From The Register.

On Wednesday, 6 October, we reported that a Wikipedia admin, RodHullandEmu, had added erroneous information to the Wikipedia entry on Norman Wisdom. In a revised version of the story we reported that RodHullandEmu had not added the erroneous information, but had "preserved" it. We accept that both of these statements are incorrect, and apologise for any inconvenience or embarrassment caused.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The Daily Mail’s secret concept-map. By thePoke.

The ‘Lines’ are:

Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.

Tilly, originally uploaded by jjn1.

One of our cats. She always looks reproachful, so that one wonders what one would have to do to earn her approval. As PG Wodehouse observed, cats’ haughty demeanour derives from the fact that they know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods.

Jeff Jarvis has been to see ‘The Social Network’. He didn’t like it. Here he explains why.

The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it’s really just a drama about a man. But that’s where it fails most. It can’t begin to explain this man because it doesn’t grok what he made—what he’s still making “We don’t even know what it is yet,” Zuckerberg says in the movie, “It’s never finished”.

The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds…

Bang on cue, here’s the WSJ [old media] piling in to make Jeff’s point. The paper just loves the movie. “The film’s substance”, it gushes,

lies mainly in its convoluted tale of vast ambition—an ambition oddly disconnected, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, from a desire to make money—spectacular success and bitter betrayal. Not since “Apollo 13” has a mainstream motion picture conveyed so much factual as well as dramatic information with such clarity and agility. First Mark moves beyond—or pilfers the intellectual property of—three upperclassmen who’d approached him for help on a website they called Harvard Connection. Later the newly-minted young magnate has a painful falling out with Facebook’s original business manager, Eduardo Saverin: he’s played with great subtlety and rueful charm by Andrew Garfield, who’ll be seen as Peter Parker in the next “Spider-Man.” While the movie’s prevailing mood is excitation—hardly a moment goes by when someone isn’t having a brilliant idea—its dominant mode is litigation, thanks to one suit on behalf of those Harvard upperclassmen, and another brought by Eduardo.

Dave Winer went to see the film. His typically sensible notes are here.

… as Dorothy Parker observed in reviewing Christopher Isherwood’s play I am a Camera.

This latest nonsense (a ‘skin’ for the iPhone 4) presumeably stems from Steve Jobs’s throwaway remark, when launching the phone, that the device felt “like a Leica”.

You can buy one here if you insist.

The September 6 edition of the New Yorker has a lovely piece (sadly, behind a paywall) by John McPhee about this year’s British Open, which was played on the Old Course at St Andrews. At one point, McPhee walked the course with David Hamilton, a noted golf historian, who drew attention to

certain “Presbyterian features” of the course — the Valley of Sin, the Pulpit bunker, the bunker named Hell — pointing them out as we passed them. St Andrews’ pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth — four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater. On the sixteenth, he called attention to a pair of them in mid-fairway, only a yard or two apart, with a mound between them that suggested cartilage. The name of this hazard is the Principal’s Nose. Hamilton told a joke about a local man playing the course, who suffered a seizure at the Principal’s Nose. His playing partner called 999, the UK version of 911, and was soon speaking with a person in Bangalore. The playing partner reported the seizure and said that the victim was at the Principal’s Nose bunker on the sixteenth hole on the Old Course at St Andrews, in Scotland; and Bangalore asked, “Which nostril?”

It’s a lovely piece, in all kinds of ways. And very good on the touchy subject of the seventeenth hole, which is almost as fiendish as the fifth in Lahinch.

Er, today is Saturday the 18th.

From the official site for the Pope’s visit.

Hmmm… Maybe he’s on some variant of the Julian calendar.

My friend and Wolfson colleague Malcolm Burrows is retiring from his position as Head of the Department of Zoology in Cambridge, and his colleagues put on a whole day of talks to mark the occasion. Even the Vice Chancellor showed up — to explain how, shortly after her arrival in Cambridge, Malcolm had managed to persuade her to do something she hadn’t wanted to do “without ever raising his voice”. (The visit that resulted from that conversation, incidentally, led to an endowed Chair in his Department.) At the end of her speech, she unveiled the portrait by Tom Wood (who did the National Portrait Gallery’s portrait of David Hockney) which has been commissioned to honour him.

Malcolm is one of the cleverest, nicest and sanest people I know. Unlike many high-profile academics, he doesn’t do histrionics. Yet during his tenure, the Cambridge department became the best Zoology department in the country, and one of the best in the world. Unusually for such a large, high-octane outfit it also seems remarkably friendly. Certainly there was a lovely, affectionate tone to the day’s proceedings.

Malcolm’s speciality is neurophysiology — more specifically the neuronal mechanisms by which a nervous system generates and controls natural movements (top right in the portrait). His chosen animals are insects, including some (locusts) that you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night (bottom right in the portrait). One of his colleagues captured his character neatly when he said that he combined a childlike delight in insects with a very grown-up style of administration. During his tenure, for example, the University’s central authority (the General Board) agreed to write off a huge ancient debt which had for decades “squatted like a huge black toad” on the Department’s back. And, believe me, the General Board didn’t get where it is today by writing off departmental ‘debts’.

It was a really nice occasion which reminded one firstly, of how important people are, even in prestigious institutions, and secondly, what a difference good leadership makes. Most of all, it was reassuring to know that, tomorrow, Malcolm will be back in his lab. He may be technically ‘retired’, but most people wouldn’t guess that.

Before I left, I asked him to pose with his portrait. Here’s the result.