“If you use a colloquialism or slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better”.

Strunk & White, Elements of Style, page 34.

Mea culpa. This is an abiding sin of mine. I will try to do better in future.

From Robert Reich’s Blog.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can’t find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.

All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted…

NetBooks now account for 10 per cent of all PC sales. That’s having a serious impact on Certain Monopolists, as this NYT report suggests.

In its last quarter, Microsoft posted the first sales decline in its history for the PC version of Windows. It blamed netbooks for the drop. On average, Microsoft charges computer makers $73 for Windows Vista, the version of Windows used in desktop and high-powered laptop PCs. That is triple what it receives for a sale of Windows XP for a netbook.

For Intel, the Atom chips represent lower-profit products, which could turn into a major sore spot if consumers become comfortable with netbooks and start to view them as replacements for standard computers.

In his recent report, Mr. Sacconaghi speculated that 50 percent of consumers could get by with an Atom-based computer for their everyday tasks. PC makers like H.P., Acer and Dell, which face razor-thin profit margins selling laptops, could use the rising competition to place more price pressure on both Microsoft and Intel, Mr. Sacconaghi said…

Bob Cringely was on the Presidential Commission that investigated the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. He’s just published a fascinating blog post looking back on it.

The folks at TMI did not really know how to manage the technology of a nuclear power plant, and that led to a huge mess. The same thing has now happened to our economy. Congress changed the banking and mortgage lending rules without regard to their purpose. Many firms bought derivative securities without the slightest thought to the math behind them or the risk they were incurring. Nuclear power plants run on a chain reaction process of atomic decay. Our government and investment community created a chain reaction of economic decay.

Chemical plants were better designed than nuclear power plants in part because Congress did not legislate how the chemical industry designed their plants. But more importantly most chemical firms of that era had CEO’s with engineering degrees. They had respect for the technology and the risk of misusing it. But that doesn’t make the chemical industry blameless. With the off-shoring of manufacturing a lot of chemical production is now being done in places where there is little respect for the dangers of technology. The chemical industry’s TMI was Bhopal. There will be more Bhopal’s coming because those companies are now being managed by bean counters, not engineers.

From yesterday’s Irish Times:

“The rules of Portmarnock Golf Club do not state it excludes women but rather say that membership is limited to men, counsel for the club has argued before the Supreme Court.

That is not discrimination within the meaning of the Equal Status Act 2000, and there must be an equal right to associate with persons of one’s choice, Donal O’Donnell SC submitted.”

The Justices reserved judgment on the ‘preliminary issues’ in the case.

The stakes are high. Section 8 of the aforementioned Act provides for the suspension of the registration of a discriminating club, which means that it could not get a licence to sell alcoholic beverages.

Flann O’Brien, where are you when we need you?

Lovely tweet from one of my Twitter buddies last night:

“Have just realised missing husband is at wembley. Excellent. Remote control all to myself for maybe another hour.”

From today’s paper.

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as ‘tweets’, which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity ‘twitterers’, such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter’s profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

That’s the stuff. Pity about the date.

Andy Hopper, the head of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, is currently on Sabbatical. He’s flying around the world — in his own plane. Follow his progress here.

Front page of this morning’s Irish Times. Junk bond status coming soon. Reminds me of a nice joke that’s been circulating for months in Ireland.

Q: What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland?
A: One letter and six months.

Hooray! The OU’s evolution megalab project is up and running. Press Release says:

Snails, often the unloved blight of gardeners, are being put under the microscope with a new public science project being launched today (Monday 30 March) by The Open University. The Evolution MegaLab is a mass public research programme which is investigating how ordinary banded snails – found in back gardens, river banks and parks – have evolved over the last 40 years, by comparing data supplied by members of the public with a database of more than 8,000 historical records.

The project runs from April to October 2009, spanning Europe, and relies on members of the public doing their own snail hunts and submitting their findings to the website at www.evolutionmegalab.org. When data is received, people will get personalised interpretations of their observations. At the end of the year the results will be analysed by a group of leading evolutionary biologists, co-ordinated by scientists from The Open University.

Scientists believe that climate change and predators may have caused the banded snail population to shift habitat and even change their appearance. Professor Jonathan Silvertown of The Open University explains: “Banded snails wear their genes on their backs. Their colours and banding patterns are marvellously varied – but the darker shell types are more common in woodland, where the background colour is brown, while in grass banded snails tend to be lighter-coloured, yellow and stripier. These differences are thought to have evolved over time because they provide camouflage from thrushes, which like to eat the snails.”

Hmmm… We have snails in our garden at home, where they are regarded (at least by the Head Gardener) with unmitigated distaste. Various remedies are proposed by helpful friends — e.g. drowning them in beer. Somehow I can’t see her (the Head Gardener) taking kindly to the idea of them as evolutionary witnesses.

Credits: The Evolution Megalab is one of Doug Clow’s projects. See his blog entry about it.