Category Archives: Asides

The Mosley orgy (contd.)

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From this morning’s Telegraph…

An MI5 agent has resigned after it emerged his prostitute wife engineered the tabloid sting that exposed Max Mosley, the head of motor racing, as having taken part in a sado-masochistic orgy.

An MI5 agent has resigned after his prostitute wife engineered the tabloid sting that exposed Max Mosley, the head of motor racing, for taking part in a sado-masochistic orgy.

The disclosure is deeply embarrassing for Britain’s security service and has forced a review of vetting.

The man was a surveillance operative with several years of service. His wife, 38, is believed to have approached the News of the World when she realised that Mr Mosley – a regular client – had booked five prostitutes for a sex session costing £2,500…

There’s a novel in here, somewhere.

On this day…

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… in 1911, the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil Company, ruling it was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Unflash Gordon’s Al Gore moment

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Remember when Al Gore invented the Internet? (Well, actually I suspect that that story may have been an embroidered urban myth.) But here’s a report of a claim by Gordon Brown that a Brit invented the iPod.

While talking about the economy during daytime television show, This Morning, Brown let it drop that it was a Briton who in fact invented the iPod.

“Companies will come and locate in Britain if we have the talented people to offer them,” said Brown. “People with ideas and innovative things that they can market. You know it was a Brit that invented the iPod. If you’ve got really innovative things, people will come to your country to locate.”

Perhaps Brown was confused about the role of design engineer, Jonathan Ive, a Brit who crafted the casing and packaging of the iPod and many other Apple products. We dare say there’s a subtle difference between the house painter and architect. (Let’s also ignore that Brown’s one example of British ingenuity came from an American company, and that mp3 player sales aren’t exactly keeping the US economy primed at the moment.) And even then, Ive ran off to America for a job at Apple in 1992 and currently lives in California.

The Register maintains that the iPod was invented by Tony Fadell, who hails from Michigan!

In the Air

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There are not many writers whom I really envy because of their intelligence, range, grace and style. John Updike is one. Another is Malcolm Gladwell. He’s just made me seethe with admiration with this lovely New Yorker essay which is partly about Nathan Myhrvold but mainly a meditation on innovation.

In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies…

Draw up a chair, pour some coffee, and read on.

The ethics of toffism

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Toffism, in case you don’t know, is discrimination against Etonians and the Bertie Wooster class generally. Edward Timson is the toff who is representing the Conservative interest in the forthcoming Nantwich and Crewe by-election, and it seems that the poor dear is being persecuted by satirists in top hats. Catherine Bennett has this to say about all that.

Timpson’s pain reminds us that it will not do, any more, for toffists to stigmatise the privileged, on the basis that an accident of insanely good fortune is preferable to one of doomed deprivation. The hapless victim of affluence, George Osborne, for instance, cannot help being named after a brand of wallpaper, any more than Boris Johnson chose to call himself ‘de Pfeffel’ or David Cameron elected to put himself through Eton – a ‘great school’, incidentally, as he ‘fessed up on Newsnight not long ago.

But the toffs’ tormentors will not let up. Just last week, Cameron was forced to stand up and ‘fess again: ‘Yes, I am wealthy, I have a very well-paid job and so does my wife.’ But if you prick him, does he not bleed? Or as he put it, with a simplicity which put some in mind of a young Orwell: ‘I drive my own car. I fill it up at the pumps and when diesel hits 121.9p per litre, which I paid outside Chipping Norton a couple of weeks ago, it really struck me that this whole tank is costing me £10 to £15 more than previously.’

So Etonians “feel the pain” too, just like Unflash Gordon. Such unity in diversity gives one a nice warm feeling. Or is it just that the seat of one’s pants has just caught fire?

Ms Bennett takes a much more enlightened view of all this.

Instead of lampooning Cameron’s otherness, his critics might want to celebrate cultural diversity, with the re-emergence in public life of a particular Tory type which was thought, until recently, to have dwindled almost to the point of extinction. Although the recent explosion in the number of breeding pairs is certainly impressive, Westminster, looked at as a whole, is very far from being ‘swamped’, as alarmists from Toff Watch have put it, by Cameron’s patrician army. Rather like Poles in Lincolnshire, it is just that its membership tends to concentrate in certain localities: Notting Hill for instance; Chipping Norton; the shadow cabinet. As they have every right to do. No one, I think, really wishes to return to the kind of bigoted hate-speech that began to sound old fashioned three decades ago, when Mrs Thatcher, declared class a ‘communist concept’, a unifying project continued by John Major, groping towards his ‘classless society’ and latterly by Tony Blair, who objected, early in his career, to Marxism’s ‘false view of class’.

