In terms of geo-politics, the last decade was one of immense significance, but culturally it was an era that was so artistically bland, that it had no name till it was almost over. Until 2009 almost nobody referred to the noughties.

1. The event of the decade - Global Warming as Fact

Bookended by cataclysmic events, the noughties started with two of the worlds tallest skyscrapers in New York’s financial district being blown up in the name of God and ended with the castration of Mammon and the simultaneous failure of the US banking system, its largest mortgage companies, insurers and car manufacturers. The former was so visually extreme it would have seemed ridiculous as Hollywood fantasy, the latter so ideologically challenging that it would seem ridiculous as New York Times fiction. The Towering Inferno and Bonfire of the Vanities had been quenched by reality.
Both these things were signals of something of longer term significance: resource wars in the Middle East and a challenge to Western hegemony from the Far East, secular changes which will determine the course of the rest of our lives. For optimists, however, the problems caused by both are solvable via continued prosperity through growth and innovation.
But the event that really defines this decade, the parade-pissing, motherfucker of all events, was the realization that prosperity could actually be the problem not the solution. Despite antegalilean tabloid sentiment, the noughties were the decade when global warming was confirmed by scientists as fact, just as the earth orbits the sun. Global warming is a problem that could actually be exacerbated by growth and as such is the worst thing to happen to humans since fleas on medieval rats.

2. Art - For The Love of God, Damien Hirst

Nothing defines the decade in more compact form than this diabolically expensive piece of shit. It’s almost impossible to think of anything more disgusting than a diamond encrusted skull, it combines the graveyard exploitation of a human skin lampshade with the ostentatious vulgarity of a gold plated toilet. It didn’t sell, so unfortunately there isn’t a single Russian gangster or Connecticut hedge fund manager to crucify for purchasing it. Instead, it belongs to them all, the people who took tainted money and unimaginatively tried to launder it, by buying taste, via a largely obsolete but prestigious medium - gallery art. Who knows, perhaps Hirst was indeed joking, in which case this was genius rather than an ironic, decade defining, atrocity.

3. Movies - The Fog of War, Errol Morris

Since Being John Malkovitch is technically from the previous decade, Adaptation would have been a worthy choice here. The complex, surreal fantasies of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze or to a lesser extent Michel Gondry, created something truly original and groundbreaking, with enough clever-clever self-awareness to satisfy a conference on Post-modernism. But I’m choosing the opposite, a superficially ordinary and simple movie of an interview with a man in a suit. The Fog of War is an historically important confession from a dying man, Robert McNamara. It’s a film that looks simple but hides a subtle complexity which could only have been pulled off by someone of the caliber of Errol Morris and for all the contrived cleverness, Kaufman and Jonze couldn’t dream up something so morally and intellectually challenging as this interview. In the tiebreaker between Adaptation and The Fog of War, fact beats fiction at its strangest.

4. Celebrity - Sex Tape, Paris Hilton

Is celebrity a cultural category? Yes, if celebrity is something in its own right, celebrity for its own sake. The decade with no name until 2009 had plenty of Frankenstein-like tabloid creations: from two-headed monster, Branjelina, to bald-headed train wreck, Britney. But above all, Paris Hilton epitomized someone who was famous for no other reason than fame itself, a talentless circle-jerk of celebrity, catalyzed by fucking on camera in front of millions then whored out to TV stations that can’t show a single piece of this piece-of-ass ass’s ass.

5. Food - The Cupcake.

Cupcakes are the hamburger of deserts - a portable, sandwich-sized item that can be eaten in the car or on the street without cutlery. There’s a big difference between burgers and cupcakes, however: a good burger is a great, delicious and manly thing, whereas cupcakes are children’s food. They are to Laduree macaroons what spam is to filet mignon, the most boring of cakes - sponge, whose ordinariness is concealed by its look rather than flavor, using toppings of different colored icing. Appropriately enough, the transition of cupcake from boutique to global was triggered by extended pajama party, Sex and the City’s visit to the Magnolia Bakery in New York’s West Village and for most of the noughties a line of bleating humans has extended from its entrance to somewhere several hundred yards away. The length of this line could act as a barometer of the sugar coated, let-us-eat-cake, reality-denial of the noughties. As the ripples of the great recession seep through every crevice of society, turning bakery cake lines to soup kitchen lines and the mood from denial to anger, perhaps - hopefully, it will wither.

