Who put up the money for The Pirate Bay

Posted on February 22, 2009 by acb

I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere in the English language press that the man who put up the money for the Pirate Bay has a remarkably unsavoury past, straight out of Stieg Larsson. Carl Lundström inherited a fortune from crispbread, and has put some of it into extremist right-wing parties, with a strong anti-immigrant line. In 1985 he was questioned along with a group of skinheads who beat up some Latin Americans in the old town in Stockholm; in the early Nineties he was thrown out of New Democracy, a populist and xenophobic party, for being too right wing; this month it turns out that one of the men arrested for his part in an armed burglary and assault in a small town on the West Coast, part of a feud within a neo-nazist organisation, was the managing director of one of Lundström’s companies.

The thing I really like is that he was also involved with an attempted coup within the Taxpayers’ Federation, a pressure group, which wanted to get it explicitly to blame Sweden’s high taxes on the presence of immigrants. A couple of years ago, Svenska Dagbladet found that the Pirate Bay’s revenues have all been shipped to Switzerland via Israel, to save them from the taxman. Lundström apparently put up the money for 100 candidates from the Sweden Democrats (an anti-immigrant party regarded with horror by the mainstream) to stand for election to the Federation’s board.

(ht Gunnar)

Posted in Net stories, Sweden | 13 Comments

Wiley Interscience

Posted on February 14, 2009 by acb

… may sodomise themselves with spiky reindeer antlers. I am paying their exorbitant charges for article reprints: $34.44 with VAT; and each one comes with the following boilerplate: IMPORTANT: You now have 24-hour access to this content. Access to this article will expire 24 hours after receipt of this confirmation screen. You may only view this content during this 24 hour period.

Is there really anywhere a lawyer who believes that this kind of licence is enforceable – is there anyone anywhere who thinks it is morally defensible? Glyn Moody twitters “roll on open access” but I don’t want to abolish the market here entirely. Someone has to pay for the work that scholarly journals do. But I do want to regulate it and when I am dictator of the universe the directors of Wiley will find themselves breaking rocks next to the directors of HBOS.

In the meantime, I save the PDFs onto my hard disk and soon I will make copies on the laptop too. Of course, if I were better organised, I could have simply asked the authors to email me the things. What would the legal position be then, I wonder?

Posted in Blather, Journalism, Science without worms | 10 Comments

New and noted from PLOS

Posted on February 11, 2009 by acb

I came across this when looking for a report about empathy in mice:

Scenes from the life of a lab rat

Scenes from the life of a lab rat


The mouse empathy story turns out to be of rather more lasting interest. I had been going to use it as an example of sloppy journalism: the Telegraph report says Good Samaritans are born not raised, suggests a new study from the United States that has identified an “empathy gene”. and I couldn’t see any mention of a particular gene in the text at all. Neither does the article link to the source in PLOS.1

But they have identified a particular mouse gene which affects behaviour which looks emphatic. In particular, mice with one variant behave as if something that they have seen happening to other mice might happen to them under the same circumstances. This is a way to understand empathy as a learning mechanism, though perhaps “understand” is the wrong word. It’s certainly a way to analyse it, and to see that sensitivity to the sufferings of others has a payoff to the sensitive; and the authors, with their talk about a reward mechanism, are pretty explicit about the ways in which emotions can be understood as strategies.

1 an interesting small example of the way in which newspapers are now edited to be read by Google, not humans: a human might want to look at the original research, but all the paper wants from Google is self-links

Posted in Blather, Literature, Science without worms | Comments Off on New and noted from PLOS

Darwinism as religion

Posted on February 10, 2009 by acb

One reason I am not writing much here is that on top of everything else I have been sent fourteen (at last count) books on Darwin to review. Well, fifteen, counting the hardback Origin of Species which turned up this morning from Penguin, with a cover by Damian Hirst, and a blurb from him, too, explaining that Darwin had revealed “the meaning of life”. I haven’t time to scan the whole thing in, but it is a very clear example of Darwinism as a substitute for earlier religions: what he writes about Darwin is exactly what would have been written about Revelation 200 years ago.

Posted in Blather | 10 Comments

National Character

Posted on February 9, 2009 by acb

Not to stereotype or anything but I have just had my first piece of German blog spam and it’s wonderfully fake-professorial: two paragraphs analysing the performances of different sorts of fund in Frankfurt last year. This is illustrated with lots of small nerdy percentages: in contrast to American lottery spam, or even the promises to grow your organ, this says you can hope for no more that 7.9% a year from these investments.

Only when I read it more carefully did I notice that it wasn’t selling anything explicitly. It had a byline at the top, in the manner of German newspaper reports but this turns out to be a real address somewhere in Estonia. So there is, somewhere in Estonia, some guy who is spamming English-speaking blogs with his Germanophone analysis of the stock markets of Europe. Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Nature notes

Posted on February 8, 2009 by acb

It was almost my birthday today, so we ate lunch at the Three Horseshoes in Madingley, which just gets better and better. What I liked best this time was a lemon sorbet which tasted of all the different smells that lemons have, and not just sharpness and syrup.

