It starts by lamenting the supposed fact that the Indian economy has just overtaken Japan’s in size, as China has also done. Terrible perhaps to slip to four in the world, especially given India’s glacial growth rate. But both India and China have about ten times Japan’s population. So Indians and Chinese are still poor compared to Japanese people. Japan’s recent economic sloth is visible in its slump to 24th in the world for GDP per capita, but that is still well ahead of China at 92 and India at 129. (US in sixth slot, since you ask.)

More tellingly, the Japanese employers’ group thinks that unless something happens, Japan will slump to developing world status, perhaps behind other fast-growth nations such as Brazil, in coming decades.

Why? Low birth rates, ageing population, low savings and investment, and following on from these, stagnant industrial productivity.

How does all this feel from the point of view of an observer in the UK, that troubled set of islands at the other end of the Eurasian land mass?

There is no doubt that Japan is still a world capital for style and technology. But it is also true that it has been badly overtaken by its regional rivals. Sony and Olympus, anyone? Or Samsung and HTC (let alone Apple)? Its society is often badly-run by complacent executives (Fukushima).

Of course, Japan is the world capital of ageing, although a recent social security clampdown did reveal that many of its alleged centenarians were in fact deceased and owed their apparent existence to family fraudsters. The ageing population has in turn meant a reduction in the famously huge level of Japanese savings, as have deflation and low interest rates.

However, it simply cannot happen in Japan or anywhere else that people enter the workforce in their twenties, retire in their fifties and live to 100. If they do, they will spend well under half their life in the workforce. By contrast my late father got a job at 16 and retired at 62, living to 94. He was exceptionally long-lived but still spent most of his life in work. Japanese people are bound to realise this.

More importantly, what does the rise of China mean for Japan? A sophisticated nation such as Japan ought to be able to make money out of this development, not fall victim to some fallacy that one nation’s rise is another’s fall.

One field in which Japan can show the way is by finding a creative route through the ageing problem. China will be there itself soon enough, thanks in part to the disaster of the one-child policy. Some further cost deflation, to make the fantastic Tokyo region a magnet for the tourists, investors, students and the like now being kept out by the high cost of Japan, would also be welcome if Japan wants to be more of a world destination.

It is now 20 years since everyone assumed Japan would take over the world economy. As usual, the time to sell is when the novelists, in this case Michael Crichton with Rising Sun, think it time to buy. It came out in 1992. My own observation of current Japan is that it is doing something cleverer than this. It is turning into the first nation on Earth to adapt to a rich but modest future, getting along with the rest of the world rather than dominating it and thinking about the happiness of its people of all ages. Certainly Fukushima shows that Japan needs massive reform (including its university system, a subject for another time). It is tackling these issues too slowly, as the Olympus scandal shows. But it is doing so from a position of strength that most nations would envy. Its national levels of angst and internal division are far lower than those seen in the US, and its sense of purpose certainly outdoes the EU. If Japan does shrink on the world stage, I think it will happen in a planned way rather than by accident.

In the era of private space ventures funded by Silicon Valley megaprofits, it is predictable that this idea would, er, fly again. Its latest manifestation, says the BBC, involves “film director and explorer James Cameron as well as Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt.” Well, if the man who gave his name to PageRank is up for it, what can possibly go wrong?

Answer, plenty. Their initial plan (bit.ly/everynewsmediumonEarth) seems to centre on mining asteroids for precious metals. There is in fact no way that such driven people as Schmidt and Page would waste their lives in this trivial fashion. The next stage in the plan is to use asteroids as a source of rare Earth elements. This sounds better, if you say it quickly enough. But it might be easier just to negotiate with the Chinese for the things. In fact, this proposal is really saying that it simpler to send a spaceship to an asteroid to hunt these minerals than it is to reopen the US mines that produced them until they were closed for polluting their environment.

In any case, if the founders of Google can do this, so can China.

