AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Öresundtåg Originally uploaded by seadipper . Coming back on the train after a day out in Lund. The standard fare for the return journey was a bit less that a similar length journey in the UK after all the rebates and my railcard discount. The train is nice and comfortable, with plenty of space and you can see out of the windows. Out of the windows you can see things like wind generators and lots of freight trains, and not just trains for shipping containers and oil. Something is different here.

Brunel's Pumping House Originally uploaded by budgie2007 / Rich B. . Opened in 1847, Brunel's Atmospheric Railway did away with the need for a separate locomotive on each train. Instead, there were pumping stations such as this one at Starcross. It was unsuccessful but the principle was sound. No doubt Brunel would have jumped at the chance to power his trains by electricity from a fixed power station. That would have solved his problem but the technology was not to come for another thirty years. Seemingly the British government has not yet grasped what the benefits are. What is it with the UK government that they are so often unable to make sound decisions where matters of technology are involved?

Earlier this year I signed the petition for a fresh electrification programme for Britain's railways. This was the wording of the petition. "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Instruct the Department for Transport to, within six months, update the 1981 joint Department of Transport/British Rail 'Review of main line electrification' to take into account current installation and energy costs and rail traffic levels; and, if the positive conclusions of the original report still stand, revive the proposals for a rolling programme of main line electrification in Britain." Details of Petition: "The 1981 Joint Review concluded that: 'On the assumptions made a substantial programme of main line electrification would be financially worthwhile. All the larger electrification options examined show an internal real rate of return of 11%; the faster options give the highest net present values'. These conclusions were endorsed by the Join...

Interesting article in todays Observer about the need to encourage people to travel by train and improve Britain's railway system. The picture shows the 24 tickets you need for a return journey from London to Stockholm. This demonstrates the problem. I travel all over Europe by train and in my experience the British system is the worst – even Estonia's is better, in its modest little way. The UK now has the very worst rolling stock. This is partly for historical reasons, because the carriages have to be made narrower and shorter than they are everywhere else but they try and fit in the same number of seats. But the main problems affects all the railways in Europe, not just Britain's. Huge amounts have been spent on technology but it does not produce a more comfortable seat or a decent amount of space for people and their luggage. The only really pleasant modern trains (less than 15 years old) are the Danish IC3, followed by the German ICE trains. Because these ultra high-te...

And now for a bit of fundamentalism. Most discussion of politics seems not to start from an agreed set of assumptions. This is apparent from those blog discussions run by newspapers. So try this. The functions of the state are (1) To defend the realm (2) To administer justice (3) To deal with emergencies (4) To make land available to the people so that they can support themselves and their families. (5) To collect the rent of land. These are minimum requirements. (1) is normally accepted but states go well beyond this to become aggressive; (2) is perverted so that courts are engaged in applying laws which may or may not be just; (3) European states are quite good at dealing with emergencies, but few others are; (4) the whole concept of giving everyone the opportunity to support themselves is not properly understood and (5) governments everywhere fail to collect most of the rent of land and have to rely for their revenue on charges on labour and capital. Cradle-to-grave socialism does n...

The revival of Evangelical or Bible-Believing Christianity is a menace second only to the rise in Fundamentalist Islam. As a Catholic I find myself agreeing with the atheists and agnostics in discussions about believing the bible and regarding evolution as nonsense, or "just a theory". The bible is a collection of texts that were adopted by the Catholic Church as being worthy of study and for the purposes of contemplation. The Catholic Church has always taken the view that it is the authority when it comes to the interpretation of these texts. The main point is that the New Testament takes precedence over the old. The rest is primarily theological. Evangelical Christians have taken these texts and given them all sorts of interpretations, often weird and wacky Anyone who interprets scripture literally is either naive or mischievous, or both.The New Testament is essentially a narrative to help understanding of the theology of the Catholic Church. It is not in itself meant to be...

Of course not, but I have been accused of being a racist several times recently. Why, and by whom? I have suggested that Islam is problematical. Not Muslims. I don't know many but the ones I have met personally seem pleasant enough and when I had an operation a few years ago I had no qualms about putting my life in the hands of an anaesthetist whose name pointed to a Moslem background. But to question Islam is no more racist than to question Communism or a political party manifesto. Múslims are not a race. They are people who follow a particular creed. They may be born into that but when they are adults, it can be taken that they are continuing to follow it out of choice. Unlike Jews, for example, who may become atheists, Catholics, Buddhists, or Muslims, but remain Jews. (Incidentally, the Jewish Cardinal Lustiger, former Archbishop of Paris, died last week, a piece of news which I was sorry to read). Now if one had a religion whose text was Mein Kampf, one might expect problems f...

