Tut, tut. Bet Michael would like to try it, though.

The Museum of Modern Art has decided that the ligature chosen by Ray Tomlinson, the engineer who invented email, is Art.

The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol…

One of the most revealing things about Britain’s private schools is their reluctance to describe themselves as such. With the same mastery of metaphor that characterises the American right they call themselves ‘independent’, as if somehow they were in fact ideologically neutral or detached from narrow sectional interest. This opening speech by Francis Wheen in a debate organised by Intelligence Squared is an entertainingly concise attack on these strange institutions.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting the video series.

The 2,200-page report into the collapse of Lehman Brothers carried out by Anton Vulakas at the request of the New York Southern District Bankruptcy Court will, no doubt, make interesting reading, but what caught my eye was this sentence in the Financial Times‘s report:

“The crux of the report, which is based on the review of 34 million pages of documents out of the 350 billion pages obtained by Mr Valukas, is its portrayal of Lehman’s insatiable risk appetite and its alleged efforts to cover up the extent of its financial woes.”

How on earth, I wondered, does anyone ‘review’ 34 million pages? And how are those pages selected from 350 billion? Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the only one asking these questions. Writing in The Posse List, Gregory Bufithis provided some of the answers. “The most intriguing part of the report”, he writes,

“concerns the sheer size of the data and the search methodology/software used in examining the documents. Valukus’s report was a mammoth task involving e-mails, reports, data sets and interviews. Answering the questions required an extensive investigation and review of Lehman’s operating, trading, valuation, financial, accounting and other data systems. Interrogating those systems proved particularly challenging, first because the vast majority of the systems had been transferred and were under the control of Barclays (who took over a large part of Lehman operating units); by the time of the Valukas’ appointment, Barclays had integrated its own proprietary and confidential data into some of the systems, so Barclays had legitimate concerns about granting access to those systems.

The second challenge was more daunting. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, Lehman maintained a patchwork of over 2,600 software systems and applications. It was decided early on that it would not be cost effective to undertake the enormous effort and expense that would be required to learn and access each of these 2,600 systems. Rather, Valukas directed his financial advisors to identify and acquire an in‐depth understanding of the most promising of the systems.”

Mr Bufithis then goes on to outline how this mammoth task was tackled:

1. The available universe of Lehman e‐mail and other electronically stored documents is estimated at three petabytes of data — roughly the equivalent of 350 billion pages.
2. Valukus carefully selected a group of document custodians and search terms designed to cull out the most promising subset of Lehman electronic materials for review. In addition, Valukus requested and received hard copy documents from Lehman and both electronic and hard copy documents from numerous third parties and government agencies.
3. In total, the Examiner collected in excess of five million documents, estimated to comprise more than 40,000,000 pages. All of these documents have been converted to electronic form and are maintained on two computerized databases, Stratify and CaseLogistix.
4. Documents were reviewed on at least two levels. First level review was conducted by lawyers trained to identify documents of possible interest and to code the substantive areas to which the documents pertained; those so identified were subjected to further and more careful review by lawyers or financial advisors especially immersed in the earmarked subjects. In order to reduce the cost of review, the Valukus sought and obtained the court’s approval to retain contract attorneys. A group of more than 70 contract attorneys, supplemented by Jenner & Block [Valukas’s Chicago law firm] attorneys, conducted first level reviews.
5. All second level (and beyond) reviews were performed by Jenner & Block attorneys or Duff & Phelps professionals. Valukus estimates that he has reviewed approximately 34,000,000 pages of documents in the course of his investigation.
6. The entire body of e-mail in the Stratify database — 4,439,924 documents, approximately 26 million pages— has been reviewed. Approximately 340,000 of the CaseLogistix documents — roughly eight million pages — have been reviewed.
7. Although a large number of the CaseLogistix documents were not reviewed, that database is fully searchable, and Valukus is reasonably confident that the repeated and focused searches applied against that database have discovered most if not all of the most relevant documents.
8. In most cases, documents were produced to Valukus under stipulated protective orders, which are described in Appendix 5 of the report. Subject to those orders, the document databases created remain a resource for the bankruptcy estate and the parties. The database includes computerized tagging which will allow persons interested in making their own searches to narrow and focus search requests.

And the cost of all this? A snip at $38 million. Wonder who pays the bill?

Seeding dandelion Macro, originally uploaded by tibchris.

Astonishingly beautiful and revealing macro shot, which shows the fiendish ingenuity of the dandelion plant in reproducing itself.

Lovely story from Sean & Nicci’s blog.

J.P.R. Williams, a celebrated Rugby international from my youth and now a 61-year-old orthopaedic surgeon, is stopped by police and breathalysed. But he has a bright idea. Someone, somewhere, has told him that you can cheat the test by putting copper coins in your mouth. The problem is that it's an idea that you need to be drunk to believe. The further problem is that PC Plod tends to get suspicious if you start shoving small change into your mouth. The even further problem is that it doesn't work.

He's been banned from driving for seventeen months. They should also make him take a GCSE in Chemistry.

Reading this scene in the manuscipt of a novel, an editor would surely object: funny idea, but do we have to make him a doctor? Nobody is going to believe that.

If only J.P.R. had read the entry on the subject in the great urban legends website, snopes.com.

Hmmm… Just when I’ve been experimenting with escaping from the tyranny of ‘perfect’ digital imagery, I find that one of my sons has been heading off in the same direction. Except that he’s been doing it the hard way. “As a counter-balance to the increasingly digitised world of photography”, he writes, “I have decided to explore the analogue printing methods of yesteryear. Specifically I am focusing on screen printing, a process that was famously popularised by Andy Warhol.”

In true Warhol spirit, his first experiments have focussed on a quintessential British brand — Marmite! What’s nice about them is that no two prints are the same, which in a way is like an implicit definition of analogue media. A gallery of images of the resulting work can be found here, and a downloadable flyer [pdf] here.

Now, where did I put that tomato ketchup?

Later: You think I jest about Marmite being quintessentially British? An English journalist friend lived and worked in New York for a couple of years and he swore that the thing he missed most in all that time was… Marmite.

Interesting list of eighteen ‘Firsts’ on the Internet. Includes the first email and the first e-commerce transaction. Oh — and the first search engine.

Yoohoo! Powerpoint junkies beware — Edward Tufte has been given a job by Obama.

Government and industry bureaucrats addicted to spewing out mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, be very afraid; Edward Tufte is coming to Washington, DC. The Obama administration has appointed Tufte to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will suggest ways that the $787 billion stimulus program's watchdog accountability board can do its job.

“I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service,” Tufte explained on his website on Sunday. “And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do.”

We’re not so sure about that. Edward Tufte is a leading critic of and writer about graphic presentations. He’s also a champion of clarity in writing and public speaking. Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University, much of his life has been dedicated to thinking out loud about what works and doesn’t work when it comes to statistical charts, maps, and tables. His most famous book is his 1982 opus The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which coined the term “chartjunk.”