But in fact, it is impossible to think that either of these ideas are the whole story behind this plan. The technology to mine asteroids is bound to be developed, because it is more or less the technology needed to divert asteroids, enabling us to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. But as O’Neill foresaw, there is no point mining stuff in gravity-free outer space just to drop it into the Earth’s deep gravity well. The logistics and the economics will never play. Instead, it makes sense to use these bits of rock to fashion space stations, space probes, space labs, space telescopes and all sorts of other space structures, in free space or in Earth orbit. I am sure that Page and Schmidt appreciate this. The scheme to bring stuff back to the Earth is doubtless only page 1 of a long business plan that will evolve over time to embody the use of the Earth’s space environment in situ, not the introduction of space resources, at least en masse, to the existing Earth system.

Their findings suggest that the British government is dead wrong to insist that red tape and high taxes impede entrepreneurialism. While the US is top of the league, various high-tax, big-state nations such as Norway, Sweden and Iceland come out ahead of the UK, alongside the usual free-market suspects led by Singapore. Ample proof of my long-held belief that the politician’s “attack on red tape” is the last refuge of governments (or their would-be replacements) who have run out of proper ideas.

Simplifying madly, this second edition of GEDI (yes, the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index) measures attitudes to entrepreneurship, the ambition of entrepreneurs and the level of activity that they achieve, mainly in high-value activity such as technology.

The first point that the table reveals is that it is hard to be a good entrepreneur in a poor economic context. With a very few exceptions such as Taiwan, the nations above the UK are rich. By contrast, four of the bottom six (out of 78) are in sub-Saharan Africa, joined there by Guatemala and India. This result just about confirms everything we know about India’s continuing failure to challenge China economically: China is here in 54th position. (Pity the many nations that don’t even get on the table to start with, or rather, pity their inhabitants.)

This analysis also shows that you cannot be an entrepreneur in a place where the laws don’t work. Russia is 61st: why would anyone want to start a business that might get stolen at any moment? By contrast Slovenia, a bit of the former Yugoslavia that now enjoys all the stability of full EU membership, is in 21st slot, above alleged capitalist haven Hong Kong. As I said, red tape might be a nuisance, but its absence is far worse.

Of course, entrepreneurialism is only one aspect of economic life. A nation needs big, old firms as well as thrusting new ones. It needs farmers as well as software developers, and it certainly needs a large and self-confident public sector. It needs nurses and teachers along with thrusting business types. Michael Porter reminds us that on a national scale, it is impossible to have a strong economy if even one part of the whole is defective.

The overlap between the GEDI table and the top nations in the QS World University Rankings is a fascinating one. While the US is clearly a leader in producing new technology and the entrepreneurs to commercialise it, appearing at the top of this table, the fit lower down is far less clear. The UK is plainly number two to the US in any university ranking, but languishes here. In second place instead is Australia. Might this be a sign that it can overcome resource dependency? Certainly it has a lively university sector that seems capable of producing the right people.

The GEDI analysis is a powerful indicator of nations’ abilities to generate new, high-value jobs. It suggests that rumours of the US ceding economic leadership to China are exaggerated. It also implies that Japan (27) has some way to go before it can regard its economic and social reforms as complete. And it has some good surprises that will give column-inches to journalists. Uruguay at 28? UAE at 14? Jamaica ahead of Brazil? Gripping!

The cable never happened but this week, the story is having one of its periodic revivals.

Does the idea make the remotest sense? Well, probably not the first time round. Then the UK had lots of coal, and active plans for new nuclear power stations. Even the fast reactor. Climate change was not an issue. Renewables were only seen as a long-shot backup against potentially hideous rises in the oil price – like maybe to an unimaginable $30 a barrel.

There are still problems. For one thing, a cable supplying a significant percentage of the UK’s power needs would be a chunky prospect. The cable across the English Channel is rated at 2000MW, a couple of big power stations. but this would need to be bigger and longer. There is also a slight question of geography. A cable from Iceland would naturally land in unpopulous northern Scotland. So the whole UK electricity system would have to be strengthened to take the power south to the users. There are already regular protests about new pylons in the lovely Highlands.

Then of course, politics. Does a cable from one tiny nation that has just gone bust to a possibly independent Scotland of limited financial means make sense?

It just might. First, cable technology is getting better. But more importantly, there is far more discourse now about European solutions to energy supply problems. See, for example, the 2008 UK Foresight report Powering Our Lives.

