I’ve just been reading an article on The Register slating New Scientist for a lack of understanding of basic economics (it’s fairly old, but I was away when it was published). Now, I’ve never claimed much understanding of economics, but clearly I’m dumber than I thought, ’cause to me The Register’s argument looks like nonsense.

The Register is attacking the classic green anti-capitalist myth that a system built on economic growth is fundamentally flawed because it requires an ever increasing consumption of finite natural resources. It may well be myth but, if it is, I’m going to need the reasons why explained to me in a little more depth than Tim Worstall gives here. He uses sand as an illustration for his argument, pointing out that a quantity of sand converted into computer chips will add significantly more value to the economy than the same quantity converted into wine bottles.

As a basic illustration, that’s fine, but extrapolated to a larger scale it doesn’t seem to hold much water (or wine). Economic growth is fine in this model as long as you assume a nation to be a closed system. Britain’s resource consumption doesn’t have to increase in line with GDP if we use our sand to make microchips. But building microchips will not reduce the demand for glass. All we’re doing is offshoring glass production, whilst continuing to double consumption of sand. If we all become singers our GDP per capita may increase while our sand consumption goes down, but we still want microchips and glass. In fact we probably want more microchips and more glass because we’re now all so rich from singing that we have more money to spend. Total sand consumption has increased again. The fact that it’s mined and processed abroad won’t negate the impact on our environment. We can not live on singing alone. Or, as put by someone wiser than me, how can you have money if none of you actually produce anything?

I’ve never bought a 360, on the basis that all the interesting games come to PC eventually anyway. But I might have to rethink that attitude on the basis of Natal. It’s going to be many years before there’s a combination of hardware and software support that can deliver that kind of functionality on the PC. I’m not just talking about Milo (there’s no way Molyneux can deliver on what he appeared to show—however good Milo’s facial recognition is, he can still only have a limited range of responses). I’m thinking of the potential for 3D, and movement tracking in 3D worlds: using head tracking to peer round corners, that sort of thing. I’m not at all surprised to see from Johnny Chung Lee’s Procrastineering blog that this is what he’s been working on at Microsoft. From the brief description he gives of the sensors it’ll easily do more than the amazing Wiimote demos he posted in the past, so it’s pretty exciting seeing it come to reality.

I’ve not watched the Sony show yet. The live stream was too choppy to make out, so I’m waiting for someone to post it. It’ll have to be pretty spectacular to top this.

Taken today in PC World Bradford. Do you think they'd give me my money back after I got home and found I couldn't actually play it?

So, today’s the day for celebrating the resurrection of the dead.

Walking back from the dawn service at Undercliffe Cemetery, with central Bradford appearing as scene from the zombie apocalypse. I was reminded of two things: First, how beautiful my city is at dawn on a bright Sunday morning, and that I should make the effort to see it more often. Second, that somewhere between the three church services I’m going to today, I need to find a couple of hours to try out one of the two campaigns I’ve still not played from 28 Days Later, the videogame.

Happy Easter.

Ragnar Tørnquist has posted “no news” about Dreamfall Chapters that got me more excited than any actual gaming news I’ve heard in months. Lots of promises to live up to here. The Longest Journey series is one of my favourite in gaming, and I hope the next instalment can summit to the potential the last didn’t quite reach. I’d love to see a game that finally gets the action/adventure blend right. I’ve never really understood why it’s not been done yet. The MMO interface is now so ubiquitous, and to the casual observer would seem perfect for such a task: a blend of full 3D movement with point-and-click for world interaction, in a fashion that many millions of gamers are instantly familiar with. Going back to Dreamfall after WoW the restrictive camera just seems infuriating. I want to look around the beautiful world, but I’m not allowed. It rather breaks the immersion. I can’t help feeling that the mini-games he mentions would too. He does say he wants to make The Longest Journey 2 as well as Dreamfall Chapters though. That’s got to be good news, right? I have faith.

Tornquist also says that Dreamfall suffered massively from piracy, despite the fact that it came with one of the most hated DRM systems ever. I assume he saw the news about Spore being the most torrented game ever. I would actually prefer to buy the game(s) online, and to have them validated online, as long as that means Steam, not SecuROM. I’d also like full SteamWorks support, including achievements and saves synced to the cloud. And I’d like a Steam client for the Mac, with all my games portable between the two formats from release day. I’m a dreamer.

