Memex 1.1

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Leon Tolstoy – 1897

Lovely project, based in Cambridge.

Transcript of a debate between me and Jason Cowley, Editor of the New Statesman, in today’s Observer.

This morning’s Observer column.

Last month, there was much hullabaloo because Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian telecommunications manufacturer, put its hoard of 6,000 wireless patents and patent applications up for auction. The scent attracted a herd of corporate mastodons – Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony – which eventually won the auction with a $4.5bn joint bid.

This attracted much attention from the commentariat, which interpreted it as a slap in the eye for Google, perceived as a rogue participant because it had made a series of apparently fatuous bids for the patents. At one point, for example, Google bid $1,902,160,540. At another, its bid was $2,614,972,128. And when the herd’s bid reached $3bn, Google countered with $3.14159bn.

Commentators were baffled by these numbers until mathematicians came to the rescue. The bids were, in fact, celebrated constants in number theory. The first is Brun’s constant, the number towards which the sum of the reciprocals of twin primes converge. The second was the Meissel-Mertens constant (which also involves prime numbers). And the third, as every schoolboy knows, represented the first six digits of pi. At this point, the penny dropped. Perhaps the Google guys were playing silly buggers – but with a serious motive, namely to inflate the price that the herd would have to pay. And so it proved.

Then, last week, Google dropped a bombshell…

LATER: Steve Lohr has a good piece about the takeover in the NYT which starts from Nick Negroponte’s vision for the digital world as one where people will ship bits rather than atoms. Google has not real experience with retailing atoms, and its experiment with selling the Nexus One handset was a disaster — though the product itself was (and remains) nicer than most Android phones. One lesson of Android is that not having control over handset hardware can lead to disappointing (or even maddening) performance for users (as I found when trying to find an Android bar-code reader App that would work with the camera on my HTC handset). That’s the problem that Apple cracked by having tight control over both device software and hardware. So one question raised by Larry Page’s promise to “create amazing user experiences” is whether Google actually plans to replicate Apple’s seamless control with Motorola handsets? And, if so, what will other Android manufacturers make of that?

Still life with cattle, originally uploaded by jjn1.

A landscape in Norfolk photographed last weekend and subjected to inordinate post-processing.

Video here. (Embed code doesn’t seem to work.)

Lovely Guardian column by Cory Doctorow.

The real story for me is about surveillance, and not the mere use of CCTV footage to apprehend rioters after the fact. It’s about the total failure of CCTV to deter people from committing crimes in the first place.

After all, that’s how we were sold on CCTV – not mere forensics after the fact, but deterrence. And although study after study has concluded that CCTVs don’t deter most crime (a famous San Francisco study showed that, at best, street crime shifted a few metres down the pavement when the CCTV went up), we’ve been told for years that we must all submit to being photographed all the time because it would keep the people around us from beating us, robbing us, burning our buildings and burglarising our homes.

A year before the Vancouver Winter Olympics, a reporter from a one of the local papers called me to ask whether I thought an aggressive plan to use CCTVs in the Gastown neighbourhood would help pacify the notorious high-crime heroin district. I said that the deterrence theory of CCTV relied on the idea that the deterred were making smart choices about their futures and would avoid crime if the consequences might catch up with them.

Then I recounted my last trip through Gastown, where the pavements were thronged with groaning and unconscious emaciated addicts, filthy and covered in weeping sores, and asked if those people could be reasonably characterised as “making smart choices about their future.” I explained how my hire car had been broken into by a thief who’d left four perfect fingerprints on the passenger window, not caring whether the crime was associated with her or his biometrics forever.

Of course the CCTV fanatics will point to the successful use of the technology to identify looters. But that’s shifting the ground: the argument for CCTV is deterrence. It doesn’t work as advertised. In fact, it’s clearly most useful only if people are not deterred.

From a helmet cam.

Sobering blog post by Ken Rockwell.

One day it dawned on me, after I heard about more than one friend buying an old Nikon D1 or D1X for $75, that these old digital cameras are worth far less precisely because they are clogged with worthless digital guts, instead of just having a hole for film.

The D1 and D1X was a Nikon F5 with a sensor and some computer junk thrown in, just as the long forgotten Nikon D2Xs is the current F6 with digital guts. People paid Nikon four times as much for the cameras with the digital guts.

My friends paid $5,500 for the D1X new, and I paid $4,500 for my new D1H back in their day, but the D1X is worthless today because it’s only got the resolution of a Nikon D50 and runs more slowly than a D90.

While a used D1X today is hardly worth the cost of packing and shipping, a used F5 still sells for hundreds of dollars because it takes film.

An old D2H is only worth about $500 on eBay , while a used F6 still goes for four figures. The F6 is still the world’s best 35mm film camera.

Even though the digital cameras cost about four times the price of their film equivalents when new, the digital cameras are worth far less after a couple of years.

It’s true. My Leica M4 film camera is worth more now than when I bought it years ago. But my (digital) M8 has depreciated out of sight. Why? Because its sensor (and image processor) are, well, effectively stone-age devices already.