[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell takes issue with an American conservative's criticism of an anti-fracking film as state propaganda for the United Arab Emirates. No, the oil/natural gas market doesn't work that way.


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin wonders why Matthew Yglesias sees state repression--state policies, more broadly--as key to the problems of independent unions in China but not so in the United States.


• pauldrye's False Steps examines the abortive British effort in the late 1950s to build its own space launch vehicle.


• GNXP's Razib Khan argues, in commenting on free speech laws outside of the United States, in that the repression of speech on grounds of potential harm to the community isn't done from a consistent philosophical position. Thoughts?


• James Bow recounts his experience on the last trip of the Northlander train into northern Ontario. It does sound like it had a lot of potential for tourism and whatnot that went unexploited.


• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares links to commentary on China's launch of its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning.


• Maximos discusses Australia's seasonal, El Nino-dependent, Lake George.


• Estonia as a Nordic nation, not that different from Sweden is the theme of the latest Itching for Eestimaa post.


• Eugene Volokh notes rioting in Bangladesh inspired by a Facebook image of a desecrated Koran that led to attacks on that country's Buddhist minority.

[LINK] "Joining EU, Croatia aims for historic unification"

When I saw the title of this Reuters article, I was confused. Certainly Reuters wasn't talking about any kind of Croatian annexation of Bosnian Croat communities, since renouncing irredentism was a requirement for Croatian membership in the European Union? But no, instead the article was talking about how a transfer of territory from the Republic of Ragusa--now Dubrovnik--to the Ottoman Empire to ward off the Venetians now, as Croatia enters the European Union while Bosnia-Herzegovina remains outside, threatens to leave Dubrovnik a virtual island or exclave cut off from the Croatian "mainland".

"Venice was Dubrovnik's sworn enemy," says Croatian historian Niko Kapetanic.

But the tiny maritime republic, its walled old town now a UNESCO world heritage site and a magnet for tourists, was far more adept at diplomacy than war. So in 1699, Dubrovnik agreed for the Ottomans to extend their reach to a 20-km (12-mile) strip of thinly-populated Adriatic coastline, creating a land buffer against the encroaching Venetians.

The deal would defend Dubrovnik until the city fell to Napoleon at the start of the 19th century, but it has come back to haunt Croatia as the country of four million people prepares to join the European Union next July.

The short stretch of coastline passed to modern-day Bosnia as the country's only outlet to the sea, growing into the drab resort of Neum and cutting Croatia in two at its southern tip.

From July, tourists and truckers will have to cross the external borders of the EU to go from one part of Croatia to another, negotiating long, costly queues and strict customs checks twice within the space of 20 km.

Diggers are eating into the hillside to upgrade the border crossings, but even then many trucks, particularly those carrying foodstuffs, face being routed via ferry from the mainland to the Peljesac peninsula and on to Dubrovnik to avoid leaving EU territory.

How to bridge Neum, perhaps literally, has become the focus of an acrimonious row, stirring nationalist passions and reviving controversy over where the border actually belongs.

[. . .]

Under pressure from the EU to find a solution, Croatia has revived a proposal to build a 2,400-metre bridge to Peljesac at an estimated cost of 250 million euros ($315.12 million), finally linking Dubrovnik to the rest of the country without having to go through Bosnia.

Construction would take several years. But Nikola Dobroslavic, the prefect of Dubrovnik county, says it is Croatia's "historic and national obligation".

Bosnia says the bridge threatens its access to open seas and would prefer a closed road corridor in the hinterland above Neum, an option Croatia is also exploring.

If it does insist on the bridge, Bosnia says, Croatia must first formally hand over control of two uninhabited islets, Veliki (Great) Skolj and Mali (Little) Skolj and the tiny tip of the Klek peninsula, that Sarajevo claims as its own.

"You can't build anything without first knowing who owns what," Bosnian Communications and Transport Minister Damir Hadzic told Reuters.

[ISL] On the problems with Japanese claims to various islands

Peter Lee's Asia Times article makes an interesting point regarding Japan's claims to various islands and island chains--most heatedly the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China sea with China/Taiwan, but also Dokdo/Takeshima with South Korea and the Kuril Islands with Russia. Japan is laying claim to three different island groups with three different nations--Japan's only maritime neighbours, excluding Micronesian states--for three different reasons rather than settling on a consistent rationale for defensible frontiers. The foreign policy implications of the muddle for Japan are significant, inasmuch as Japanese claims to islands claimed--arguably with greater justice--by the South Korea and the Taiwan that are Japan's only plausible allies keeps Japan from such an alliance. (The fact that the claims bring Taiwan especially but also South Korea closer to China doesn't help, either.)

Japan's claim to incontestable sovereignty over the islands goes back no further than its seizure, together with Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands, from the Qing empire in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, and not being forced to give them back in the post-World War II muddle.

The "spoils of war" argument, aka we got 'em and by golly we're gonna keep 'em approach, is an awkward one for Japan. It would dearly like to get back four islands on the southern end of an archipelago stretching between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Hokkaido, which are now occupied by Russia as heir to the Soviet Union's spoils of war.

The short form of this imbroglio is the "Kurile Islands dispute", but the two southernmost islands are more Hokkaido-esque, and Russia has signaled a willingness to give them up. The two more northerly islands are bona fide members of the Kurile chain. Russia wants to keep them. Japan wants them. Awkwardly for Japan, in 1956 it promised to surrender its claims to these two islands if a formal peace treaty were concluded.

