A Boeing 747 falls out of the sky. Literally.
And watching it, I’m reminded of Auden’s wonderful poem about the fall of Icarus.
Author Archives: jjn1
Testing Fargo
This is a test of Dave Winer’s new outliner/blogging tool, Fargo. Can’t decide if it will be useful for me or not, but there’s only one way to find out!
And just to see if the editing facility works, here’s a fresh, updated version of the original post.
Wonder how one puts in links — say to Arts and Letters Daily? Has that worked, I wonder?
Yes it has! Hmmm… this could be useful when one wants to blog something but is pressed for time.
North Korea: the depressing reality
Thoughtful (if depressing) piece by Ian Buruma.
The tragedy of Korea is that no one really wishes to change the status quo: China wants to keep North Korea as a buffer state, and fears millions of refugees in the event of a North Korean collapse; the South Koreans could never afford to absorb North Korea in the way that West Germany absorbed the broken German Democratic Republic; and neither Japan nor the US would relish paying to clean up after a North Korean implosion, either.CommentsAnd so an explosive situation will remain explosive, North Korea’s population will continue to suffer famines and tyranny, and words of war will continue to fly back and forth across the 38th parallel. So far, they are just words. But small things – a shot in Sarajevo, as it were – can trigger a catastrophe. And North Korea still has those nuclear bombs.
UL framed
Si monumentum requiris…
… circumspice.
St Paul’s seen from the end of the Millennium Bridge.
How to tell someone to get lost
Bertrand Russell to the old Fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.
Provenance of the image unclear, but my guess is that it comes from the Russell archives at McMaster university. At any rate, the archive catalogue (snippet below) does list correspondence between Russell and Mosely.
Seven, plus or minus two: or what the North Koreans do best
Foreign Policy is a terrific journal, but sometimes even it runs out of ideas for thought-provoking copy.
Take, for example, this morning’s little feature headlined “7 things the North Koreans are really good at”.
BTW, in case you’re interested, they are:
1. Building tunnels
Apparently, the Hermit Kingdom has constructed a massive network of clandestine tunnels underneath the so-called demilitarised zone (DMZ). “Designed as a means to mount a massive military invasion from the north, the tunnels are ‘large enough to shuttle through an entire military division per hour,’ according to Popular Mechanics. GlobalSecurity.org estimates that Pyongyang has built up to 20 tunnels that snake through the Demilitarized Zone.”
2. Counterfeiting US dollars. Foreign Affairs maintains that Kim Jong-Un & Co make the best fake dollars in the world.
3. Hacking (Really? In a country with no real Internet access.)
4. Doing more with less (i.e. absence of choice. Eric Schmidt told me that during his extended visit to North Korea, no public building he entered — except for his hotel — had any form of heating. It seems improbably that a state that cannot heat its buildings would be good at sophisticated software. But then again, they’ve built rockets and nukes.)
5. Cheap labour. (No surprise there.)
6. Massive co-ordinated propaganda displays. (Synchronized swimming was made for North Koreans.)
7. Seafood (Eh??
The Amazon cat
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away
My Observer review of The The New Digital Age
When, in early 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside from his position as Google’s CEO to become the company’s executive chairman, some of us were reminded of Dean Acheson’s famous gibe about postwar Britain – which had “lost an empire but not yet found a role”. What, one wondered, would Dr Schmidt’s new role be, and when would he find it?
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen
Well, now we know…