We are already used to the idea of cooking in France with methane from Siberia. A lot is said about covering the Sahara with photovoltaic cells to feed Europe with electricity. (People boosting this idea never mention the possibility of any Africans getting any electricity.) Or wave power from the seas around Britain could boil kettles across the continent. In this context, incoming geothermal power from Iceland would add to the mix nicely.It would not be cheap, but decarbonising European energy is bound to cost something.

Of course, doing this would call for a new willingness to plan on a European scale, at a time when national instincts seem to be in the ascendant. It would mean big supra-national infrastructure becoming a priority – maybe the right idea in the current recession. It would offer a side-step around the European impasse over new nuclear power. And Iceland coud sure use the money. So maybe the wire’s moment has finally arrived.

Or maybe I’ll still be writing the story of the cable that never was in a few more decades. Last time I used a typewriter, this time a laptop. Any guess at the technology I’ll deploy next time?

The story by lovely Alok Jha was to the effect that the Wellcome Trust is about to insist that any research it supports be published in open-access journals. It’s worth seeing in full here http://tinyurl.com/848wtre. It talks about a few journal, eLife, which Wellcome plans to launch and says will rival Science and Nature.

Wellcome is a giant of the medical research jungle, up there with the nouveau riche Gates crowd, spending about £600m a year on research in its own centres and un universities. So this looks quite important. Certainly it is a big departure for Wellcome to go head-to-head with the great boutique journals of world science.

And if you say it quickly enough, it is hard to argue that scientific information should be unavailable. This belief has become a bandwagon. A UK House of Commons committee report on the subject a few years ago was more or less pure advertising for the open access movement.

But what is the real problem that this movement seeks to solve?

First, the term “academic spring” that supporters of this reform have adopted is silly, as well as being insulting to the brave people of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere.

Next. scientific knowledge is getting more important and is being produced more widely. The 500-700 universities that produce most of it are in about 60 nations (see www.topuniversities.com).

People all over the world need this knowledge and there is a strong argument for making it freely available. Universities in the developing world, especially, cannot afford high-priced journals.

Finally, journal publishers have got greedy, with big price rises and big profits.

So, what happens when you go open-access? First, publishing costs money. Editing, reviewing, etc, are all costs. So the authors or their institution pay in the form of something like “page charges” instead of via subscriptions. This is good, because big productive universities that carry out research tend to have more money than the lesser ones that read other people’s papers. But it does (further) disadvantage good researchers in modest places, in the developed and even more in the developing world.

Next, it takes money off the library budget and give it to research groups. Good luck with that in the university management meeting.

Next, most of the open-access fuss is about medicine, partly because of all the lay interest in medical research from patients’ support groups and the like. So far so good, but has anyone thought how it plays out in astrophysics (big money, probably OK) or history (less money, maybe more problematic)?

Also, many funders of research are not as prosperous as Wellcome. They do not pay “overheads” such as library costs. If they have to pay page charges, they say that they will just support less research.

In an era of constant media innovation, the journal publishers have hung in there better than publishers of telephone directories or local newspapers. They manage this partly because they have been creative with the content they control, constantly repackaging it into new forms and providing new tools to users. In a few years their business may look very different and a lot smaller, but my bet is that they will still be there in the world of open access. Look out for future moans about soaring page charges.

Oh look, here is the lovely thing. So far so good except – no front page, just some inside page with Chinese writing. I called T-Mobile at length – nobody could help, phone obviously bust, send a new one.

Aha. Same problem. Long talk with another helpful person. This time we find a page that lists some languages and opt for English. Success! She admits, by the way, that there seems to be a definite Sinophile fault among some batches of the 4S.

Five minutes later, Chinese has been restored, and all English has evaporated.

OK, call again. This time we start to get some sense. The person manages to steer me to the home page (never seen before) and hence to the Settings icon. This should allow language choice except we cannot match the wording to the English wording on the 4S that he has at the other end of the phone. He suggests that I take it to an Apple Store (nearest one, central London). He also tells me that this is Apple’s problem, not his. Odd, I am not paying Apple.

