People have been pretty easily sucked in to following the Government's characterisation of the smoking ban as a ban on smoking in "public". It is the converse: one may smoke and resmoke along the Queen's highway, but not in a privately-owned restaurant.

One may smoke in a privately-owned home, indeed, one may smoke in a publicly-owned home, and many are known to do so. One may not smoke in a private members' club, despite such premises being legally very similar to privately-owned dwellings (non-commercial, not enterable by members of the public in general). The reason is that private members' clubs employee people, who could suffer from passive smoking, and the law turns on whether people are employed on the premises.

I used to think that the justification for this was that some people are thought to have no choice but to work in smoky premises (I used to live in a village west of Cambridge where the only place serving alcohol, being the only employer other than the Post Office and a pig farm, was a private members' club). I'd thought this was some extension of the fallacy that since most people have no choice but to work, they have no choice but to work for a particular employer and cannot switch jobs. I now think it's probably just that the Government wants more precedents for measures which prevent people from engaging in risky behaviour through their choice of employer.

It's not clear how the home itself can ultimately be protected from these laws: I was working at home today, and had to put up with smoke coming in from builders next door. I should get together with my landlady and form a private members' club.

There are preposterous libertarian arguments in favour of smoking cigarettes near other people, grounded in the respect we ought to have for personal autonomy. We can just ignore these as nicotine addicts are not autonomous individuals, but even if we take them seriously, we are faced with massive market failure: I have been asked "do you mind if I smoke" with oftenness and politeness. Never however have I been offered any consideration. If the passive smoking externality could be eliminated by market mechanisms, I can scarcely imagine that even our old friends and colleagues at the Pinochet Institute for the Reduction of Poverty would not like to see the homeless and other vulnerable souls becoming professional passive smokers when they could be doing something else with their time.

So, massive transaction costs (possibly alleviable by technology) inhibit the market in passive smoking easements. We also lack the technology to privatise the air. We are foredoomed to produce a socially non-optimal amount of tobacco smoke. The debate about the UK legislation was concentrated on the physical health effects of smoking, which is unfortunate as by far the most egregious externality is that smelling someone else's cigarette when you don't want to is bloody annoying. With not a little confidence may we adjudge the fragrance of cigar, pipe and apple tobacco much more agreeable than that of the Lucky Strike, though even the aromatic sublimity of a virgofemorally-rolled Monte Cristo is unwelcome to those ailed by asthma, sore throats, or jogging. It's just rude. "Hello, I cannot control my cigarette addiction, so must it discomfort you as well". If people want to annoy each other with fumes, they should buy some land big enough for fumes to dissipate before they annoy neighbours, and certainly keep their filth off the public highway.

This law encourages cigarette smoking in the privately-owned uncovered space outside pubs; there's no fresh air inside a pub, and so there is no fresh air to be enjoyed in parts of London where pubs and stuffy cafés constitute the sole places where one may sit down.

The whole thing should be reversed: ban tobacco smoking on public land, and on land where it is likely thither to diffuse. Permit it in private, regardless of whether the premises are open to the public, frequented by people in the course of their employment or residential. At the very least, recharacterise the law as a "non-residential private smoking ban".

It would be insensitive to wonder if some of the people who jump in front of Tube trains are just doing it to inconvenience me, but for less serious transport interruptions, it's clear that a cocktail of selfishness and lack of situational awareness is to blame. I used to think that standing in the carriage doorway holding your child in such a position as the door slams on his head as the words "Mind the closing doors" are announced was the most stupid thing I'd seen on the Tube, until yesterday.

There is a rule, more observed in the breach than honoured, that one stands on the right and allows passage on the left, when travelling on the Tube escalators. In practice, passage on the left is obstructed by people who are too situationally unaware, luggage-laden, selfish or obese to exert with their brains enough control over their bodies to stand only on the right. Yesterday I found the rule honoured in the breach. I was hurrying down the left side of an escalator at Holborn, and to my dismay but not surprise found that some idiot was trying to run up the escalator toward me. I started to move faster, to make sure we met where there would be room to pass each other, and to make it more dangerous for her to keep going lest we crash into each other. I assumed that she was not going to recognise that I had some notional right of way. Presently we collided. I pushed past her and got to the bottom of the escalator, and she started trying to run back up again. To my delight, she found her way blocked by a column of five or six people seemingly incapable of following the "Don't stand on the left" rule, and had to descend sheepishly to the bottom of the downscalator, and clamber over the barrier to the upscalator she would have been on had she followed the one-way system in the first place. Make apathy work for you.