6. T.V. - The Wire, HBO

I haven’t had a TV for most of the decade (by accident rather than design, and not because I’m a snobby intellectual ponce - I love TV) so I’m going to be completely dishonest here and pick something where I’ve only watched a part. I’ll rely on the better judgment of friends such as Jason Kottke and the fact that almost everything that I’ve seen on TV in that last ten years that has been good has been on HBO. While the BBC rested on its laurels and became victim of the endless Simon Cowellesque vaudeville that renders TV less interesting and unpredictable than watching people play Guitar Hero when its not your turn, HBO demonstrated that the length and pace of an extended TV series allows for superior character development and depth of plot than a movie. Perhaps this was the point where TV overtook film to become the medium where the best talent operates.

7. Internet - Flickr.

Internet applications are rarely designed - marketing departments communicate directly with engineering, rather like developer driven architecture, where the architect is employed by the contractor. It used to be that deliberately crippled UI was considered a virtue, this could apply to the arguably elegant minimalism of Craigslist to the complexity of Wikipedia which self-regulates against uncommitted publishers or the Horrendous anti-design of Myspace which was supposed to be less off-puttingly elitist. Facebook put that theory to rest with its modernist style and attention to detail, but Flickr was the first popular web application that was really well designed. This was largely to do with the founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake who defied the stereotype by being both geeky and urbane. Similar to Vimeo, the beauty of the application has influenced the content and Flickr has become a source of stunning photography. Flickr was the first mature Internet application.

8. Books - People don’t Read, Steve Jobs.

People should listen to Steve Jobs, he might be the one, the messiah, all his products start with ‘I’.
My choice for the book that defined the decade is no book, and Job’s infamous statement that people don’t read.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Jobs was referring to the Kindle, which is by all measures a success. However, I suspect that jobs is right, Job’s ‘iSlate’ will surely be a multi-media device based on the fact that a black & white, video-less gadget which you can read a paperback on but can’t properly browse a website, makes the Kindle a loser in the long run. People read, they just don’t read books. iSlate will be bigger than the Bible.

9. Architecture - Nothing in Particular, Zaha Hadid.

The architecture of the last decade was epitomized by ‘funny shaped’ signature buildings by signature architects where brand took precedence over substance, like a signed picture without a drawing. Its origins were in the fragmented splintered shapes of deconstruction, but ended up in more fluid, organic, double-curved forms that were previously the exclusive domain of product and car design. The architects that defined this style predated the trend or the computer modeling that allowed it to become a built reality rather than something that only existed in drawings; in the picture above, showing Hadid’s weird collaboration with Lagerfeld for Chanel, the designers themselves look like they are computer generated. This style of architecture became popular because it fitted the niche created by a speculative bubble. A building with an unsubtle, unusual shape, but boring floor plan and crude detailing has maximum impact for minimum design effort and can be done quickly. Zaha Hadid was once great - as a paper architect, but this is the style that Dubai made possible, it defines the decade architecturally, and history may not be kind to it.

10. Music - Killing in the Name, Rage Against The Machine

For 2009, the coveted UK Christmas Number 1, which had been dominated by winners of the reality TV talent show, the ‘X-factor’ for four years running, was won by Rage Against The Machine after a grassroots campaign organized on Facebook. As the traditionally saccharine festive season rings out with ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ rather than an orange tanned, pre-pubescent with super-glued hair in a zoot suit and flared collar white shirt singing ‘grandma I love you, you’re swell’, to the tune of Nessun Dorma and a cash register ringing up, perhaps Santa is real after all. The next decade is going to suck, but it will have a better soundtrack.

Goodbye to cupcakes, and X-factor and Paris Hilton and Dubai tower blocks, and all that.

Chas A. Egan, Charles H. Lineweaver calculated how run-down the universe is as things disappear into the ultimate run-down state of black holes (where you can’t do any work with what gets sucked in). Unlike previous calculations, they included freakishly big ones ( a billion times the mass of the sun) rather than the average (10 million times the mass of the sun) which account for most of its run down-ness: entropy.
The new results for entropy in Boltzmann units are: early universe (10^88); now (10^104); maximum (10^122).
(BTW entropy units are joules per kelvin - can someone remind me are the units of temperature itself, energy, or is it unitless)
Ron Cowen has a good summary of the paper at Science News, where he mentions the following:
“Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg”.
Entropy is surely about macrostates vs microstates, if we had a name for a particular arrangement of molecules in an omelet, it would have high entropy. We don’t, there are many ways to smash an egg and still call it an omelet, so they are low entropy.
Does this mean that entropy is meaningless? No, but it means that it is relative to a particular system. The amount of potential work that can be done by system A on B depends not on some absolute measure of the free energy of A, but how much of that free energy is useful to B.
There is a relationship between the energy exchange between systems and information exchange, so the above paragraph could describe a relationship between two systems where the meaning of A was not absolute, but relative to B. One person’s high entropy omelet is another persons’ very special low entropy omelet with a name.

