Thank You Orson Scott Card...

...for Enders Game. I've just read this for the second time after nearly twenty years and have to admit that it's an absolutely fantastic, seminal sci-fi work that inspires, is thought provoking and is a genuine joy to read.

I picked up a copy recently for my eleven year old son, who's a voracious reader and who's recently been keen to get into some sci-fi after pretty much reading most of the contemporary "young adult" fiction out there at the moment. Once he'd finished with it (and I have to say that he thought it was completely awesome and has since read the first two sequels Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide) I picked it up and worked my way through it in about a day.

For those of you that have never read it, then the basic plot is centered around the early years of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is taken from his home and put through a military school (Battle School and later Commander School) with the sole objective to turn him into the perfect military leader, to help Earth overcome the forces of the (apparently) nefarious Buggers - an insect like race hailing from some far flung corner of the galaxy.

This book has a number of quite visionary elements to it in my opinion, and brims over with engaging and thought provoking ideas that really good sci-fi should always have. To name but a few of the ones that I found most interesting are:

1. The idea of propagating "remote" war through the medium of simulated reality. Ender and his cohorts are trained over the years using rich simulated environments, not a million miles away from the kind of FPS and RTS games that have been evolving over the past ten years.
2. The idea of a political, questionably democratic movement asserting itself through nothing other than the media networks and news channels. One of the sub-themes within the book is how Ender's brother and sister rise to have real political power as a result of them instigating of social change purely through the expression of their ideas on something very similar to the Internet as we know it today.
3. The notion of homogenisation of nation-states into less granular super-powers and the alignment of these super states against opposing idealogical principles.
4. What it means to be a killer and what it means to separate the consequences of an action from the initial intention of the action.

Meaty stuff eh? Don't get me wrong though, although there are some heavy-weight concepts woven throughout the fabric of this book - the reason why it's so good is that it has a pace and pathos that keeps you engaged throughout, so much so that at the end of the book you really do find yourself empathising with a number of lead characters; in particular Ender himself.

In other words, it strikes precisely the right balance between challenging the reader at the abstract, philosophical level but (if you want to take the whole thing a lot more literally and on face value) also allows even the most casual reader to enjoy a thoroughly good yarn with all the trademarks of strong character development, interesting and intriguing plot twists - the lot.

Thank you Orson Scott Card, for this fantastic and amazing novel.

UFO Across The Mersey

I've just clocked this post on the BBC web-site: BBC NEWS | England | Close encounters over Mersey which contains some rather dubious footage of some "mysterious" lights in the sky over the Mersey last night.

Not in itself particularly interesting thought I, until I watched the Flash vid associated with it and caught the snippet taken from de-classified MoD report regarding some blokes apparent contact with an alien life-form called Algar.

I for one, would like to be the first to offer my condolences for his great loss, with Algar being killed by another race of beings. Let's hope this doesn't cause some kind of inter-galactic war.

BTW, if you're interested in tracking down the original Algar report and other completely bonkers reports of lights in the sky, space cows, ray umbrellas and erm...visitations, then check out the National Archives page here.

Caravan Tax

Caravans, caravans, caravans.

If, like me you're fortunate enough to live in a scenic part of the UK then you're probably used to the periodic influx of caravans (and associated caravanners) that happens each and every bank holiday, school holiday break or sunny weekend.

They appear in their thousands like some weird invading army tugging their mobile lounges behind their oversized saloons or 4x4's, generally moving at no more than 50 miles per hour, clogging up not only the main arterial routes into a region, but also all the less-travelled A-roads and B-roads, back lanes and population centers. They get everywhere.

Local roads that you would normally traverse in a matter of minutes to get to your local amenities become clogged, glutinous affairs where forward progress becomes a source of intense frustration and stress.