Commuter-on-commuter psychological warfare is also waged by means of wheelie luggage. This is a transient battle for position rather than territory, like naval warfare without the cannon and hats. There are two principal tactics: allow the wheelie luggage ... to do a wheelie: let it just roll onto one wheel, the other heading off into the stratosphere, and careen off on its own arc, such that it threaten enemy passengers rather than the carrier. Achieving this nonchalantly is just the low-tech analogue of the Metro terrorists' eternal conundrum: how do I get the toxins airborne? (Folkwarden David Blunkett is no longer Home Secretary so there is no longer a danger of being sealed in the Tube in the event of terrorists' getting a substantial quantity of lethal wheelie luggage airborne.) Secondly, re-extending the handle on wheelie luggage suffices a pretext for becoming stationary at the top of a flight of stairs, endangering those still attempting to move up the stairs, who must now also become stationary, sending a little ripple of delay back down the stairs to every passenger and every person with whom he has to do, yea until the end of days.

We use water cannon to rid the Westminster streets of anarchists, and sweep the homeless from their Mayfair addresses. Our politicians speak of reducing the incidence of hooded-sweatshirt wearing teenagers from the tops of double-decker buses. Truly it is time to cleanse the Tube of those who would selfishly delay other passengers, and disperse with rubber bullets those who would stand and chat in critical tunnel intersections. I wait in joyful hope for that glorious Day when we wipe our enemies from the face of the London railway transit system.

The Big Issue recently carried a so-called "debate" on ID cards between Mike Parker of NO2ID and Meg Hillier, the relevant Government minister. Much of Hillier's writing merely states what the Government is threatening to do, rather than attempting to justify it, so it's not a debate in the proper sense.

Hillier is actually "Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Identity", which is horrifying to me, as I don't believe that "identity" exists. I'll admit that it's a useful concept in maths and logic, but that's not what is meant here. What people mean by the word seems to be either something like "race", "culture", "ethnicity", "nationality", "gender", "sexuality", "class" or "government-issued documentation making assertions about a particular human being". The latter is sometimes a development of the all-too-common mistake that truth is what the government says it is (people don't really think this; it's what happens when they fail to think), or the definition of words and concepts is properly the responsibility of the government (some people really desperately want this to be true, and for some countries it is).

Since the minister's title precedes her argument on p4 of the 17 March edition of the paper in question, it's possible to disagree with her premisesbefore she's even started writing. She begins:

It's simply inconceivable that in a modern society, people do not have a single, simple, safe way of securing and verifying their identity. We all need to be able to prove who we are---when travelling, opening a bank account, getting a new mobile phone or applying for a job.

How many times has human thought gone wrong in those 51 words? (The whole article is about 750 words long.) I don't think it's worth counting, but just as an exercise, I shall try to identify some of them.

First, "inconceivable" is hyperbolic. We're already in the situation she describes, so if she cannot conceive of that situation, she cannot conceive of the material universe as it currently exists, and something is badly wrong with her brain and she should pursue a different occupation such as painting. What she means is that a means of verifying identity is necessary for some people and that is it wrong, in an egregious way, if for some reason this isn't possible. That might not actually be unreasonable. I just don't think it's as necessary as she does.

Whenever I read word "modern" I always mentally substitute the phrase "post-Renaissance" and see what I get. People try to use the word to mean whatever they want it to mean, and so it has come roughly to mean "in the last five or ten years, or at least since the election of the Blair or Attlee governments".

So, on to "single, simple". Why should Hillier's constituents get ripped off by a "single" public or private identity-verification monopolist? We are never told.

Why should any such system be simple? Take all the pairs of principals who wish to participate in a transaction in which "identity" is "verified". This is quite hard for me as I can't think of any legitimate examples, but let's take Hillier's example of opening a bank account. The only things the bank cares about (when not giving credit) is really your address and some means of working out that future withdrawals are authorised by you. It may be forced to care about "who" you are, e.g., what your name is by external factors such as regulatory punishments. So, the set of all instances where a particular bank and a particular person wish to open an account, and the set of all analogous circustances in other situations. (It should be noted that the banks are mainly after proof of residence rather than proof of identity, which is what all those utility bills are examined for). We're already in complex territory, and only dealing concretely with bank accounts. Why is the degree of complexity in verification not properly a matter to be decided on a transaction by transaction basis? Some banks and some customers might want to use much more complex means of checking the bona fides of the other party in certain circumstances. Then again, the minister probably didn't even think as she typed the word "simple". It'll be there just because some better alternative to the Government's scheme is more complex.