A frequent topic for discussion is the widening gap between super-rich and the poor, with people in the middle being squeezed down. This is occurring in most countries, the effect being particularly marked in the USA and Britain. Nobody seems to know what to do about it. Yet there is no mystery about what is happening. It is precisely as predicted by the nineteenth century economist Henry George, who, in his book "Progress and Poverty" examined and accounted for the paradox whereby the enormous increase in productive power produced by the Industrial Revolution led to a small class of wealthy people and a huge class of people squeezed to the limit and living in poverty. The past thirty years have seen a succession of revolutions which have had the same effect as the first Industrial Revolution, of increasing people's productive capacity. First we had the large centralised mainframe computer, which did away with a vast number of routine jobs. Then came personal computers, w...

King Gustav Adolph's flagship, the Vasa, sank in 1628 when a squall blew it over in Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage. It is now on display in a specially built museum. This incident was similar to that which sank the Mary Rose in Portsmouth Harbour in 1533. The guide explained that the ship was too narrow for the amount of sail which it carried and that there was insufficient knowledge of ship design at the time to prevent this kind of thing, other than rule-of-thumb. There was a commission of inquiry but nobody could be blamed. Which has set me thinking. What had happened to the Vasa was widely known. It is also likely that shipbuilders understood that a narrow ship was a faster ship. But optimum design would require the application of calculus, which was not invented until around 1675 by Newton and Leibnitz, apparently simultaneously and independently. And, as far as I know, it was to be another century before the mathematical principles were applied to practical shipbuildi...

Grövelsjön, northern Dalarna, August 2006 Originally uploaded by marielinder . Kräftor är ett litet djur som ser ut som en hummer. De har två klor och hundretals av ben. Svenskarna äter dem i augusti men värför vet jag inte. Kräftor innehåller nästan ingenting som man kan äta. Det finns ett stycke kött samma storlek som min lilla tå vid svansen och två stycken i klorna, men det är mycket små. Man måste dra ut köttet från den hårda skalet med fingren. Man behöver bra syn och ljus. Därför är kräftor inte mat. De är ett roligt spel. Igår kväll satt vi tillsammans i ett stort rum på Göteborgs Nation. Gardinerna stängdes och det fanns levande ljus. Det var ganska mörkt. Det fanns massor av kräftor på bordet. Vi hämtade kräftor och åt dem. Vi drack mycket öl och snaps och sjöng många studentsånger. Men det var svårt att äter kräftor. Det smakade ganska bra men det fanns också bra ost och knäckbröd som var bättre så jag åt det istället. Jag åt bara ett halv dussin kräftor därför att de var f...

One of the people on the course is a 25 year old Croatian who is studying Swedish so that he can do a Masters degree in International Relations in Helsinki. He has been in Britain for about half his life. I had a long conversation with him on the bus on the way to Stockholm. His analysis is worrying, as it roughly coincides with my own. His generation has just switched off from public affairs. He finds hardly any of his own British contemporaries that he can talk to about anything serious. In my own experience this isn't entirely true - I get to talk to young people at my old college when I go there, and things are not quite that bad. But they will mostly go into high-powered well paid jobs which is fine but it does nothing for the public realm as such. I thought it was just me being a miserable old fogey but seemingly it is not. I wish it was. If we have no insight into our problems, how are we going to get out of them? Of interest in this connection is the view of Sweden held by ...

Edit: Stockholm City Hall Originally uploaded by soylentgreen23 . We had our conducted tour of Stockholm City Hall today. As an iconic building, it attracts a constant stream of visitors, being one of those tourist attractions which appeals to a very wide range of people with all sorts of different interests and cultural backgrounds. Completed in 1923, and gloriously extravagant, it cost three times more than intended and it provides accommodation for just the city councillors and a couple of hundred support staff. There is an interesting comparison with London's County Hall, also on a key site by the river almost opposite the Houses of Parliament. What happened to that? The Council was abolished and the building sold. Most of it is a hotel and on the ground floor is a Macdonalds. Who has their values and priorities right?