Odds and Ends (4)

an improved horn, making travel more expensive and the cost of originality

I get an idea for a post, start it, put it aside to see if more ideas accumulate around it. If they don’t then eventually, when I have enough too short posts, I put them together and post them.

An Improved Horn

On a short drive recently I twice heard honking, was uncertain whether it was directed at me. That started me thinking about a car horn as a device for communicating with the drivers of nearby cars, its limitations and how they might be overcome.

There are two limitations. The first is the narrow bandwidth. Blowing your horn tells other drivers that there is something you want them to pay attention to but not what, a one bit message. The second limitation is that it is not directional — everyone near you gets the message and there is no way to know whom it was intended for. What we need is an improved horn, some way of sending a message to a driver near you, received only by him, some way of pointing your horn at a specific car and transmitting more than a single bit.

There are a number of ways it could be done. One could, for example, have a QR code on every car, front back and sides, of the driver’s cell number. I point my improved horn at the car, it reads the code and dials the number, I tell him that his trunk is open or that he has a flat or that something has come off his roof rack. We have to be able to make and receive the call hands free, but the technology for that already exists.

This version requires adding a QR code to every car. Every car already has a license plate. In an alternative version, the horn scans every car in sight to read its license plate, consults a database linking license plates to phone number. When you point the horn at a car it dials the phone number associated with that car’s plate. That database does not exist — but it could.

No doubt there are other ways it could be done.

It may by now have occurred to you that although this is an idea, it is a bad idea. A driver sometimes, but rarely, sees a car with an open trunk or a flat tire that the driver would like to be told about. He much more often sees a driver who he thinks is tailgating him, or slowing traffic, or blocking his turn, or grabbing a parking space that should have been his, or … .

The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality

or

What is Wrong with Modern …

You are the first city planner in the history of the world. If you are very clever you come up with Cartesian coordinates, making it easy to find any address without a map, let alone a GPS, very useful since neither GPS devices nor maps have been invented yet.

You are the second city planner. Cartesian coordinates have already been done; you can’t make your reputation by doing them again. With luck you come up with some alternative, perhaps polar coordinates, that works almost as well.

You are the two hundred and ninetieth city planner in the history of the world. All the good ideas have been used, all the so-so ideas have been used, and you need something new to make your reputation. You design Canberra. That done, you design the Coombs building at Australian National University, the most ingeniously misdesigned building in my personal experience. After walking around for a few minutes you not only don’t know where you are, you don’t even know what floor you are on.

I call it the theory of the rising marginal cost of originality—formed long ago when I spent a summer visiting at ANU.

It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn’t worth looking at, modern music isn’t worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen’s or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.

There might be a reason nobody else has used it.

How to Make Travel Harder

Require every traveler to carry a passport and show it every time he crosses a border or rents a hotel room, several times before getting on an airplane. To make losing your passport or having it stolen end your trip and make it difficult to get back home, refuse to permit duplicate passports. Requiring half an hour standing in line before going through passport control at the airport is an optional extra provided by only some countries.

Require every airport to search every passenger’s person and luggage, electronically or manually. Forbid passengers from carrying pocket knives, allow liquids only if bought after the search and before boarding.

What, if anything, does all of this accomplish beyond letting officials respond to “something must be done” by doing something? A pocket knife is a less formidable weapon than a club, multiple forms of which can be carried on as an innocent implement of one sort or another, and the problem of passengers hijacking airplanes was solved by putting a lock on the door to the cockpit. Uninspected checked luggage could contain a bomb but matching loaded luggage to boarded passenger will limit the tactic to suicides. Besides which, any competent terrorist should be able to locate himself under the takeoff or landing path of an airport equipped with a hand-held antiaircraft missile — a large caliber rifle might be sufficient. And there are multiple other ways, which I will not list, that someone willing to risk dying can kill a substantial number of random victims.

Inspecting airline luggage makes drug smuggling a little harder but there are ways to cross a border on the ground that are hard to block, as demonstrated by the widespread availability of illegal drugs. Requiring hotels to check passports does nothing for the hotel since what it cares about is whether you can pay the bill, which the passport does not tell and looking at the cash or running the credit card does. It provides information which a sufficiently energetic police department can use to keep track of people, especially foreigners, but how useful is that? Foreign spies or terrorists can obtain stolen passports or fake ones or avoid hotels in favor of safe houses belonging to local sympathizers.

Checking passports at the border can be used to try to control immigration — but not very effectively in any country willing to let in tourists, since once someone is across the border he can stay for as long as he avoids attracting attention from the local authorities. If he does attract attention the authorities can observe the lack of an unexpired visa and expel him, whether or not his passport was checked when he arrived.

A story I once read featured as the plot McGuffin a pile of blank passports from some corrupt third world country. At the end the protagonist, having failed to obtain the McGuffin, thinks up an alternative business plan. When you go through passport control the agent checks to see if the name on the passport is on the Interpol list of wanted criminals and whether the country the passport is from is one their country has problems with but, in a world with almost two hundred independent countries, many with different names in different languages, it never occurs to the agent to ask whether the country the passport is from exists. It certainly does not occur to the hotel clerk. The protagonist’s plan is to invent a country, hire one of the companies that prints passports for small countries to print some for him, and sell them.

In the real world Liberland produces passports — which are not recognized by any country in the world but would probably work for registering at a hotel and might even get you into a country with inattentive officials. I have something similar produced by the Free State Project.

What additional ways that travel is made harder have I missed?

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