What on earth does it mean to "secure" an identity? To get to the bottom of this, one needs to come up with a concrete description of what these people who believe in "identity" mean by it, if that's possible. I think what is meant is a sort of metaphysical object, outside physical reality, which is or represents a unique human individual. It's the sum of all the things like one's name, address, parents, serial numbers issued by various bodies. A soul in an age of unbelievers, composed of information. I note in passing that before Plato, atomists thought the soul was made up of matter like the body. This "identity" concept seems to be a set of pieces of information, some of them intimately concerned with physical material (biometric data). Ultimately, an identity in this sense is reducible to a single, very large, unique number. Is it not just an abuse of the word "secure" to apply it to such a thing? What is presumably meant is to impose access control on the physical objects known to be containing copies of this data. "Security" is sometimes treated as a black and white, boolean concept; either something is secure or insecure. This is nonsense. One must ask "secure against what?" and calculate, in respect of each threat under consideration, whether the cost of countering the threat exceeds the harm otherwise obtaining, taking into account the probability of such harm, which is a often a function of the costs and benefits of causing it.

It is just pathetically vague to say "We all need to be able to prove who we are". The three or four examples given of circumstances in which this need supposedly arises are ones in which the "need" is imposed by the Government, and in some cases imposed partially with the intention of increasing the demand for identity-verification services! We don't need to prove "who we are", whatever that means. We just need to satisfy the other party in a situation of whatever it is he wants to know, often name and address, or length of residence, or creditworthiness, not "identity".

Wikipedia is too often treated monolithically when its accuracy is being assessed. It shouldn't be, as Wikipedia is a common technical and regulatory system for encyclopaedic articles, and the accuracy of any given article is a function both of the behaviour of the Wikipedia system and the article's own subject matter.

Like the Linux kernel, it's possible for an individual working alone to make a small incremental improvement to Wikipedia, and for the beneficial improvements to be detected and preserved by others, such that they preponderate. This is what Yochai Benkler calls peers-based commons production in Coase's Penguin.

Wikipedia's regulatory system has a policy and an enforcement mechanism.

Wikipedia's policy is called NPOV, Neutral Point of View. This may sound like a sincere attempt to be objective on matters of fact, but in principle means to be agnostic as between the truth and its alternative. I have no conclusive evidence for the following smear, but the reason for this agnosticism is that Wikipedia's creator, Jimbo Wales, is or was an "Objectivist", an adherent of an anti-authoritarian anti-collectivist pseudo-philosophy invented by novelist Ayn Rand, with whose works I am unfamiliar as to read them would see me stripped of my degree faster than throwing a brick through the Senate House window or watching rugby league.

Wales doesn't want an authoritarianism about what is true, so Wikipedia remains neutral as to "point of view". With minimal funding, of course, Wikipedia can't actually afford a truth-reckoning authority, but that is beside the point, because in practice, NPOV is pretty benign.

Wikipedia enforces its policies; there's a dispute-resolution procedure. I've used it. It sucks. Material can be forcibly removed from Wikipedia on grounds of NPOV-violation, falsehood or non-notability. The cost of contesting a strongly-fought dispute of this character is many hours of one's time. It's not worth it.

The relative costs and benefits of truth and falsehood in a Wikipedia article depend on the subject matter. The better our understanding of something, or the simpler it is, the lower the cost of maintaining an accurate Wikipedia article about it. (Simple and well-understood are not the same: quantum gravity is doubtless trivial; turbulence is complex but we know a huge amount about it; biology or economics on the other hand presently have neither characteristic.) There are few benefits to anyone of inaccurate Wikipedia articles about the physical sciences or mathematics.