With ironic names like the "Rapier", "Swift", "Valiant" or "Swallow" other road users are forced to sit behind these cumbersome, ugly contraptions as they make their ponderous way to the nearest herding point, so that their occupants can plug in their mains electricity, set up their satellite TV, crack open their chemical bog and get down to enjoying the thrills and exuberance of a truly nomadic lifestyle.

The Avondale Land Ranger - a prince amongst caravans to some, just another white, wheeled coffin to others.

I'm not a fan, as you can probably tell. To me, caravans can be basically summed up as the "suburbs on the move". Each weekend, thousands upon thousands of people pack up their stuff, cram it all into a lounge on wheels with all the creature comforts that they would have in their own homes and hunt out specifically clinical, managed, safe resting places where they can set up camp and get down to enjoying what they would probably do if they were still in their lounge back home in good old Suburbia.

The popularity of caravanning in the UK is huge. Some statistics taken from the Caravan Club indicate that:

• There are currently approximately 1 million registered caravanners within the UK.
• The CC annual turnover is £95 million pounds, indicating a sizable market for "value add" caravanning services.
• The number of registered caravanners more than doubled (from 100,000 to 250,000) between the years of 1971 and 1982.
• That caravanners inject somewhere in the region of £370 million pounds a year into various regional ecomonies.
• There is on average, one CC badged caravan site for every 30 square miles of country within the UK.

That means that taken as an aggregate, the registered caravan owners within the UK equate to a small city, mobilising and spreading out throughout the furthest reaches of the UK each public holiday. A small city moving along the highways and byways.

As I was sitting in my car on the A55 the other day (incidentally stuck in a jam caused by an overturned caravan) it occurred to me that I've never seen (and admittedly not really actively gone looking for) any kind of lobbying asking for a degree of taxation to be applied to the use of caravans. It hit me in a flash what a genius idea this would be. My rationale is simple:

1. Caravans have the aerodynamic profile of a melted blancmange, and so vastly increase the fuel consumption (and therefore emissions) of the vehicle towing them to their final destination.
2. To tow a caravan, you need a fair degree of torque, which generally you only get with larger, thirstier and dirtier engines, such as those found in the 4 x 4 models - often diesels.
3. Towing a caravan dramatically reduces the fuel efficiency of the towing vehicle, and so lead to an increased consumption of diesel, petrol - driving up demand and so the forecourt fuel prices.
   
4. Caravans are slow and directly cause congestion on many of the UK roads, resulting in jams and therefore driving up the emissions from vehicles of other road users; given that they end up having to sit around for longer periods with their engines running, in lower gears. Given the current governmental policy around road tax and linking it to emissions, this also has the indirect effect of driving up the cost of road tax for other road users.
   
5. Caravans add either 50% or 100% the number of axles bearing down on the road (taken with those connected to the towing vehicle) and so must increase and/or exacerbate the wear and tear of the highways, thereby indirectly driving up the road tax for other road users.

Taking all these (alright, alright - somewhat biased) points into account, it struck me that on many levels, caravans can be thought of as just another HGV vehicle; you could replace the word caravan in many of the above points with "articulated lorry" and they'd still make sense.

Use of HGV vehicles is of course, heavily regulated and heavily taxed (directly or indirectly) and given that they share so many fundamental characteristics with the caravan, I don't really understand why the two things should be treated so differently.

A more egalitarian approach could be achieved in a number of ways:

1. Introduce an uplift on the standard road tax for any car owners that intend to tow a caravan.
2. Introduce a separate caravan road tax - i.e. have a caravan registered as a separate, legal vehicle that is subject to same road tax banding as standard non-HGV vehicles.
3. Introduce a tachometer-based taxation which introduces a price per mile travelled levy that would need to be paid dependent on usage.
4. Introduce a devolutionary toll-based system which would be collected using the existing caravan-site infrastructure, thereby eliminated the need for any additional infrastructure (i.e. toll boothes).
   

Looking around on the web, it appears that some degree of caravan taxation has in fact been proposed previously - check out this page for Margaret Becketts anti-caravan taxation stance and a link to a petition against it.