I plotted a graph of Rome’s population through history [source]. Some points: the rise and fall of Ancient Rome was roughly symmetrical (compared to the rapid decline of societies such as Greenland in Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’); the population during the Renaissance was miniscule (yet it was still a global center), when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel it was considerably smaller than a town like Palo Alto is today (60K); Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20K employees); the growth of Rome during the Industrial era is much greater than the rise of Ancient Rome.

I’m not sure what the population of Rome’s hinterland would have been in ancient times, but assuming that present day Rome is more sprawling, the 4 million inhabitants of greater Rome would perhaps show the post industrial city’s growth as being even more extreme than its ancient counterpart.

Not entirely facetiously, note that the extended period of decline and relative stagnation between 400 and 1500 roughly corresponds to Nicaean Councils of the 4th century and the Copernican revolution of the mid 16th, events which stake out what could reasonably be called the Christian period, (or partially, at least, the Muslim one, depending on your perspective).

Ireland has just created legislation which will make it illegal to blaspheme.
“Blasphemous matter” is defined as matter “that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion”
Given that parts of the Koran directly accuse Christians of blasphemy, that all the Abrahamic religions are guilty of blasphemy to each other, and that almost all religions are blasphemous to someone, the blasphemy law is clearly farcical. The Bible and the Koran are now potentially illegal in Ireland, beacuase of a law designed to protect their followers.
Dawkins claimed the law was a return to the Middle Ages, however in that period it would have made some sense since blasphemy would have only applied to the one religion, yielding less self-contradiction.
In short, Irelands blasphemy law is designed to protect only opinions which are held without reason against unreasonable opinion. Tenets held because of reason rather than faith are not protected, because they are not religion.
Ireland now has a law that says that:
(i) if enough people say black is white and are
(ii) offended by the opposite,
(iii) providing its a belief based on superstition not evidence,
(iv) it is illegal to tell them otherwise.

More here

Memetics evangelist, Susan Blackmore has a piece in New Scientist which suggests that replicated information in computers is distinct from memes, and therefore something new altogether.
“Evolution’s third replicator: Genes, meme, and now what?”
Biologist Larry Moran calls this pseudoscience.
Forget about the fact that I was talking about something similar to Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’ in the post below (it was under the tag ‘half baked ideas’, a non-scientific ramble), one of the problems with the idea of memes is that it imagines that memes are somehow different from genes. This opens up the inevitable possibility of a zoo of gene-like things as Blackmore suggests and Moran takes issue with.
At an abstract level, genes contain information, so do memes and Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’. One of the defining features of information is that it can be stored in different languages or media.
A better way to look at memes might be that genes are a particular flavor of meme instead of the current notion that memes are a by product of intelligent gene-based organisms

New Scientist has a piece on re-assessing economics after the crash.
I’ve a half-baked idea here, that is, one the one hand, obvious, but I haven’t seen spelled out anywhere: that free-markets are prone to viruses.

Clearly some memes propagate despite the fact that they aren’t true: astrology; homeopathy etc., the memetic equivalent of viruses.
Much of free-market ideology is based upon application of darwinian ideas to economics.
Therefore, even if free-markets do evolve naturally under natural selection, not all market forces will be benign, there could be the free-market money equivalent of viruses. I’ll call these ‘benes’ (as in bean counter, slang for accountant).
These benes could be merely be specific memes to do with money - such as a speculative or panic rumor, or indirectly such as businesses based on memes e.g. horoscopes. But they could equally be financial instruments, business practices or business environments themselves that are attractive and therefore become widely used, but are damaging to the free market that creates them. (An example of the latter might be lobbying, where businesses such as Verisign, for example, protect a monopoly over .com domain names more effectively by seducing legislators than being competitive.) These are somewhat different from memes since they become much more like organisms, with a life of their own. In some cases, like the SWIFT transaction system or retail bank buildings, they arguably have a phenotype.
The idea that capitalism is prone to periodic viral infection through benes, seems like an obvious thing to investigate. It also creates a middle road between the doomsayers that claim that macro economics is dead and the libertarians who say that it would have been OK to let everything fail. The message: ‘Capitalism works overall, but be careful’. Just how careful, might be something that could be ascertained scientifically.