Given this unfavorable position, Japan must contest the "spoils of war" argument and rely on emotive, historical claims to the islands - the exact opposite of its position on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

The "exercised sovereignty" argument also provides no comfort to Japan in its dispute with South Korea over the Dokdo Islands (Takeshima to the Japanese). After the conclusion of World War II, the United States supported the historical Japanese claims to the islands but declined to put their defense within the scope of the US-Japan Joint Security Treaty.

Since 1991, the main island has been home to a family of South Korean octopus fishermen and about three dozen Republic of Korea Coast Guard, fishery, and lighthouse personnel. President Lee Myung-bak has visited, as well as thousands of South Korean tourists who take a US$250 ferry trip to the island.

In July 2008, the administration of then-US president George W Bush acknowledged South Korean control over the islands by designating them as ROK territory.

Therefore, Japan's attempts to hold on to the Senkakus on the principle that their effective de facto control, by itself, constitutes de jure sovereignty undermines its arguments on Dokdo and the Kuriles. This inconsistency, one might assume, does not make an ironclad case to the United States to encourage a regional confrontation over Japanese dismay over Chinese pretensions to the rocks.

[LINK] "The CD at 30 is feeling its age"

NPR's The Record notes that today is the 30th anniversary of the sale of the first compact disc (Billy Joel's 52nd Street as the first).

I'm intrigued by the thirty-year cycle for recording media that's identified here. As presented it sounds plausible, but the implication of the theory that digital downloads of mp3-format files will be dominant for the next three decades does make me wonder.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a musical format many of us grew up with: the compact disc. It's been three decades since the first CD went on sale in Japan. The shiny discs came to dominate music industry sales, but their popularity has faded in the digital age they helped unleash. The CD is just the latest musical format to rise and fall in roughly the same 30-year cycle.

[. . .]

The CD was supposed to have the last word when it came to convenience and sound quality. And for a while, it did. The CD dominated record sales for more than two decades — from the late 1980s until just last year, when sales of digital tracks finally surpassed those of physical albums. It's a cycle that has played out many times in the history of the music industry, with remarkable consistency.

Sam Brylawski, the former head of the recorded sound division at the Library of Congress, says, "If you look at the last 110, 115 years, the major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy."

He says one of the biggest factors driving this cycle is a desire on the part of manufacturers to sell new players every generation or so. "The real money — the real profits — for companies have been in the sales of hardware. That is to say, machines that play back recordings."

Brylawski says that's true for Apple's iPod, the must-have MP3 player that drove the demand for digital music tracks beginning in the early years of the 21st century. And it was just as true at the very beginning of music industry for one of the pioneers of sound recording: Thomas Edison.

"Edison put his heart and soul into this beautiful equipment," says Tim Brooks, who wrote a book about the beginnings of the recording industry called Lost Sounds. "He didn't care much who the singers were."

Edison practically gave his recordings away for free in order to get people to buy his phonographs. He invented the recording cylinder in 1877, but it didn't really catch on until the 1890s. Cylinders were about four inches long, and they looked like empty toilet paper rolls covered in wax or lacquer. They were the state-of-the-art musical format for about 20 years, until they were supplanted by a new invention: the 78 rpm disc, touted by Edison's competitor, the Victor Talking Machine Co.

"The early machines were very, very crude," says Brooks. "The sound was not as good as the sound on cylinders. But it was a lot more convenient. They didn't break as easily. They could be made longer, bigger, that sort of thing."

Convenience over sound quality — that's a theme we'll come back to later. The 78 reigned as the most popular format until the early 1950s, when it was replaced by the LP. The bigger disc definitely sounded better. But its success stemmed in part from how conveniently you could listen to a dozen songs on a single disc. The LP was in turn the format of choice for — you guessed it — roughly 30 years, until it was challenged by the cassette and finally supplanted by the CD. At each turn, of course, Brooks says the record industry was happy to repackage all of your old favorites in the new format.

"When 78s went out and LPs took over," says Brooks, "the record companies were able to resell stuff they'd sold before. When CDs replaced LPs and things in the 1990s, go back to the catalog and sell it again. So it's a cash cow for them that way."

[LINK] "The New Aesthetic"

After too long quiet, Castrovalva is back up with a post drawing on an interview with Neal Stephenson where that man bemoans the "lack of optimism" in modern science fiction specifically and a lack of faith in imagining the future generally (in fashion, say).

Reading this, I began to wonder if the issue is that in many respects our lives are saturated with information technology to such an extent of digital alienation that the old and physical acquire a nostalgic cachet. Something of this can be seen in the new aesthetic, an attempt to document the eruption of the digital into the physical, whether that be QR codes, surveillance cameras, augmented reality, missing people adverts on 404 pages, 3D printing through to pixellated photos of physical objects. As discussed here:

"Intuitively, one feels that this could be important. Smartphones, tablet computers, drones, CCTV cameras, LCD screens, e-readers, GPS, social networking, recognition algorithms and scores of allied technologies and concepts are rising to super-ubiquity around us. They are wreaking untold changes on the behaviour of nation states, corporations and individuals. Yet all this is happening in a cultural environment broadly evacuated of ideology, apart from the exhausted fairytales of neoliberal consumer capitalism… Converging, leapfrogging technologies were evoking genuinely new emotional responses within us, responses that do not yet have names."

I think some of this can also be seen in how we choose to depict the digital. On the one hand, we have Apple’s preference for skeuomorphism whereby interfaces are designed to mimic the physical with textures, beveled edges and leather or wooden finishes. It’s all rather reassuringly retro. By contrast, Microsoft’s Metro interface is an austere environment characterised by its flatness and minimalism having kicked away the crutch of realworld metaphors.

Does this explain steampunk?