Yesterday a European Union directive went into effect, prohibiting mobile phone carriers from charging so-called roaming charges when a subscriber leaves one country and enters another. From yesterday every subscriber should pay the same price wherever they call from in Europe.

Finland has negotiated an exception and we will continue to pay more to make phone calls from another country.

In a post on Facebook Ian McNabb, Liverpool singer and songwriter (and former frontman of The Icicle Works) wrote that Sgt Pepper did not stand up as the masterpiece people usually hail it as. He argued that The Beatles blew it by including the wrong tracks from those available, and thus fatally weakening the album. He implied that they could (and probably should) have recognised this at the time and fixed it. He then suggested how they could have done this.

Since the middle of 2002 I have been engaged in producing and creating a large-scale project that began as an attempt to create an online synthetic world, and moved swiftly into the more interesting attempt to model a synthetic culture.

This has involved the creation of a space in the world (an island in the southern Mediterranean) and the attempt to fill this space with a geography, history, economy and ethics that together form the kind of narrative that one would expect to find when reading a real culture. In doing this we have posited “culture” as the continual reading and rereading of a number of contending narratives, whose relative importance, and believability, waxes and wanes over time.