Memex 1.1

Fascinating list of the 50 most-cited 20th-century works in the Arts and Humanities Index. No. 1 is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, followed by James Joyce (Ulysses), Northrop Fry (Anatomy of Criticism), Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) and Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax). Chomsky appears three times in the list, as does Joyce. Wittgenstein appears twice, as do Karl Popper and Levi-Strauss. Hmmm…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves”. Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many relatives of the 492 people killed in the 1942 Coconut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “Sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Yep. I recognise most of that. This was Joan Didion writing in yesterday’s Guardian about her reaction to the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

From Larry Lessig’s blog…

Google has been sued by the Authors Guild, and a number of individual authors. This follows similar threats hinted at by the American Association of Publishers. The authors and the publishers consider Google’s latest fantastic idea, Google Print — a project to Google-ize 20,000,000 books — to be “massive copyright infringement.” They have asked a federal court to shut Google Print down.

It is 1976 all over again. Then, like now, content owners turned to the courts to stop an extraordinary new technology. Then, like now, copyright is the weapon of choice. But then, like now, the content owners of course don’t really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.

More… Ed Felten chips in.

Twenty years ago this week, Apple sued Steve Jobs after he was ousted by the company’s Board!

As the proud owner of a Toyota Prius, I was heartened to find reports on the Houston Chronicle’s ‘RitaBlog’ that Texan Prius owners were able to make the trip to safety with petrol to spare — and were able to run the air-conditioning all the way. Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.

From the New York Times…

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 - Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war. “There is no dynamic now pulling the nation together,” he said in a meeting with reporters at the Saudi Embassy here. “All the dynamics are pulling the country apart.” He said he was so concerned that he was carrying this message “to everyone who will listen” in the Bush administration.

Prince Saud’s statements, some of the most pessimistic public comments on Iraq by a Middle Eastern leader in recent months, were in stark contrast to the generally upbeat assessments that the White House and the Pentagon have been offering.

JVC have released a range of camcorders which record onto microdrives rather than DV tape. Specs are a bit primitive, but it’s a start. Yippee!

Lovely report in today’s Guardian about how a schoolboy had an inspired idea about how to make money from the Web. Reminds me of the early days of the Internet boom.

Lots of obituaries this week of the great Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal (for example here and here), but the most striking one was in the Economist. It included this story:

One of the stranger conversations in Simon Wiesenthal’s life occurred in September 1944. He was being taken by SS guards, in his faded striped uniform, away from the advancing Russians. Somewhere in the middle of Poland, he and an SS corporal scavenged together for potatoes. What, the corporal asked him mockingly, would he tell someone in America about the death camps? Mr Wiesenthal said he would tell the truth. “They wouldn’t believe you,” the corporal replied.

… that the average private health insurance policy for a family in the US now costs $10,000 a year (as reported in this week’s Economist)?