I never quite understood the beef between Dawkins and Gould over punctuated equilibrium, however the notion that just because species flourish at different rates does not mean that DNA mutation does. (I need to double check to see if that was Dawkin’s point. )
To illustrate this consider a sand pile and the mini-avalanches that happen as sand is poured on the top at a constant rate. The rate of the pouring of sand may be constant but the avalanches will be varied - some big, some small, following a power law distribution.
In evolution, a constant rate of change to genotype may create periods of rapid change and periods of little change in phenotype - punctuated equilibrium. The gradualist evolutionary mechanism of neo-Darwinism is not challenged by this.

(update - am checking the Gould vs Darwin debate - the literature is not very succinct, surely I don’t need to read an entire book to see what the exact difference of opinion was?
It seems to be this: Dawkins figures that all complexity at the level of species, how they interact appear and disappear within a changing environment can be explained by natural selection operating at the level of genes. There doesn’t seem to be a simple explanation of what Gould thought (perhaps that’s why there are no 3 line explanations). My instinct is that Dawkins is right and analogies abound in terms of simple processes producing complex interactions - like the 3 planet motion).

[The picture above is from the New York Post, it makes false or misleading claims (highlighted) about propsed healthcare taxes. It is part of an alarmist trend in the reactionary press which makes what could be a bi-partisan issue appear necessarily polarized].
Having lived in America for 10 years, its a great place - but there are two things that feel broken, the legal system (with opportunistic litigation and judges who legislate (on both sides of the political spectrum)) and the healthcare system (with its bureaucracy, mercenary feel and lack of universal coverage).
In healthcare the culture of litigation compounds the problems of both medicine and the law, and its failings should anger those on the left for its patent social unfairness and the right for its obviously inefficient free market failings.
Solving this should be a bi-partisan call to arms, but it has become a polarizing force through lies and deception. A proposal to increases taxes by miniscule (1%) and overhaul the whole system is being spun by knee-jerk reactionaries as a huge tax hike on the middle classes.
As an outsider who has experience of multiple countries healthcare, I feel compelled to share my anecdotal experience of it in the US.
Despite having healthcare coverage here, it was cheaper for me to pay for a doctors visit in France where my wife is from and buy an antibiotic out of my own pocket than claim against my insurance and pay the co-payment. If I lived there or in another european country such as the UK, (but not Ireland), this would be free with a nominal fee for prescriptions (less than $20) - and contrary to perception I would pay about the same in taxes. In Switzerland, I would pay for the mandatory healthcare (about half of the US rate, but with better service and results) but in the end it would be a wash because of lower taxes.
But its not just about day to day coverage. A health insured friend in the US who had a heart attack received a $300,000 bill after finding that his insurance company only paid 90%. A friend of my wife is nearly bankrupted by her treatment for cancer. The worst part is that many people in the US do not seem to know that its only there that this happens. In every single other industrialized nation the threat of being bankrupted by medical bills does not exist.
And treatment in the US is vastly different from anywhere I’ve been (I have lived in 4 other countries). Nearly every time I go to the doctor I am sent for some kind of test - this seems like a good thing and who am I to argue, I am not a doctor? But when I asked a doctor in the UK (after having been sent for a brain scan for dizziness that was a drug side-affect) I was told that the risk of the scan was possibly higher than the chance of disease. What may have been happening is that the doctor had to minimize his risk of being sued by increasing my health risk.
This abrogation of responsibility which seems to me to contradict the hippocratic oath also manifests itself in the annoying habit of giving you a choice for every treatment. When there are two people in the room making a health decision, a fully qualified medic and a trained architect, apparently the architect (me) has to make the choice. If you wanted to have an operation in a creative and unusual, but life threatening, way, you might want want to ask me. But I’d recommend a doctor. Yet when I say to a doctor, ‘well you choose from your recommendations’ he says (me) the architect should.
The responsibility problem is often not the Doctor’s fault. My sister, who is a doctor in the UK was told not to offer to help Americans if they fell ill while flying. The reason was fear of being sued. Litigation is just one part of the reason why US healthcare is a massive rip-off costing 40% more than anywhere else in the world with no better results.
For the capitalists amongst us, US heathcare is a DMV-like Byzantine rats nest of paperwork, unnecessary ass-covering treatment and co-payment drug costs which exceed buying them directly off the Internet.
And that is if you have healthcare. If you are one of the 46 million Americans, the only people in any developed country that don’t, then your life expectancy is less than if you lived in Libya.
What the Obama administration is proposing is to replace inefficient Stalinist style corruption with something economically far less socialist than the US military. So what’s the problem?

