Memex 1.1

Dubya had a lunch party today at the White House. Guests were his Pa, President-elect Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Apparently it was Obama’s idea. It was the first time since 1981 that all living presidents have been together at the White House.

Photo here.

Every year John Batelle makes some predictions about the year ahead and — to his credit — revisits them at the end of the year to see how he did. This year he’s clearly having difficulties. And he thinks the recession will end in the fourth quarter of the year. Sure it will. And pigs will fly in close formation.

Amazing video from JPL.

Interesting Guardian interview. The strange thing is that he hasn’t been offered the job.

We went to see Dean Spanley this evening and enjoyed it hugely. Implausible plot (about reincarnation) but a lovely, literary script, and great performances by Peter O’Toole (playing a curmudgeonly old bugger not unlike himself), Jeremy Northam as his son (in a truly magnificent hat) and Sam Neill as the Dean. Can’t improve on the IMDB reviewer, Jamie Robert Ward, who wrote:

For all its eccentricities, dry humour and rich sense of character however, it must be noted that the experience of watching Dean Spanley certainly isn’t for everyone. A drama rooted in classic prose, focusing heavily on character, philosophy and small nuances of psychology and life, Toa Fraser here sticks to his guns and delivers an unapologetically intelligent, cultured and insightful character study kept in check by warmth of heart and unique personality. If there is one major selling point for the feature that will allow all audiences to get something from the feature however, it simply lies within the timeless presence of Peter O’Toole who gives a wonderful performance befitting of his stature and the character in which he resides. It can be a touching, humorous and even thought-provoking experience, but like a fine wine, you’re best not to get too involved here; this one’s for sitting back and soaking in one sip at a time, and yes, it might be a little syrupy but it’s enough to get lost in and enjoy all the same.

The big surprise was learning that it was based on a book written by an eccentric Anglo-Irish peer, Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany who was, among other things, a friend of Yeats and Lady Gregory and a great dog-lover. This last attribute explains much about the film.

*Footnote: A Spoonerism. The celebrated Warden of New College was proposing a toast to the Queen.

I always thought that Quentin and I must be the most chronic cases of travelling geeks (in terms of the amount of kit we take with us) in the western world. But I was wrong. We are mere amateurs, nay boulevardiers, compared with Mr Stephen Fry. Here is the list of what he has just unpacked in his New York hotel room.

7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard.

4 x iPod/iPhone chargers: I seem to use one iPhone exclusively for mad hacking, jailbreaking and frigging about with, another as a pedometer, another for music, another as a – guess what ? – phone. I know I’m putting my botty on the line by confessing to jailbreakage and hackery, but I think Apple (while each update brings a new weapon in their war against Pwnage and SIM-card skulduggery) are man enough to take it.

3 x Hard drives: Took the hasty decision to come to America (I shan’t be back in Britain till late January) with just one computer, one of the new MacBooks. It doesn’t have Firewire. Duh? Maddening, since my favourite hard drive is Firewire only. But at least the MacBook allows a proper connection, unlike the underpowered USB of the original version of the scrumptious MacBook Air. You know that feeling when you have a whole lump of data on one device or peripheral and you want to get it on another and you suddenly realise you can’t? ‘Okay, so I upload it onto a compact flash card. No onto an SD card. Hell where’s my card reader? Right. I email myself the file…’ etc., etc. That happens to me a lot.

1 Snowball USB Microphone: just in case I have the sudden yen to record a podgram. You never know.

6 x SIM cards: Orange, Vodafone, 2 x O2, T-Mobile, AT&T. My UK mobile number is Orange, that’s my regular number, but one needs to swap and shuffle and use other networks in order properly to play. I know. I’m weird. I’ve long accepted it. But weird is just another way of spelling “wired”. I drew weird in another way and got wired.

1 x Blackberry Bold
1 x Blackberry Storm
1 x HTC G1 Android ‘Googlephone’
1 x Pocketsurfer
n x iPhones (too many, you’d only laugh or snort with derision if I told you the exact number)

Assorted CDs

Assorted Manuals and Quickstart Guides.

Mind you, he probably travels by private jet. Try getting that pile of stuff past a RyanAir check-in.

Chris Nuttall of the FT has become a Gmail user.  (He’s on the run from the dreaded Lotus Notes.)  He’s posted some helpful notes on how to make Gmail more efficient. I’ve learned some tricks I hadn’t known. Gratias!

… dangerous, apparently. This from today’s Guardian.

A man has been given an asbo banning him from carrying felt tip pens in public after writing abusive comments about women in public lavatories and buses.

David Jell, 49, is also prohibited from carrying spray paint and displaying rude comments or nicknames in a public place under the terms of the three-year order.

Magistrates in Sevenoaks, Kent, served Jell with the order on 22 December after hearing that he had committed criminal damage and harassment between January and September 2007.

Er, what about all those misanthropes and misogynists who write similar things in the pages of the Daily Mail, Sun and Star?

Well, this is a pretty strong contender. And it’s by Annie Leibovitz too. It’s crass in the way that Woolworth prints used to be. (Remember Woolworths? Neatly organised kitsch — as Nye Bevan put it. He famously observed that listening to a speech by Neville Chamberlain was “like paying a visit to Woolworth’s: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence”.)

From Jonathan Zittrain, relaying a message from Larry Lessig’s blog, which was down (maybe still is).

With the help of Joe Trippi, I launched Change Congress, which was designed to focus these issues in the context of American politics.

Throughout this process, however, I have felt that the work would require something more. That the project I had described was bigger than a project that I, one academic, could pursue effectively. This wasn’t an issue that would be fixed with a book. Or even with five books. It is instead a problem that required a new focus by many people, across disciplines, learning or relearning something important about how trust was built.

About six months ago, I was asked to consider locating this research at a very well established ethics center at Harvard University. Launched more than two decades ago, the Safra Center was first committed to building a program on ethics that would inspire similar programs at universities across the country. But the suggestion was made that after more than two decades of enormous success, it may make sense for the Center to consider focusing at least part of its work on a single problem. No one was certain this made sense, but I was asked to sketch a proposal that wouldn’t necessarily displace the current work of the Center, but which would become a primary focus of the Center, and complement its mission.

I did that, mapping a five year project that would draw together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this increasingly important problem of improper dependence. Harvard liked the proposal. In November, the Provost of Harvard University invited me to become the director of the Safra Center. Last week, I accepted the offer. In the summer, I will begin an appointment at the Harvard Law School, while directing the Safra Center.