the corner office

The Bank of England is a great big carbuncle slapped in the middle of the Square Mile, and it feels like every time I need to traverse the City it gets in my way. This monstrous edifice with mile high walls and iron doors as high as trees, it simply doesn't care. FSCK YOU, it says, WALK AROUND ME.

A week after the riots, how exactly are you supposed to react when a young feller riding shotgun in a van sticks his head out the window as you're making your way out of Deptford, and asks you how much your bike costs?

In the end he expressed surprise at how expensive my bike wasn't (he thought it would've cost an extra zero). And I didn't even lie about the price. Honest.

Hrrm. Not that I'm suggesting that rioting hoodie monsters be treated like human-eating lions (blap blap), obviously. Nor being too apocalyptic. Just that it wouldn't surprise me if these sorts of outbreaks and random attacks happen more often in future.

Now that things seem to have quietened down, I guess the navel-gazing will begin in earnest.

There's a line, and on the other side of the line are all sorts of goodies. Now lots of people won't cross the line because they've been taught it's wrong to do so, but this isn't heaven on earth. The main reason even the most god-fearing never cross the line, is because common wisdom has it that if you cross the line, it'll be bad for you. The exact nature of 'bad' isn't that important, and in fact it's a cocktail of things. Jail, fines, guilt, ostracism, a truncheon to the head, whatever. It's an economic cost/benefit, regardless.

Then one day you're mucking about, you get carried away, maybe a bit of false bravado, and before you know it, you're across the line. And... nothing happens.

Now what?

Then you text 100 of your closest friends and tell them that you've just crossed the line and nothing happened, and man, the goodies are looking great ("Let's get some watches, man," a BBC report yesterday caught some kid saying). Many of the assumptions about the flow of information and ability to coordinate on which the current order depends are suddenly looking a little antiquated.

Now what?

So I think it comes down to consequences, or more accurately, and less politically, 'cost.' And these lines and the implied costs of crossing them are fundamental to the mechanics of society. A change in the perception of costs can't help but be followed by a change in behaviour. I think what people should really be worried about, is what's happened to the perception of cost.

Radio and news reports suggest that people now being charged are having the book thrown at them, and that many of them (including many respectably employed types, according to something I heard yesterday) have had a bit of a rude awakening. Suddenly not the brave and fearless heroes they thought they were a couple of days back. So perhaps the cost recalibration won't be that bad.

But as much as nobody's in the mood for leftie rhetoric now (yet?), the truth is lots of these kids have very little to lose by our standards. Their cost/benefit calculations are stuffed up and mutated beyond anything 'normal' citizens can fathom. Swathes of the consequence cocktail are missing or work in reverse. And now these kids have learned that the lines they respected before, no matter how tenuously, aren't so hard to cross after all.

As the wisdom goes in Africa, what to do with the lions who've tasted human blood?

A bond is an IOU. Quite literally. I remember doing a vac job at a South African bank when I was an accounting student, and we did a 'stock count' of the bank's bond holdings. This amounted to a bunch of us sitting in a room with a big box, and inside the box were prettily-printed certificates from large organisations and governments which in many more words basically said 'pull in on the 25th June 2017 with this piece of paper and we'll give you Eleventy Billion Rand', and we ticked them off against lists to make sure they were all there.

And there you sit, holding a piece of paper which is worth more than you'll earn in your entire life.

Then when we were done the lady who looked after the bonds took the box back and stuck it back in her bottom drawer.

I fib a little, but I remember us being quite surprised at how relaxed they were about security. Which is understandable, not just any old fool is going to rock up at some government building and try to redeem a certificate with a serial number that's worth millions. 'Never mind how I got it. I'd like 'em in 20s, please.' Just doesn't happen.

Anyhow, that's what bonds are. And all the stuff that's going down now is because suddenly people aren't so sure that those pretty pieces of paper are going to be redeemed one day, in 20s, or anything else.

That's the eurozone crisis, and the US credit downgrade, in a nutshell.

Would you believe that the area of mathematics most favoured by blind mathematicians is geometry? (via)

I'm on leave this week, and just as well, I guess. I normally cycle along roads that are now lined with burned-out cars. This morning it still looked like a group of chancers hijacking a community issue. Now the images on the telly make it feel like the whole damned city is on fire. It suddenly feels a little closer to home.

Not quite sure what to make of it.

Something I'd forgotten is that the 'borrower nor a lender' line from Hamlet is close to another rather famous line: This above all: to thine ownself be true. A line for which the words 'wise' and 'hackneyed' compete to be the best adjectives.

I'm betraying my age but if memory serves I first learned that line from Bowser in an episode of Sha Na Na. Sadly, neither YouTube nor the Internet at large have any recollection of it. What good is the Internet really, then? You can see a lot of Sha Na Na on YouTube though... although I wouldn't say I recommend it.

What was quite interesting was reading about the group on Wikipedia, particularly where many of the 5,000 former band members have ended up. Doctors, lawyers, professors, some still performing, and one poor bugger whose 'whereabouts today are unclear.'

I was going to use a stronger word than 'stuff' but I'm occasionally afflicted by fits of propriety. Anyway.

Human beings are amazing:

More impressive still, about half of the island is covered by "lithic mulching," in which the islanders scattered broken stone over the fields. The uneven surface creates more turbulent airflow, reducing daytime surface temperatures and warming fields at night. And shattering the rocks exposes "fresh, unweathered surfaces, thus releasing mineral nutrients held within the rock." Only lithic mulching produced enough nutrients - just barely - to make Rapa Nui's terrible soil cultivable. Breaking and moving vast amounts of stone, the islanders had engineered an entirely new, more productive landscape.

From an interesting review of a book about Easter Island (via).

I've often wondered what the world will do for kitchen counters when we run out of quarryable granite. I have concluded that this is not something worth worrying about; I don't how much granite the world has remaining but I expect the answer lies somewhere on the happy side of both "lots" and "plenty."

A couple of years ago I saw an episode of Coast showing sand being dredged off the coast of Wales and the presenter saying "there's only so much sand in the world, and when it's all used up, it's all used up." The word "soon" wasn't mentioned, but you start wondering.

The problem applies equally to many other things, like soil, and the magic stuff that makes crops grow (quoted at; via):

Modern high-production, single-crop agriculture today is very dependent on finite mined resources, which, if used wastefully, could easily cause a severe problem within 50 years and, if used sensibility and sparsely, could last for perhaps 200 years. And then what? You must recycle and farm super intelligently, as if your life depended on it. And it will.

This could be quite a depressing thought. But I think we will be OK.