A 15 year old boy in Britain, doing work experience at Morgan Stanley, wrote up his description of how he and his friends use the Internet. MS subsequently published the report as if someone had handed them a 3 ton chunk of obsidian labelled Internet Era Teenager Rosetta Stone.
Some clue about how unrepresentative of the average teenager someone doing work experience at Morgan Stanley might be, comes from this:

“How teenagers play their music while on the go varies, and usually dependent on wealth –with teenagers from higher income families using iPods and those from lower income families using mobile phones.

Suspicion about whether he asked anyone else other than his possibly small and atypical sample teenager friends comes from the unconvincing and varied terms relating to stats:

“99pc of teenagers”…”Most (9/10)”…”No teenager that I know of”

The last item “that I know of” surely makes the former stats suspicious as generalizations.
And much of the report is just ’so what’:

“Some teenagers use a combination of sources to obtain music [this says nothing]…Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on [hardly groundbreaking]…”Most teenagers own a TV”…”Teenagers listen to a lot of music”

And of course, the newpaper industry:

“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper”.

Yes, nobody reads newspapers, this isn’t teen Spidey Senses in fact, according to one notable, middle-aged man (Steve Jobs) ‘nobody reads’.
In terms of trend insight, apparently outdated phones aren’t cool. Who could have known? What Is Not [hot] includes:

“Phones with black and white screens, Clunky ‘brick’ phones”.

The stuff on display media smacks of being irrelevant:

“Outdoor advertising usually does not trigger a reaction in teenagers, but sometimes they will oppose it (the Benetton baby adverts). Most teenagers ignore conventional outside advertising (billboards etc) because they have seen outside adverts since they first stepped outside and usually it is not targeted at them (unless it’s for a film)”.

Games billboards, as he says are very popular, but anyway one would expect most people of all ages to describe how they are influenced by billboards like this.
No doubt the conclusion, that teens like viral ads, will have agencies rushing to produce forced second rate memes and money pouring into gimmick guerilla marketing, without thinking about the content rather than the medium.
Getting access to what drives buying habits for the generation of teenagers that are growing up surrounded by Social Networks, the Internet and Cellphones is like nabbing the elixir of youth for old farts and bankers.
This makes them easily susceptible to useless crap, as the report released by Morgan Stanley, produced by a 15 year old intern proves. In short, it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t obvious to anyone who actually uses the Internet or has seen a teenager in the last 10 years. There is no analysis, no sampling no controls or normalization of results - merely hearsay.
The single thing that can be concluded from this is that Internet consultants will be able to bilk large organizations for years to come, because people like Morgan Stanley will buy anything.

Text of the report here.

Why is the darker woman on the left called white and the relatively similar featured lighter woman on the right called black?
One of the things that struck me about the controversy surrounding Michael Jackson’s bleached skin and thinned features (the latter co-incidence suggesting the former wasn’t just vitiligo) was how extremely stereotypical racial classification is and how much it has to do with history. Michael Jackson ended up looking like a cartoon of a white woman.
In the US if you are of partially African and partially European decent you are most likely to be called black, suggesting that there is a notion of being ‘tainted’. The very fact that the half white, half black, President Obama is called black is proof of this prejudice.
The reverse is not quite the same. A person is often not tainted white in Africa as we will see with Obama’s trip there this week. That is not to say that people from various African nations are less prejudiced, just that the prejudices tend not to apply to ‘American Africans’ a term which shows the arbitrariness of African American and that the groupings where prejudices apply depend on local history.
The grouping of an entire continent which contains the majority of the worlds racial diversity, under one umbrella term ‘African’ is also an absurdity arising from the cruel fact that many people’s origins have been erased beyond the ability to pick a continent.
A randomly picked person from Africa will be as genetically different from another African as a randomly picked non-African. Someone from Ethiopia will typically have thin features and a Bushman may have fairer skin that Victoria Beckham’s tan. At the very least what it is to be black or white is blurred.
Victoria Beckham is a good way to illustrate this absurdity as the picture above demonstrates adequately. Both her features and skin tone appearing no more or less African than Whitney Houston in the picture above. Yet one is ‘black’ woman and the other is a ‘white’ woman.