Memex 1.1

“He was too New York, too Italian, and he had too many wives”.

Dorothy Kaliades, a retired jewelry designer who was having her nails done in Howard Beach, Queens when she was interviewed by the New York Times. She was explaining why she had never believed that Rudi Giuliani had a real chance of becoming the Republican candidate for president.

Putting [Lotus] Notes on iPhone is like getting out a piece of exquisite Wedgwood china and using it to serve a steaming pile of dog shit. Have you ever seen Notes? It’s not software, it’s a form of punishment. Companies that use Notes have to staff not only a help desk but also a suicide prevention center — it’s that bad. Even the poor bastards at IBM, who are forced to use it, do nothing but complain…

From the The Fake Steve Jobs diary.

“The market in the short run is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”

Benjamin Graham (1894-1976), economist, professional investor and mentor of Warren Buffett.

Looks as though there’s a lot of voting going on just now.

From a conversation with John Markoff…

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

At the end of 10 thrilling and memorable days in American electoral politics, we should recall the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan - who was, by coincidence, Hillary Clinton’s predecessor as senator for New York. People are fully entitled to their own opinions, he observed, but they are not entitled to their own set of facts.

Martin Kettle, writing in today’s Guardian.

Dick Cheney famously warned in the context of terrorism that if there is even a one per cent of something very bad happening, we should act as though it were a certainty. Since the odds are approaching 100 per cent that if humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will alter the planet in ways that no one can predict, Cheney’s rule should make him, on the subject of climate change, a soulmate of Al Gore.

Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, writing in the Financial Times, January 5/6, 2008.

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

John Brockman.

From Quentin’s blog:

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

He got it from Dan Dennett.

Interesting aside to a discussion about the Leica M8:

As an aside on the whole sensor size issue—I guess there is some practical or economic limitation that keeps most sensors at 75% of the standard 135 film size, thus forcing all of the rethinking of lenses and such, but it’s interesting to note where the 35mm standard came from. Apparently, in 1889, Thomas Edison was developing the Kinetoscope and a worker asked him how wide to cut the film. He held up his thumb and forefinger and said “About this wide…” and the 35 millimeter standard was born…

HM the Queen on Proust (as envisaged by Alan Bennett in his new story, An Uncommon Reader):

“Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, ‘Oh do pull your socks up’ “.

From yesterday’s Guardian.