Margaret Beckett getting sloshed in her caravan. This picture was actually taken moving at high speed down the M4 between Swindon and Bristol.

Margaret Beckett, unusually, not in her caravan and attending to matters of state.

It looks to me as the basic arguments against some form of caravan taxation fall could be summarised as follows:

1. People have a "right to roam" freely, taken way too literally this is translated into the right that caravanners have to "hitch up" and then subsequently invade any part of the UK, without having to pay for the privilege.
2. Caravanners typically only use their caravans occasionally, and so some form of taxation that assumes constant or background usage would be unfair.
3. Stars and upstanding role models such as Madonna and Jamie Oliver, have claimed at some point to have either caravanned, or more likely purchased some massively expensive all in one "roam-a-home" as part of some publicity stunt or strategy, so it must be alright, good and decent.
4. Caravanners contribute massively to the local econonmy, through the purchase of foodstuffs, refills for their chemical toilets etc...

All of the above, with the exception of number four seem pretty unsubstantial from where I'm sitting. To take each in turn:

1. Everyone has a right to roam in their caravan, except of course for travellers and those with a genuinely peripatetic or itinerant lifestyle, where land ownership and invasion of privacy laws appear to come into force. I suspect that most caravan-fans would probably support the taxation of genuinely migratory people, and I also suspect that most caravan owners wouldn't like to have a transient settlement on their back door step.
   
2. Occasional use of a caravan is moot. The point is that most caravanners tend to occasionally use their caravans at the same occasional point in time, thereby creating the problems cited earlier in this posting. If there was some kind of uniform distribution governing the occasional use of the caravanning fraternity, then many of the problems wouldn't be as bad as I'd perceive them to be. The fact is that the major downsides to caravan use are symptomatic of a clustered pattern to their usage and distribution across the UK roads at peak periods throughout the year.
3. I'm not going into this one, it's a lifestyle choice I suppose - sincere or otherwise.
4. OK - so the contribution to local economy is great. Not as great as it would be if a small proprtion of the caravanners elected to use a local hotel, guest house or other means of local accommodation as an alternative once in a while. Those non-caravanners that don't have the ability to be "self-sufficient" surely contribute a larger proportion of revenue to local business, than those that basically sit in their mobile lounges, eating food probably bought in Tesco before they set off.

There. That's about all I wanted to say on the subject of caravans for the time being - and I'm pressed for time so need to crack on with some other stuff. If you read this post, and have a strong view one way or the other then I'd love to hear from you - just pop in a comment using the links provided.

Primus

OK - so this is my first blog post ever (even though I've been working in the IT sector for something like 13 years now); so right up front I'll apologise to all of you readers for my slightly less than polished writing style.

To be honest, I don't even read many blog articles myself and so I'm not 100% certain what mode of speech is regarded as cool within the blogosphere (is that the correct word?) - I'm just going to try and be as spontaneous as possible, and try not to inject too many expletives
into my postings.

The purpose of this blog? Well, simple really - it's nothing more complicated than just having somewhere that I can use to put down my thoughts, reflections and rants about various topics, many of which will probably seem trivial, a lot of which will seem irrelevant and hopefully a few of which might be interesting enough to merit reading by your good selves, and at least perhaps give you something to think about (or sympathise with or rage against).

I understand that this blog engine has a commenting facility built in, and to be honest I'd more than welcome comments (no matter how inane, no matter how blunt or derogatory); I've a pretty thick skin and above all value the right of others to have a healthy, hopefully grown up discussion on any particular subject. Get personal with me in your comments and I'll get personal right back at you. You have been warned :)

Given that I've never really done this before, this blog won't have (or at least I don't think it will at the moment) a specific subject area - I've quite eclectic interests and tastes to be honest, so expect to see some fairly wide and varied posts on here.

That's about it for a starter - I've just started my working day so need to get cracking with my day job, I'll put up my first "real" posting later on in the day.