this has rather been overlooked. Let me explain.

When you make a TV programme, you (usually) pay people for the work they contribute. In the case of creative talent – presenters, actors, voice-over performers, musicians, and in times gone by directors – the rights bought are extremely specific. Usually, the broadcaster only has the right to show a programme two or three times. Additional broadcasts or export sales trigger extra payments, called ‘residuals.’ This is the way the industry works, and how people make their living. It’s perfectly possible to have a system where people are ‘bought out’ of all their rights by the broadcaster at the start: indeed, I work on such terms – I get paid once and the production company owns the product of my work. But still, my programmes are encumbered by presenters’, music and occasionally archive video/stills reproduction rights. You could change this for future series by spending more upfront, but you can’t do that retrospectively.

For much of the BBC’s archive, they simple don’t have the artists’ permission to reproduce the show – until relatively recently, digital non-broadcast formats (ie. internet delivery) simply won’t be mentioned in the contract. Even if rights can be secured, the time required to do so for even a small fraction of the BBC’s archive would be immense.

So… ‘putting the BBC’s archive online for the public’ – which is what Dyke has been reported and praised as saying – implies renogotiation of rights deals en masse, right? Er… well, no, because that’s not what he promised, as even cursory journalism reveals.

Here’s the full text of Greg Dyke’s speech. In particular, here’s the section where he describes what he actually has in mind:

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use.

Now, this isn’t what I’ve seen people online – including me – discussing. It isn’t even close. We’ll get clips of Walking with Dinosaurs (BBC in-house production, available without voiceover, and they own the music), but the full run of Blake’s 7 or any of the costume dramas? That’s not what Dyke’s talking about.

It’s still a fine endeavour, but it’s emphatically not ‘putting the BBC’s archive online.’ Not by a long shot.

[update: here’s an example of the sort of thing that’s around on the web. And of course, I fell for it myself; not a shock, since the original BBC News Online article makes the same mistake! C’mon folks, let’s check facts with the original sources!. If we’re going to play at being journos, let’s do it properly.]

A lovely flat with a corner bay lounge: ‘has potential’ rather than ‘walk-in condition,’ but I’d rather have character and some spare deposit than someone else’s idea of a perfect kitchen.

Only, there’s a minor snag. Just a teensy one. The surveyor’s report: ‘The roof’s about to fall in.’

Up in the attic there are decaying lumps of hardboard vaguely keeping the water out, with buckets helping out. In the surveyor’s estimate it’s one winter away from serious damp problems through the side walls, and not much further off fears of serious roof failure.

Now, I was expecting the survey to pick up on pretty much everything – ie. to be fairly dour – but I don’t think it’s normal for the chap to call and say ‘Tell you what – I’ll spare you the written report, so long as you don’t buy it.’

Dang. I can pick ’em.

Just back from my first decent (ie. non-commuting) run on the new bike. Yes, I know I’ve had it for weeks, but this really was the first chance I’ve had. Well, second maybe, but anyway… still nothing spectacular, just a bit of an explore up to Pollock Country Park, past the Burrell Collection, then looping back to the Clyde and along some of the cycle tracks there, on a glorious late afternoon. Only about 20 miles. Some observations:

• There are more cycle routes and tracks in Glasgow than I’d assumed.
• There’s also more glass than seems remotely reasonable. Oh, and a greater variation in track surfacing than I could have guessed. Who’s bright idea was it to use cobbles on a dedicated bike path, then?
• The bike still seriously outclasses me. It wants to spin along at 22mph – I’m staggering at 18. It’s glorious, and I now know how it handles in fast descents up to 32mph. The steering stiffens gradually, rendering it increasingly stable at speed. It’s textbook stuff, and absolutely delightful in practice. I can’t wait to lug the thing up to Glencoe.
• Over 100 miles on the clock now, and it needs that free first service. Everything’s a little loose/bedded in: it needs a sympathetic hand with a set of allen keys and some grease.
• The ride isn’t as harsh as I’d feared, but I really do need to fit the bar ends. The direct steering and flat bars are perfect for commuting, but on longer runs I really do need the forward extensions to avoid doing nasty things to my wrists. Ow.
• In the afternoon sun, the riverside is surprisingly pretty. Glasgow isn’t a beautiful town in any standard sense, but it’s by no means ugly. It’s the sort of place you can respect.

Now – time for a shower. Eu.

No, I’m not there, but it looks like there’s some mighty weird stuff going down. On Friday Tony Ball, BSkyB’s Chief Executive, suggested that the BBC should be forced to sell off its six most-popular series each year. Now, on cursory inspection that would appear to be an unworkably daft idea, but on closer examination I reckon it turns out to be utterly stark-staring bonkers. Unless, that is, one’s goal is to render the BBC operationally unviable. And as the BBC themselves pointed out, this is Murdoch we’re talking about.

Next up: Greg Dyke has apparently revealed plans to put the BBC’s back-catalogue online, free for non-commercial use. Which at first glance would appear to be an excellent way of sinking a small fortune on storage, digitising time, and bandwidth, but in practice is exactly the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. Who says Dyke doesn’t understand the term ‘public service broadcasting’? Of course, they’ll probably use some whacko DRM-enabled Windows Media Player codec, but that’s a different kettle of (exceedingly smelly) fish. And what does it mean for the DVD sales of BBC Worldwide? Should I not have bought Blackadder?

Dyke also had some reassuring things to say about the need for a strong ITV. Well, he muttered the phrase, anyway. ITV itself seems so caught up in the ongoing merger mania that one doesn’t often hear such direct drum-beating from them – so it’s kind of Dyke to step in and fill the deafening silence. He specifically raises the subject of broadcasting fees, which as advertising revenue falls are a touchy subject.

The future of ITV is in some ways more interesting than that of the BBC, since the two are theoretically linked. That is, they’re supposed to benchmark each other to similarly high standards; which is increasingly difficult as ITV’s programming budget shrinks. But hey, now we’re back to the subject of the BBC’s competitive/commercial behaviour, which is where we started. And I’m hardly an impartial observer.