Memex 1.1

Every Friday evening in the Summer, villagers and guests in Cotignac gather to eat moules marinières and (afterwards) play Boules. The latter is not for the faint-hearted. Think of it as the French equivalent to croquet: banal in appearance and vicious in reality.

Seen yesterday on a nearly-impassible country road in Provence.

I’m not a fan of the French President, and became even more irritated by his antics down the road on vacation in Cap Negré, where he’s been running a kind of holiday camp for chopper-ferried celebs like U2’s Bono. But at least he knew what to do when ten French paras were killed in Afghanistan. First he interrupted his holiday by flying out to see the troops, and then he was in Les Invalides at 11.30am yesterday for the ceremony to honour the returning dead. Compare that with the fact that Tony Blair never turned up at Brize Norton to greet the coffins of soldiers he had consigned to battle. Or the way that George Bush has always studiously avoided any public encounter with his returning casualties.

Tom Friedman on the Georgian mess…

If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams…

Hmmm… Not quite. The Gold goes to Saakashvili IMHO.

This is the time of year when US News & World Report publishes its list of the ‘top’ US universities. And guess what? Harvard comes out top, followed by Princeton, Yale and MIT & Stanford tying for fourth place. Average annual fees for the top five = $35,636.60. Just thought you’d like to know.

One of the most useful analytical devices I’ve ever encountered when lecturing about new technology is the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Here’s the one for 2008 (courtesy of TechCrunch).

Hooray! A photograph by my son Brian is one of the winners in the Tate’s Street and Studio collection. To see the photograph in a larger size, click here. It’s a terrific picture in true HCB style.

Ever wondered why magpies are obsessed with bright, reflective objects? New Scientist has a video suggesting an explanation.

Here’s an ininteresting service — near real-time monitoring of the performance of cloud computing services.