Well, well. Today is the ninth of the ninth two thousand and nine. Or 09-09-09. Or 999.

The University Library in Cambridge has, for decades, had a blank space in front of the steps leading to the main entrance. In recent years, this has become a jumble of untidy (and unsightly) car parking. So the Library commissioned a set of fourteen sculptures to reclaim the space. Until Friday last, they were a mystery to us library users because they were firmly encased in impenetrable wrapping. But at 6pm on Friday all was revealed. And very nice they are too: cast in bronze and with a lovely patina. The central four have an added feature — designed not only to interest small children but also to test the tidiness obsession of adults.

From Kottke.

Michael Stillwell pulled an interesting chart out of a book called A Farewell to Alms. It’s a table of the speed of important news reaching London. For instance, in 1805 the news of the Battle of Trafalgar took 17 days to travel the 1100 miles to London; that’s a speed of 2.7 mph. By 1891 when the Nobi earthquake occurred in Japan, it only took the news one day to travel 5916 miles, a speed of 246 mph.

Nowadays an email or a Twitter update can travel halfway around the world nearly instantaneously. The 2008 Sichaun earthquake occurred 5100 miles from London with the first Twitter update in English occurring about 7 minutes after the quake started. Assuming the message was read a minute later by someone in London, that’s 38,250 mph. Had the Twitter updater been right at the epicenter and able to send a Twitter message 30 seconds after the quake started and was read a minute later in London, that’s 204,000 mph. Five orders of magnitude improvement in 200 years…not too shabby.

In Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s entrancing book about his long walk through pre-war Europe, I came on this reflection on the narrow escape Vienna had when it was besieged by the Turks. He’d just been to a museum where various artefacts symbolising the Turkish defeat were displayed:

Martial spoils apart, the great contest has left little trace. It was the beginning of coffee-drinking in the West, or so the Viennese maintain. The earliest coffee-houses, they insist, were kept by some of the Sultan’s Greek and Serbian subjects who had sought sanctuary in Vienna. But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moon of the Sultan’s flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They lark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.

Truly, you learn something new every day. I had always assumed that the croissant was the product of unaided Gallic inspiration.

Enraged by Quentin stealing a march on me in the gadget wars with his Mac Mini 9, I resolved to restore my shattered dignity. I bought a Dell Mini 9 on eBay (the cheap one with 8GB SSD and 1G Ram), a 2GB RAM chip and a RunCore 64GB SSD. This is more expensive than a standard SSD, but one’s paying extra for its killer feature — a USB interface.

And now I have an absolutely delicious little machine which runs Leopard like a native.

It’s an eerie experience running an Apple OS on non-Apple hardware. As Leopard launched on the Dell I was suddenly reminded that I’ve owned a version of virtually every Apple machine there has ever been — starting with an Apple II in the late 1970s. But this is the first time I’ve seen the apple logo launch on a machine that the company hasn’t made.

In terms of performance, the Dell is pretty good. The screen is ok. Anything that requires disk access tends to run faster than on my MacBook Air, but processes that are compute-intensive run slower. So this is not a machine for video editing, say. But then, neither is the Air.

The great thing about the Dell, apart from the psychic satisfaction it offers, is the form factor. It’s a nicely made piece of kit. And it fits easily into a camera bag, so it will go more places with me.

I’ve used a lot of NetBooks since the ASUS 701 first launched, and I love the concept. But until now, using a NetBook meant that one always had to accept some compromises either in terms of functionality or ergonomics. The Dell Mini 9 running Leopard means much fewer compromises.

Just listened to a terrific radio interview with my former Observer colleague, the wonderful Katherine Whitehorn, who has long retired from the paper but is now the ‘agony aunt’ of Saga Magazine. The conversation had moved on to the way readers respond to newspaper/magazine columnists. Katherine recounted how she had once had a letter from a man who lived with his wife in a largish house but the two of them nowadays hardly exchanged a word in the course of an entitre day. How could this dire situation be improved. Katharine suggested that the get a dog “because at least then they’d have to talk about who would take the bloody animal for a walk every day” — and was deluged with angry letters from readers saying “how dare you suggest introducing an innocent dog into such a dysfunctional family”.

And I thought: only in Britain could this happen.

Lovely story from Good Morning Silicon Valley.

In deference to the tradition of local TV newscasts, a crime report leads this edition of the iWitness roundup, but it’s a crime report with a happy ending … except for the perps. The unnamed victim in the case was strolling through Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood around 1 a.m. Saturday when two gentlemen approached and asked for his wallet, credit card PIN numbers and iPhone, emphasizing their request with what appeared to be a handgun. After handing over the goods and notifying authorities and his banks, the man turned to his computer and fired up the Find My iPhone GPS-location feature of Apple’s MobileMe service. Sure enough, there was his phone, faithfully tracking its abductors on a shopping trip at a North Versailles Wal-Mart, then a snack stop at Eat’n Park, and finally to a gas station, where police caught up and took three men into custody, along with the stolen items and a pellet gun. With luck, the iPhone will take down a few more bad guys before word of this defense measure spreads down to street-thug level.

The Census of Ireland for 1911 has just gone online. I’ve been trying to locate my grandfathers on it. So far I’ve found my paternal grandpa. Still looking for my mother’s father. But I’ve been struck by one column on the form:

Brutal, eh? At least by the standards of our politically-correct age.

The death of, and tributes to, Ted Kennedy raise an interesting question about the relationship between individual moral worth and public service. By all accounts, the youngest Kennedy boy, like his older brothers, inherited many of the personality defects of his obnoxious father — particularly the predatory attitude towards women. In Chappaquiddick, Teddy displayed another kind of moral flaw, by not trying to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne, by fleeing the scene without reporting the accident and (almost certainly) by using family money to buy the silence of the girl’s family. (Echoes here of how wealth had also bought absolution from the sin of cheating in a Harvard exam.)

On the other hand, it’s clear that Ted Kennedy was, as a legislator, often on the side of the angels. The Economist, not exactly a bleeding heart liberal journal, described him as “one hell of a Senator”, full of “passion and energy and a palpable desire to comfort the afflicted”. He agitated for civil rights for blacks and was largely responsible for the Voting Rights Act, the Age Discrimination Act and the Freedom of Information Act. He campaigned for an end to the war in Vietnam, for stricter safety rules at work and for sanctions against apartheid. Almost alone among Senators, he opposed the Iraq war from the start and was a lifelong campaigner for universal health care.

This is a great record. And yet it is the record of a morally flawed man. Compare it with the political legacy of, say, Tony Blair who — in his personal life at least — seems a model of moral rectitude. And yet he took the country to war on false pretences, quashed the Serious Fraud’s Office’s investigation into BAE Systems’s relations with prominent Saudi princes and passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act — and a good deal of other illiberal and intrusive statutes.

It’s worth remembering this when the UK print media have one of their periodic feeding frenzies about the private lives of politicians. The fact that someone cheats on their spouse may well be distasteful, but does it really tell us anything about their suitability for public office? Ted Kennedy (or for that matter Jack or Bobby) wouldn’t have passed even a cursory test for moral probity. And yet they did a lot of good. In fact you could argue that, of all the Kennedy boys, Ted achieved the most and in that sense was the greatest of them.

Spotted in a secondhand bookshop the other day. Consists entirely of pages like this:

I guess there was once a market for this kind of aid. Just as there was for tables of logarithms.

En passant: Warne was Beatrix Potter’s publisher. If this is an example of the sort of stuff they published, no wonder they were bemused when she showed up with Peter Rabbit.