On the way home, drove over the downs around Elmdon, hoping to see deer. There were none, but instead two hares in a field, whom I failed to photograph, a very idle kestrel which could scarcely be bothered to move as the car approached him, and—liveliest of all—a rat foraging on the verge of the road above Littlebury, with a bright green-golden tinge to his fur in the sunlight. He ran back to the hedge as the car approached, and then turned to watch us when we stopped and cocked his head on one side and showed his teeth at the intruder. No pictures of him, either, but here’s the more romantic predator.

Kestrel on a telephone pole

Posted in Blather, Pictures | 2 Comments

Book Search

Posted on February 6, 2009 by acb

If this list is Google’s idea of the history books we might want to read on our mobile phones, Amazon can breathe easy. Five books are listed. One purports to be the memoirs of Napoleon; two are by those well known historians Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson; there is a naval history of the Napoleonic wars, published in 1837 – and to conclude the selection, Daniel Defoe’s True Born Englishman, and an illustrated edition of the Pilgrim’s Progress.

It’s like something you’d find in a Thirties Evelyn Waugh novel, describing the great lost library of Abyssinia

Book Search.

Posted in Blather, Literature, Net stories, nördig | 4 Comments

Random resumption

Posted on February 6, 2009 by acb

I know I have written nothing here for the last month. I don’t think that’s good. It started off as a consequence of Guardian blogging, where I felt that I had to turn everything that occurred to me into a daily Guardian blog; then there was a lot of other work in the last fortnight, when I have been making a radio programme and writing a longish magazine story, both on science subjects. But I need something light-hearted and longer than twitter to write silly notes in.

So here are some, mainly Scandinavian, observations, for the last week:

  • The suburbs of Gothenburg, where I used to live, have a horrible problem with the drug known in England as “GBH” and there as “gobbe”. Six people have died of overdoses in the last year; the ambulances won’t go out without police help because the overdosers go from coma to extreme violence without warning; a 14-year-old girl was gang-raped on the drug in Nödinge, where I used to live. No one was convicted because she couldn’t remember what exactly had happened. (from a copy of DN, read on the plane to Copenhagen)

  • The metro in Copenhagen is absolute bliss. Clean, quick, quiet and you can sit at the front and watch the brown concrete dragon intestine writhe slowly as you rush through it. Then, when it emerges, the rain obscures everything, since there are no winsdscreen wipers, and suddenly it is borne in on you what being driverless actually means.

  • The FT is full of thoughtful pieces suggesting that we are turning into an emerging market crisis: except of course that the UK is not so much emerging as disappearing

  • The only redeeming or even remotely human things in Heathrow terminal 3 are the Chez Gerard in the furthest corner from the entrance and the Borders where the assistant knew who Paul Auster’s wife was, when asked by another customer. Everything else is broken, smelly, or both.

  • London City airport would be a very nice place if planes actually took off and landed there but if it has been snowing they don’t.

  • My column in the Guardian about why public libraries should subscribe to jstor, pubmed, and so on, drew a number of really thoughtful letters, one of which says that UCL is being charged £6m a year for its electronic journal subscriptions.

  • Can it really be true that Richard Dawkins charges £4,000 a pop to talk to schools? I was told this with absolute confidence by an Oxford academic who, admittedly, dislikes him.

  • The first hardback printing of Fishing in Utopia is entirely sold out.

Posted in Blather, Journalism, Sweden, Travel notes | 8 Comments

From the literary magazines

Posted on January 1, 2009 by acb

My new year treat has been to ignore all comments about atheism on the Guardian site. 320 at last count. Instead, I went for a long walk and caught up with the LRB and TLS. The personals in the LRB are wonderfully back on form. “I found yours”, my wife said, passing over the one that said “Everyone. My life is a mind-numbing cesspit of despair and self-loathing. Just fuck off. Or else write back and we’ll make love. Gentleman, 37.”

Doesn’t everyone lie about their age?

But there were many other winners this week,and the most encouraging thing was that so many were short, including “I make my own sexual lubricant. The secret ingredient is Bovril. Man, 56. Congleton.” Is this down to the influence of twitter, of the credit crunch, or is it the beginning of a new literary movement?

Over at the TLS there is an interesting and moving piece about Mary Woolstonecraft’s suicide attempt and a really interesting-looking book of ghost stories but the moment that snapped my neck around came at the end of a long piece on Milton when I was assured that one essay was worth the price of a whole anthology. Uh, OK: 288 pages, binding unspecified but probably hardback – £50. By some measure that qualifies as the most enthusiastic review I have ever read.

Happy New Year to all of you.  And I know I owe Mrs T a piece about Franco.

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments

Joseph Conrad on CiF

Posted on December 24, 2008 by acb
that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of science can give to the dullness of common mortals.
Posted in Blather | Tagged | Comments Off on Joseph Conrad on CiF