Quite the opposite obtains in the case of history, politics, religion, linguistics, et c. Linguistics? I like to tell people that the point of historical linguistics is rape and pillage, and certainly in areas of the world where ethnic tensions are high, linguistic/onomastic arguments (e.g., your village's name is actually from the language of my ancestors, ergo ...) are used to inflame passions. It is easier to come up with a plausible historical linguistic argument than it is to plausibly refute one. People sufficiently motivated by contrarianism or a desire to fit in with the local racists can combine this fact with the general, non-domain-specific, tools of intellectual dishonesty are not going to be stopped by Wikipedia's wrist-slapping dispute resolution procedures.

This is why hard sciences and maths coverage on Wikipedia is very good, and some linguistic articles are an affront to the human capacity to perceive and reason about the external world. The good reputation of Wikipedia's physical science articles will attach to the lies of the ethnic cleansers, and vice-versa.

I have always been broadly in favour of the moon. It is therefore unfortunate that as a result of moving to a well-lit cloudy city, I don't get to see more of it, not that much can be seen of it anyway right now from Fulham, as the moon here is currently being rebooted.

The moon of Fulham is of course of a rather different character from the sort of moon you get in other boroughs, and this is much to be welcomed. Local moons for local people, I say. The moon of Lewisham, for instance, fills me with dread, to say nothing of the politically-correct multi-coloured minor planetoid they are rumoured to have in Quislington. Apparently there are plans to consolidate the various moons into some ghastly newfangled contraption, but if Australian states can't even standardise on rail gauges what are the chances of London boroughs agreeing on orbital dynamics?

Much as I dislike acquiescing in faits accomplis, the existing lunar arrangements work well (despite the current unavailability of the moon in Fulham) and it's far too late to do anything about them now.

No matter who wins tomorrow's Australian federal parliamentary election - after all, there is no Government and Opposition, only Complicity and Resistance - the real winners will be ... psephologists. Or so they say.

It is clear to everyone that Christmas should be banned ... between 7 January and 30 November each year. One cannot buy a mug of Starbucks coffee this month but one be confronted by unseasonal gaudy red and green decorations.

The IPPR is coming out with a report which says

"If we are going to continue to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other major religious festivals too. "Even-handedness dictates that we provide public recognition to minority cultures and traditions."

Who is "we"? Why is continuing to mark Christmas expressed in a conditional subordinate clause as though it were a hypothetical situation? It is indeed the case that without massive coercion of a large proportion of the population, and of foreign-owned commercial organisations including but not limited to purveyors of bad coffee and insipid paninis, it "would be very hard to expunge it from our national life". Is that what the author was contemplating, or was he just unconsciously following the syllogistic "if X, then Y" form so beloved of Marxists and scholastics?

So why go to this effort? Only because "even-handedness" "dictates" it unless public organisations mark other festivals? Are the consequences of just not doing anything worse than turning the UK into an anti-religious police state? Is "even-handedness" really that important a value? More important than tolerance?

Of course the real reason to oppose this nonsense is that suggested by Francis Cornford. I remember exactly the same proposal being rejected in 1659.

This week has been a good one for amusing words and phrases.

I came up with "lithohaematology", "euphemistically challenged" (now that it's politically incorrect to saying "politically correct", sadly others lit upon this before I did), "I've seen the writing on the wall, and it says ``King Belshazzar, please call your office''", and (phoning the Parliament switchboard, "Good afternoon, my name's Martin Keegan and I'm trying to bring down the Government. Would you please put me through to the office of Greg Hands MP?". Sadly, I've now forgotten the funny put down they responded with before connecting me.

Well, it amused me, anyway.

Why is it there such a strong correlation between the geographical distribution of political party support in the Ukraine and historical boundaries? The border between the Orange parties and the Blue looks just like the border of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth four hundred years ago, and the bit of the country (Subcarpathian Ruthenia) which used to be in Czechoslovakia and Austria-Hungary maps almost exactly to the area which supports Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party.

(I assume anyone reading this blog will know the historical boundaries from memory, but have included a link to the election map)

Some Europhiles seem determined to prevent the UK public from ever having a say over the constitutional structures of the EU. I noted Jack Straw trying this on a few years ago; now Sir Ming Campbell is at it. Instead of letting people have a say on the EU's constitutional structures, as laid down in the new treaty, he's proposing a referendum on UK membership of the EU! This is just like the lie that the UK would have to leave the EU if it voted down the Constitution (which insult to truth and democracy was disproven when France and the Netherlands remained members): the choice is between the proposed constitutional arrangements and UK withdrawal, with no option of different arrangements and continued membership.