The Tragedy of the Railways

I went to York at the weekend by train, and visited the National Railway Museum. (It's fantastic, by the way, if you like that kind of thing.) But what it really made clear is what a wonderful we used to have in the National Railway system, and what a sad and fallible thing we are left with. Surely it has to be in the national economic interest to have a railway system that works well? Surely we have learnt the lesson that private capital cannot do this kind of thing, with its very long term investment horizons and its low direct return on capital well?

The fact that the indirect return on capital via higher economic activity is very high is irrelevant to a traditional common stock company: so just renationalise the whole thing, huh, and have done with it.

When all you have is a hammer...

...everything looks like a nail. I took this for another purpose entirely-illustrating the grotesque overuse of the normal distribution in finance, as it happens-but I like it so much it is going up here.

Another triumph for America

If I ever need a hip replacement, I hope they give me whatever Floyd Landis is getting. It would be rather good to win a stage of the Tour de France.

Postscript: it appears I wasn't wrong in the implication here. See this for the breaking news.

Not the first formula you'd pick

Formula One is boring. It used not to be, but it is now. There's no overtaking, innovation is mostly concentrated in aerodynamics (which you need a wind tunnel to appreciate) and tires (which are anyway supplied by one of two companies). Moreover how you are treated depends on who you are - Schumacher and Ferrari usually get an easy ride from the stewards. But irritation aside let's look at this from the game theory perspective: how would you set up the rules of F1 if you were starting from a clean piece of paper to make it as exciting to view as possible?

Kimi's Maclaren in the window of a furniture shop near my office recently.

Clearly one issue is the amount of competition, and that is driven by money. Fine: cap all the team's budgets at $100M including the driver's salaries. Then people would be forced to chose between spending on the driver and spending on the car. Ferrari are commonly supposed to spend roughly four times that amount, so it should be a good leveller. Next, make the circuits more overtaking-friendly. The last grand prix at Magny-Cours was a great example of how not to do it. Finally, let's encourage some innovation in making fast, energy efficient cars: put a limit on the total amount of fuel that can be used for the whole weekend, including qualifying, and set it at around 75% of the current usage. Finally, actually enforce the rules on bad driving: if a driver is judged to endanger or end the race of another deliberately or through lack of skill or care, dock him ten points and make him start the next race at the back of the grid.

And can we ban race radios and indeed any other communication from the team to the riders in the tour de france at the same time?

Zizou the pawn

Much of the media furore over Zinedine Zidane misses the point. It doesn't matter if you love him or hate him, think he is a talented footballer, a shining example of cultural integration or merely a yob. What matters is his visibility. If we want children to take away the lesson that it's OK to head butt people, then be gentle on him. If we don't, then he should be punished severely - fined, vilified and, yes, prosecuted for assault. For better or for worse, Zizou is a pawn in a media game, and the outcome of that game will be highly instructive to many, many people.

You still know best Tony

The energy review, to no one's surprise, has concluded that nuclear power is now economic. How could one possibly know? In order to make that determination, you need to know how much it costs to decommission a nuclear power station and store the waste. The former is tricky: you are estimating the cost of a complicated piece of engineering thirty or more years in the future (and we all know how costs tend to escalate with big engineering projects). But the latter? We aren't talking 30 years. We are talking a million, or at least until we figure out how to make nuclear waste less radioactive. How on earth do you estimate secure storage costs for that long? And if you can't, is it not reasonable to conclude that there is no way one can decide whether nuclear power is economic or not?

The resolution wars

Digital cameras are not high enough resolution yet. What, I hear you cry, you can buy 12MP for under a grand now. Well, yes, you can. But that's not enough. The problem is that this particular game is set up for standard sized photographs. 5 inches by 7, say, or perhaps a little larger. Big in this context is A4 sized. And that's fair enough. But I want to put my pictures on the wall, so 20 inches by 30 is a minimum. A decent printer gives 360 dots per inch, but let's be charitable and call it 200. Then 20 inches is 4000 pixels and 30 is 6000 so 20 x 30 is 24MP. And remember that's a minimum. Ideally I'd like to be able to crop that image a little, and print it larger. So really 50MP is a sensible resolution to aim for. It might be a while before I buy a digital camera...

Ten pounds each for Albert

Look at this delightful (or hideous, if you have similar taste to me) structure. It's the Albert Memorial. Now riddle me this. This edifice was recently restored, at considerable cost: over £10M. As a Londoner, would you have put a pound in the box to renovate it? As a visitor, would you have paid £10 or more to see the brand new regilded structure? Does it create enough extra economic activity to pay for its cost of capital? Or is it just another Victorian monstrosity which should have been left to die?

Performance Enhancing Lawyers

The cyclists who came second, third and fourth in last year's Tour de France are implicated (although not convicted) in a doping scandal. Yet the winner has just won a libel victory against the Sunday Times for suggesting he wasn't clean. Let's just think a moment: Lance Armstrong was competing against the best cyclists in the world in the supreme trial of endurance. Suppose they were on drugs. He won. Then either (a) he is an incredible athlete, head and shoulders above even his performance enhanced peers; or (b) ...

Publish and be redeemed

Helpful and encouraging news on open access scientific publishing (Deus ex macchiato, ibid) from today's Guardian:

The push for open access to publicly funded academic research was boosted yesterday as an umbrella body supported placing subscription journals' articles on the internet for free...

The Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, have all opted to make online archiving a requirement of grants from this October.