Unsurprisingly, John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got in quickly with the definitive commentary on this story, but I couldn’t resist adding noise to the signal.

Dear Mr. Brown,

You know, back when Mr. Blair finally left some of us had high hopes. You’d talked a lot of good talk over the years and some of the initial signs were even pretty good. But, as with all these things, it didn’t take long for the dream to die. Now everyone’s talking about crisis and the world just seems to grow a little more gloomy and a lot more doomed every day. I guess it’s in times like these that leaders really get tested. But I’m sure you’ve thought that already.

I’ve been out of the country a while, and I’m still finding my feet back in the UK. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on much that’s going on here. But I got another of those round robin e-mails asking for lobbying on some important issue or another and, today, I’m just disillusioned enough to care.

Apparently there’s some big meeting of European leaders happening this weekend, where you’re all going to gather and talk about how we can get more idiots to borrow more money they don’t have to buy more crap they don’t need because that’s what’ll put us on the path to economic recovery. I enjoy foreign travel as much as the next Prime Minister, but I’m not convinced that’s the way.

Among other things of late, I’ve spent some time in India, studying Gandhi. I know you respect leaders with the courage of their convictions, so you probably know much more of him than I do, but I found some of his values really struck a chord. He was all about building a new nation that wasn’t just independent of Empire, but which valued integrity, and where values he saw as traditionally Indian formed the basis for a society with lasting strength.

Personally, I tend to think that the morality of compassion for life and respect for the world in which we live has far more global roots. Sadly, politicians these days don’t seem to like to talk about morality. Maybe it’s because it’s too reminiscent of “values voters” and the “religious right”, ’cause Lord knows we don’t do God in the UK, or maybe it’s ’cause you’re all too afraid of the morality trap catching the proverbial residents of your wardrobes. But aren’t we all a little more grown up than that? Don’t we have a little more integrity?

Maybe it’s because it’s impossible to talk about morality whist at the same time asking for months of detention without trial? Maybe it’s the paying civil servants to sell arms for private companies? Maybe it’s the forcibly making people destitute as a tool of public policy? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the rehabilitation of usurious practices that created this whole mess in the first place.

I guess it may not sit well with your calvinist background calling usury immoral, but a strong sense of morality was the one thing that some of us thought you had over your predecessor. Coupled with a little integrity, that could take you far. Maybe even the rest of us too. Take a look at who’s benefiting from all the stimulus packages, and ask who they’re helping. If it’s making the rich richer and the poor poorer, it’s probably immoral. And if you find yourself arguing that it’ll help the poor in the long term, that’s probably just the coward’s way out. Ask yourself why you really wanted this job.

Maybe you could start by putting a fraction of those rescue packages not in the hands of the institutions that failed us all, but with those who have creative solutions but no finance. Maybe people who have ways to make our way of life more sustainable in the long term. Maybe some of the new jobs could be creating renewable energy. Maybe you could put that as a challenge to some of these European leaders you’re meeting on Sunday.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic.

Two years ago I spent a couple of weeks travelling in the West Bank and Israel. The holy city of Lhasa, more than anywhere else I’ve been, brought back those memories of Jerusalem. We had only a single week in the whole of Tibet, mainly spent in a Land Cruiser the steering wheel of which had a neutral position 90 degrees clockwise of where it ought, travelling the length of the Friendship Highway. It seems somehow wrong to have enjoyed that time, for fear that I’m becoming a kind of occupation junky, but the rich texture of experience we had there revealed a land of great beauty.

From the roof of our hotel, across toward the Potala Palace, the Lhasa old town appeared part Tuscan hill village, part refugee camp, only in a distinctly Tibetan architecture style that, until that day, I never knew existed. On the floor below, our (slightly malodorous) bathroom had imitation Hello Kitty tiles and our bedroom quite possibly the least comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in—pitted and rough like a tent pitched in a rocky field. At ground level monks roamed the winding market streets shopping for blenders and rice cookers, and Chinese soldiers kept watch on street corners, feet fighting to resist the western beats from nearby Tibetan music stores.

