jester™ Lens Cleaner, originally uploaded by frozenjester.

Seen on Flickr.

Hah! You think I jest? Well, look ye here at this quote from US Patent #7,689,524, granted this morning.

An intelligent personalized agent (e.g., guardian angel) monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user. Such implementation may be presented in the form of a software assisted mind amplifier. The amplifier analyzes preferences and predicts future actions based on the analysis. For example, if a user is at a shopping mall, the guardian angel can evaluate the surrounding environment with respect to the user's own attributes and preferences and determine or infer that the time of day is noon, the user has not eaten lunch, and there are no pending appointments at the moment. The guardian angel with knowledge of the user's favorite foods, last time frames for consumption of such favorite foods, and available restaurants in proximity to the user can provide directions to the nearest positively rated restaurant that serves such favorite food as well as (in the background) check for seating availability, and make a reservation (if needed). Thus, the guardian angel can, based on environment, user state, preferences, and available resources, take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social interactions by indicating whether the user has met an individual before, to gauge the appropriateness of jokes or comments given the demographics of the audience, etc.).

Ray Ozzie and Billg are the lead patentees. The patent is, needless to say, assigned to Microsoft.

Don’t you just love that idea of a “mind amplifier”? Boy, could I use one of them.

Willem Buiter was one of my favourite bloggers. But then he left his LSE Chair to become Chief Economist at Citigroup, and disappeared behind a wall of corporate discretion. But excerpts from his Citigrou analysis reports seem to leak to the FT — as in this summary.

The reason we [i.e. Citigroup] are quite confident that a boom, bubble and bust sequence will take place in China is simple: whenever credit conditions like those seen since late 2008 in China have presented themselves in countries where the fundamentals are strong (as they are in China today), where structural change, including financial innovation, is occurring at a frenetic pace (as it is in China today), and where the monetary, regulatory and fiscal authorities are untried and untested (as they are in China today), a boom, bubble and bust sequence has occurred. This time is unlikely to be different unless the authorities in China act differently from the authorities in China and elsewhere in the past.

Given that experienced monetary policymakers and financial regulators in the West have failed to spot and prevent asset bubbles, the Chinese are, he argues, unlikely to be any different:

A bubble is a manifestation of out-of-control or over-the-top economic success; you find bubbles in countries with strong fundamentals. In no major country are the fundamentals stronger, the structural change more dazzling or the policy authorities less experienced at managing a market economy than in China. We recognize that experience and familiarity with the modus operandi of a financial market economy are no guarantor of good policy. Even highly experienced monetary policymakers and financial regulators, heading institutions with a track record of decades, like the current and previous Federal Reserve Chairmen, failed to identify and prevent excessive credit growth and asset bubbles, and may indeed have contributed through their regulatory and monetary policy actions (or inaction) to the financial boom, bubble and bust that severely damaged the financial system of the US. Even so, the fact that those in charge of monetary, financial and credit management in China are operating in terra incognita increases the risk of policy errors.

So? Expect a Chinese bust in a couple of years. Wonder what that means for the rest of us?

Shock! Horror! Steve Jobs replies to email.

Huh! That’s nothing. Once upon a time you could write to billg@microsoft.com and get a reply from Himself.

This is such a lovely geeky idea, beautifully executed.

The Icarus project is a home brew project to send a camera high into the stratosphere to take pictures of the Earth from near space. The camera is enclosed in a flight box and attached to a helium weather balloon which lifts the camera to an altitude of approximately 35,000 meters above sea level. The camera is controlled by a small micro computer which takes pictures at timed intervals in various directions. Other sensors to measure temperature, barometric pressure and altitude are incorporated into the flight box.

Photographs are great too.

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.