The Wiki Man

I’d like to start 2009 with a few words of thanks to everyone who has joined the Spectator readers’ lending team at www.kiva.org/team/spectator. So far we have lent money to over 100 small businesses in the developing world, a figure buoyed by the disproportionate generosity of the Spectator’s Australian readership (including a lady from Cairns in a particularly elegant hat). We still have some way to go before overtaking the largest lending team — 1,700 people from Team Obama, since you ask — but every new joiner helps. And, thanks to the depreciation of the pound, the interest-free loans I made earlier in the year through Kiva (the loans are repaid in US dollars) have turned out to be unexpectedly profitable.

It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young. At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, it’s a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography. More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality.

I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins — the brilliant geneticist Richard Dawkins, that is, not the amateur theologian of the same name. The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable are among the most mind-changing books I have read. I can’t say the same of the atheist stuff. Dawkins seems a much better evangelist than polemicist; more persuasive when exalting Darwin than attacking God. If you want to be a polemicist, it helps to be funny, which Dawkins isn’t (for convincing and witty attacks on non-science nobody beats the late John Diamond). But I also find it annoying that Dawkins picks on such clunking, unoriginal targets. If you want to attack irrationality, in Britain at any rate, why pick on God?

The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other claims to adversity. To me this seems, well, slightly racist. If asked to choose between a) being a black editor of the Harvard Law Review or b) spending five years of my life in a small bamboo cage being tortured by some really angry North Vietnamese, I wouldn’t think long before ticking box a). But being seen as an outsider has always been electorally useful, and more so now than ever.

An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently. If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left. With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000. With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left. But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling refund, you would have $214 cash. Even better, if a year ago you had decided to entrust your $1,000 to the needy rather than the greedy, you would have ended up today with $1,000. This market-beating 0 per cent rate of return is available through a website called www.kiva.org.

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and then died. I duly performed a hard reboot (that’s the technical term for ‘switching it off and on again’) only for the same thing to happen again. And again. With hindsight, of course, I should have simply called the government pretending to be a banker and explained that I had bought something that at first looked clever but turned out to be worthless crap.

I recently saw a photograph of a street vendor’s stall in Argentina. The menu reads simply Orange Juice $5. Jugo de Naranja $4. Here unsuspecting Anglophones are paying a premium of 25 per cent for not knowing Spanish. It’s a practice known to economists as price discrimination — in other words setting a price in proportion to a customer’s propensity (or indeed ability) to pay. There’s a lot of it about — and in the internet age we can expect to see it more and more. How low a price will a website quote you for your new Mini Cooper if it knows you already own a Jaguar? It’s reminiscent of the famous comedy scene where Bill Cosby’s attempts to bargain down the price of a car are ruined when a passing friend greets him as Dr Cosby.

A friend of mine, a professor at an Ivy League university, specialises in research into transgenic mice, learning how DNA modifications affect intelligence and memory. A few years ago, after some genetic tinkering, he created a batch of mice of quite spectacular dimwittedness. They were useless in the maze, ditzily wandering about with no sense of spatial awareness and incapable of finding the cheese after repeated attempts. This wasn’t the only interesting thing about these mice. Every one of them had a most unusual pigmentation, at least for mice: they were blond. This was huge. ‘You’ve found the blond gene — phone the Sun!’ ‘Um, I was thinking more in terms of Nature or Scientific American,’ he said.

Toby Young in last week’s Spectator remarked on the peculiar malice, as he saw it, of the online comments posted in response to his articles. He has a point. The people who post comments are not the same reverential folk who form a paper’s traditional print readership. On the other hand, at a time when the Telegraph and the Guardian attract more than 18 million online readers each month, your online readership is no longer a small niche you can safely ignore. Why then do they seem so nasty? Most people who comment on writings on- line aren’t nasty at all. Responses to blog posts are often complimentary and constructive.

I am still waiting for an enterprising research company to publish honest readership figures for British news-papers. Not the boring stuff about what we read at the breakfast table or flourish at our desks, a decision driven by badge value. No, what I want to know is which papers people reach for in private when they find themselves on the loo with a full selection of news media to hand. You see I’m happy to bet that, in such circumstances, even Paul Johnson or A.S. Byatt reaches for the Sun or the News of the World first, and the Pope keeps a sneaky copy of Bild tucked behind the cistern. So I’m sure a few Spectator readers have by now furtively watched the Max Mosley film online.

Alongside the vast fuel tank which powers the Space Shuttle into orbit are two spindly tubes known as Solid Rocket Boosters (or SRBs). Their shape is not ideal: their manufacturer, a firm called Thiokol, had intended them to be fatter, but was constrained by the width of a horse’s rear end. It appears that Roman chariots arrived at a standard axle width of 4’ 81/2” for the simple reason that this width could accommodate two horses’ bums between the shafts. Standardisation of axle length was vital, as on muddy roads your wheels formed ruts that set solid in dry weather. A vehicle with a non-standard axle can become fatally cross-rutted, a danger for off-road drivers even today. So the 4’ 81/2” standard became literally entrenched.

Once again it’s the time of year when Spectator readers start loading up their cars with Andrex, Gentleman’s Relish and Marmite in anticipation of the annual drive to France. Do I have any advice to give? Unsurprisingly I do. For the first hour across the Channel, I quite like to listen to Nostalgie FM. This is a French Oldies station unintentionally rendered hilarious by some French law (probably by J. Toubon) which requires a proportion of songs on French radio to be sung in French.

‘Linda works miracles in the kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers.’ This sentence has haunted me for 15 years. It’s from a parody of the typical reader’s review in The Good Food Guide, probably by Craig Brown. I still quote it gnomically when asked whether some restaurant or other is any good. These reviews were usually written by the kind of people who preferred to purchase from an emporium than to buy from a shop. The word ‘peruse’ was always a clue. ‘Reluctant to entrust navigation to my lady wife, I chose to peruse the atlas myself, necessitating the removal of my driving gloves.

Those of you who saw his article a few weeks back will be pleased to hear Kelvin MacKenzie took a remarkable second place in his local council elections. Already the climbdown over parking charges has begun: the cost of a day’s parking at Weybridge Station is suddenly not £5 but £4. It’s the same story in my birthplace of Usk, where rebellious townsfolk recently rejected the idea of paying for parking at all — with the result that the car park is invariably full and hence totally useless. One thing the denizens of Usk and Weybridge clearly share is an unfamiliarity with the work of UCLA Professor Donald Shoup and his masterwork The High Cost of Free Parking.

If the climate-change debate has accomplished anything, it has proved people never say sorry. When I was about 12 the families of the people who now wince at every gramme of carbon we burn carried on their cars a yellow sticker reading ‘Nuclear Power — No Thanks’ (on 2CVs the sticker was rumoured to be factory-fitted). More linguistically gifted environmentalists preferred the German version ‘Atomkraft? Nein danke’, hinting at sexy Baader-Meinhof connections, or in my part of the world ‘Ynni Niwclear? Dim diolch’ (Back in the 1970s, I am fairly sure it read ‘Pwr Niwclear’, but modern versions all seem to prefer ‘Ynni’ to ‘Pwr’.

My article last week (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’) led me to be accused of elitism by one of the magazine’s online readers. What riled him was my suggestion that, rather than spending £6 billion on speeding up the Eurostar journey by an hour, it might have been better to spend a few million quid providing WiFi to the passengers, allowing them to make better use of their time on the train. I was told that this was typical of the ‘businessman’s arrogant assumption that only business passengers mattered’ — and what about people who wanted to go to Paris for leisure?