I never happened across evidence of the kind of day to day disruption of livelihoods we saw in Palestine (though I understand rapid industrial development and mining are destroying nomadic communities in the west), yet the presence of the occupation is overwhelming, and the atmosphere stifling. The Tibetan flag is visible only by it’s absolute absence. Pictures of the Dalai Lama are forbidden. Tibetan phrasebooks are impossible to find, and the only guidebook available inside the country is that published by the Chinese government. As I understand it, it’s difficult even to study the Tibetan language beyond a very basic level in school. Back in Hebron I was stopped in the street by people wanting to talk politics, everyone had an occupation story to tell. Here nobody did. People are afraid to trust their neighbours. Even alone they were reluctant to speak to us. There’s simply no sign of dissent. There are no Banksies on the walls here, nor hastily scrawled slogans of night-time activists. Though I’ve not been able to check all the facts independently, we heard stories of shocking discrimination against ethnic Tibetans and legal incentives for Han Chinese immigrants to colonise the country that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

Away from Lhasa the the Chinese presence is less pronounced, but every small town has its Chinese quarter, usually far larger than the Tibetan old town, crowded with restaurants and hotels hungry for a share of the Chomolungma (Everest) Yuan. The few monasteries that remain are sad places, more like museums than centres of prayer and study, with the monks banned from meeting together since the uprising in March. The street patrols by the People’s Liberation Army are less ubiquitous between Lhasa and the border town of Zhangmu, but convoys miles long crawl the shiny new roads through the high mountain passes.

Entering the Chomolungma National Park, for the final drive toward Base Camp, the tarmaced road disappeared, and it started to become apparent why a 4x4 was necessary for the journey. The Chinese rebuilding of the Friendship Highway became an increasingly less obvious work-in-progress, and the track narrower and rougher for the winding passes. The lower dragon-scaled mountains on the edge of the park looked ready to rouse any moment, but for the streams flowing down their sides that gave the whole area the artificial glistening wet look that I thought only existed in Unreal worlds. The larger ones had clouds gathered around their tops as if they were chimneys of some unspeakable power station.

Then, as you summit the final Gyatso La Pass, you get your first glimpse of Chomolungma. Our guide told us that the local name means “beautiful woman” in Tibetan (though Wikipedia says it’s “Saint Mother”), and it’s obvious why people become obsessed with her. The clouds had gathered at smaller mountains. Chomolungma actually produces her own, with the wind carrying the snow from the summit into the clear blue expanse. Descending from Gyatso La toward the Great Himalaya Range, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, turning my head from one window to another with the zigzagging road. And every time she appeared afresh from behind some lesser hill the wonder was just as great.

Base camp itself was a slightly sadder place than I had expected, though it’s hard to say whether that was because of lower tourism, or just it being off season for climbers. Walking the last few kilometres from the modern camp to the foot of the mountain the landscape had become dryer and more sandy and the cliffs more orange. I’m pretty sure Starbuck crashed somewhere near here in 105. In a last show of Chinese bureaucracy, it is forbidden to set even a foot on Chomolungma herself, and the historical base camp site is now only a small military outpost. We were able to climb a small hill for a close up view and photo opportunity.

We had planned to have one final night in the shadow of the mountain at Tingri, but following a landslide on the road our guide advised that we push on to Zhangmu directly from Base Camp. Crossing the Himalayas and descending the narrow gorge toward Nepal the desert of the plateau gives way to incredible lushness. The blockage on the road turned out to be not a natural landslide, but rather a team of over enthusiastic Chinese road builders, who’d detonated not only the cliff-side route of the new road, but that of the old road as well. After a couple of hours waiting while engineers made meticulous adjustments to the position of a large girder that appeared to be supported on nothing, and was due to form a temporary bridge, we were allowed to walk across to a waiting Land Cruiser for the final few kilometres into town.

And that, following one night in a hotel with a stunning view down the Bhote Kosi valley, was the end of Tibet. I’d like to end with “Free Tibet!”, or some other punchy, simplistic slogan, but, in truth, I barely believe Tibet even exists any more. A couple of weeks later in Pokhara, Nepal, we watched Seven Years in Tibet. To visualise the difference between the historical Tibet and the country we visited, and know that not one frame of the film can have been shot there, was one of the most emotional experiences of our journey so far. Later still, while staying with Mel and Steve, an imported copy of the Guardian we saw reported that even the Dalai Lama has now given up. Somewhere there’s hope for the people of Tibet, but I’ve yet to find out where it is.