Now, however, points of interest begin to appear. Now that I can opt for Location Services, I see that a map of Taiwan has appeared. And on the XE.com currency machine, I see that the New Taiwan Dollar has replaced sterling as my base currency. Now, I like Taiwan and the Taiwanese, and have been there many times. But this is more Taiwan than I signed up for. And I speak as someone who has had a book translated into Complex Chinese, the local version of the language.

But this T-Mobile chap has an idea. Walk to my nearest T-M shop and throw myself on their mercy. It works, too. The helpful chap gets his own 4S out and after days of fury on my part, solves the problem in no time by scrolling round zones called General and International.

Now the machine knows it is in South London, not offshore China, and that it should speak appropriately.

Lessons? Well, that the world’s top tech company is shipping goods that don’t work and that need a lot of fixing, apparently for known problems. That most technology hardware comes from Taiwan at some level. That folks on the phone cannot cure anything very fundamental. And that this means waste – the phone that I sent back would have worked fine with some of the wisdom applied by the man in the shop.

For no reason known to me, there are still odd bits of Chinese about the thing, mainly around the clock. I’ll leave them there as a reminder of my not-quite visit to Taipei, one of my favourite cities. And because I cannot see how to shift them without risking a total reset and a fresh visit to the fascinating land of President Ma, where the Grand National is a political party, not a race.

OK, time for Easter.

I was working with my colleague Wendy Barnaby, but don’t take our word for our wonderfulness. Instead see what participant Agnes Szeberenyi from Hungary thought of it.

I was a witness at this inquiry on behalf of the Town and Country Planning Association, and penned a book on it for Pluto Press.

Yesterday the Observer reported that Mansfield wants inquiries into Murrell’s death to resume, with an emphasis on the possible role of the UK security services.

So, here are the only four things you need to know about the Murrell case.

One. There is no mystery about how she died. As David Aaronovitch has written convincingly in his book Voodoo Histories, a local criminal was done for the crime. (DA is a mate of my mate Rex Osborn, so it must be true.)

Two. If her evidence had been given to the inquiry, it would have been unimportant. We know this from advanced drafts of her planned evidence. Far more damning evidence on her subject (nuclear waste) was given to the inquiry, and by more authoritative witnesses than Murrell, eg TCPA, Friends of the Earth and many others. As far as I know the people responsible are either alive, or have died of natural causes.

Three. Neither Sizewell B nor the abortive “small family” of nuclear reactors planned to succeed it would have added materially to the UK’s very serious nuclear waste problem.

Four. I gave evidence of Day 131 of the Inquiry. There was a small but dedicated audience when I spoke at the Snape Maltings. Two chaps in good suits were in row six. They happily admitted being from Special Branch. So we do know that the funny police were interested in the inquiry. These two complained vigorously to me that it was keeping them away from their proper jobs. However, this does not support the idea that Argentinian-style death squads were on the case.

I never met Hilda. But I know she deserves better than this. Can we leave her in peace please?

Like her cello concerto, premiered at a Prom I was at two years ago, this concerto makes the soloist work hard. Gone are the Mozartian days when she could sit around for about a third of the time, watching the orchestra doing its stuff. Hagner and her 1717 Stradivarius were in action more or less from start to finish.

It’s an astounding work, building from the start with immense tension as the orchestra comes in gradually from across the stage. While it is no contender for the whistle test, it shares the lyrical qualities of the cello concerto and perhaps for this reason is more of a repertoire fixture than most modern concertos. Hagner has already recorded it with Kent Nagano, but if you possibly can, get a video. Seeing the orchestra and soloist in action makes it all a lot clearer. It’s unique and novel, but maybe Sibelius’s bigger symphonies and of course his own violin concerto are some sort of precedent.

Meantime Chin is now on the guest list for my fantasy dinner party. I’d love to get some idea of how that fantastic density of ideas gets developed, and then turned into a finished work of such texture.

And for those of you who care about these things, Chin was at SNU but perhaps found the Technical University of Berlin more formative, and still lives in Berlin. She seems to like London as this is the second big ovation I have seen her take here.