There's a world going on Underground

Whilst un-wasting the last of the open wine and beer last night, we watched a programme called "Ghosts on the Underground". It's a descriptive title and ably describes the contents, which were mostly dramatic shots of empty stations and tunnels at night; tube workers giving their descriptions of eerie goings-on; Sigur Ros, Mogwai and other ethereal music providing the soundscape; and a sceptic — Vic Tandy (of whom more in a second) — patrolling the tunnels with a spectrum analyzer.

I quite enjoyed it, truth be told. It was all done in a very low key (pun intended - we'll get to that ...) style and some of the testimony was all the more interesting for its mundane setting. The producers (or perhaps the budget) had decided against reconstructions and this worked to the programme's advantage.

As enjoyable as it was, most of the testimony was single-source and a lot of the witnesses seemed to be a bit too fond of "yarnage" (you could tell a few of them had told their stories before and enjoyed doing so) to take it particularly seriously. Whenever there was a tale involving more than one person ("So I radio'd the supervisor and he said ..."), these other parties were invariably nowhere to be seen or heard from. Via inter-titles, the programme made the connection between particularly "haunted" parts of the system and deaths, accidents or grave-disturbances that occurred in those places; why? I don't know; London's a large enough and old enough city to have seen death in every nook and cranny if you choose to go looking for it. It all added up to something akin to a collection of post-industrial, twenty-first-century, camp-fire stories, but it was none the worse for that.

The sceptical engineer, Vic Tandy, was one of the first people to investigate seriously the connection between infra-sound (bass sounds too low for the human ear to hear, typically sub-20Hz) and supernatural experiences, and was involved in the discovery of the so-called "fear frequency". He had first-hand experience of the ghostly effects of infra-sound while at work in the early 1980s; an experience which led him to describe the occurrence in a white paper for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, titled 'The Ghost in the Machine' and followed it up with an investigation of a "haunted" pub in Coventry ('Something in the Cellar').

As he trawled the network with his spectrum analyzer, Tandy found high levels (as high as 90-95 decibels in some places) of infra-sound in many of the areas considered "occupied". One good example was an engineering tunnel under the Thames: It was badly-lit; it was cold; it was narrow; it was draughty; the action of the trains pumped air first one way then in the opposite direction, causing the doors to bang; and the subsonic reading was over 90dB in the fear frequency range — enough to freak-out any sceptic without supernatural occurrences, I'd imagine. Tandy was clearly affected himself, but just smiled as if he was amusedly freaked-out by the whole setting.

Tandy died last year, which can only lead to the probability of the programme being a Halloween repeat.

I was slightly annoyed as they hyped-up the existence of a certain logic-defying photograph before an ad-break, but I received a phone call during the break so missed that entire section. Anyone got the scoop?

[Half the time, though, I was just looking at empty tube stations with their pipe-like corridors and smooth floors and thinking, "I'd love to skate that"]

MiBs and GiBs and MBs and GBs

I've always been a bit agnostic on the whole kilobyte-vs-kibibyte binary-prefix debate. As my grandfather used to say about some of his seafaring kit, however, "You don't need it until you need it".

Owing to a goon-based confusion which resulted in me having to take an hour out of my day to buy one extra DVDR because of someone else's miscalculation (DVDs use base10 gigabytes, you tw(i|a)t), I'm becoming converted.

I'm becoming convinced that the main reason for opposition is that nerdlets won't be able to say "gig" or "meg" any more.

What I'm Reading:

A rather excellent polit-comm masters thesis from one of my friends. I've been through it once already and am going through it again. It concerns the existence of public spheres; specifically, whether a European Union one even exists.

The existence of an EU-public-sphere opinion is independent of amity or enmity towards any EU policy or subject. For example: One could object to the policy of mandatorily using SI units (the metric system, in other words) for agricultural produce on the grounds that it's an unnecessary imposition on British trade and agriculture and because "nobody here uses kilos for carrots anyway"; OR one could object on the grounds that it should be a European principle that unit harmonisation is unnecessary. Both oppose the policy, but one does it using an insular nation-state perspective, whereas the other is an EU-public-sphere thesis. Likewise: As a UKian, one could be in favour of getting rid of the UK-rebate on the grounds that it would enhance the UK's strategic position within the EU; OR one could be in favour on the basis that "we're not pulling our weight" - that it would be a good thing for Europe to give up the rebate. Both are in favour of a policy but, again, one is a nation-state perspective and the other attests to the existence of an EU public sphere perspective.

Some commentators have claimed that a public sphere equals, or requires, pan-European media outlets of the type which don't exist (thereby refuting the existence of an EU public sphere); others claim that, no, public sphere effects are beyond uniform media channels and can exist happily in the independence of each nation's media. Part of the problem (dealt-with in the thesis) is that many critics define the (hazy) notion of a "public sphere" so as to support whichever viewpoint they happen to be peddling. In such circumstances, it's no surprise that everyone finds what they are looking for. The thesis seeks to apply more empirical and scientific methodologies in order to answer the question.

More interesting to me are the points made with regard to federalism (with a small "f") and its effect upon democracy and the nation state. To an extent, these ideas are independent of the European situation and are more to do with the management of discourse and power.

An interesting and typical quote (with references removed):

Finally, for Neunreither, the absence of any mechanism for the expression of official opposition to European policy within the Union’s institutional system presents a fundamental obstacle to the emergence of pan-European deliberation. Because opposition cannot express itself formally within the system, opposition to particular policies is transformed into opposition to the European Union itself. Furthermore, "this transformed opposition is not likely to be exercised on the EU level, but tends to flow back into the traditional national systems". Here, the point is not so much that there is no European media through which opposition could be expressed, but that opposition has no need to manifest itself at the European level because citizens are members of the Union through their national governments. So the absence of a channel for popular opposition creates no opportunity for public deliberation to have a visible effect on the policy process, except through national governments, thereby concentrating public discussion of European politics within national public spheres.

Anyway, I'm surprised to have found it quite interesting, having begun reading it as a semi-obligation to a friend. I'm not sure the author fully proves his case ("No: There's no EU public sphere"); certain things are quite definitely demonstrated and they, in themselves, are fascinating (empirically-measured political biases across the different UK newspapers, for example) and some links are more tenuous (falsifying certain claims need not disprove theses which only vaguely depend upon them) but the journey is well worth the destination.

Name that Mountain Range #2

This one's easier than last week's. Answers later.