Full Marx

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Lovely column by Simon Caulkin, who has been looking at the current crisis of capitalism in the light of re-reading an elegant introduction to Das Kapital.

It takes a reading of Francis Wheen’s concise and lucid Marx’s Das Kapital – a biography (Atlantic) for the penny to drop. The cantankerous ghost hovering over the global turmoil and glorying in the discomfiture of its chief agents is that of Highgate Cemetery’s most eminent denizen and the UK’s great revolutionary. The sense of the grinding of the gears of history, the shifting of the political and economic plates, comes straight from Karl Marx (although some might also want to add an element of Groucho). When the governor of the Bank of England talks of protecting people from the banks, and plaintively recommends that graduates should consider a career in industry as well as the City, shimmering eerily through his remarks is the Gothic vision of alienation and auto-destruction that Marx outlined 150 years ago…

Another interesting perspective on capitalism is that of systems engineering. The basic problem is that the system is intrinsically unstable. It can be maintained in a semi-stable state for periods of time by regulation, but in the end its latent instability breaks through. Oscillations between boom and bust are a feature, not (as its apologists maintain) a bug.

Getting the message

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Martin’s seen the light

I got a laptop from work last year with Windows Vista installed. I don’t use it much (I have a Vaio with XP which works fine), but it has become our media machine at home. Then yesterday it gave the message that the activation period had expired and this version of Windows was not valid. I tried entering the code on the sticker on the machine but no joy. I contacted tech guys at the ou who reckon I will need to plug it into the campus network for it to update. As I’m in Cardiff and in the US next week, this means it’s at least a couple of weeks before it will be usable again. I asked if they knew this would happen, and was told no. I wonder if other organizations know about this ‘feature’ of Vista? I’ve always been reasonably pragmatic about Windows as an OS, if everyone else uses it, then I’m happy to. But not being able to access a legitimate copy is rather stretching my agnosticism. So finally it may be a case of Linux, here I come.

On this day…

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… in 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The spike was tapped into a prepared hole in a polished California laurel tie by Leland Stanford, one of the financiers of the railroad (and founder of Stanford University).

According to UnderstandingRace.org,

Chinese railroad workers present at the site were deliberately excluded from the photograph. Hired by the Central Pacific railroad, these Chinese workers operated under the most dangerous conditions, handling explosives used to blast through the Sierra Nevada mountains, resulting in higher fatalities than other workers.

Wonder what happened to the spike.

Later: Harry Metcalfe emailed:

When I was last there, in I think 1993, on the way by car from San Fran via Death Valley, the Apache Reservation in Utah, to Washington D.C. it was still there, but safely indoors, not still in the track.
According to Wikipedia (where else?) the spike and the special tie rail were replaced soon after the ceremony.

Still later: Found this (via Google Images):

Caption reads: “There were two golden spikes made for the ceremony joining the two halves of the Transcontinental Railroad… this one was the long-lost (but never used) twin of the spike that’s now at Stanford University. ”

The spike was donated by David Hewes, an entrepreneur who understood the importance of PR.

According to this source,

The spike is engraved on the top and on all four sides. On the head are the words, “The Last Spike”; on side one: “The Pacific Railroad ground broken Jany. 8th 1863, and complete May 8th 1869″(the ceremony was to take place on May 8th but was delayed by adverse weather and labor problems that held up the Union Pacific delegation); on side two: “Directors of the C.P.R.R. of Cal. Hon. Leland Stanford. C.P. Hunting. E.B. Crocker. Mark Hopkins. A.P. Stanford. E.H. Miller Jr.”; on side three: “Officer. Hon. Leland Stanford. Presdt. C.P. Huntington Vice Presdt. E.B. Crocker. Atty. Mark Hopkins. Tresr. Chas Crocker Ge. Supdt. E. H. Miller Jr. Secty. S. S. Montague. Chief Engr.”; and on side four: “May God continue the unity of our country, as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world. Presented by David Hewes San Francisco.”

Finally, Shawn Fanning gets a payday

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From TechCrunch…

Shawn Fanning, best known for founding Napster, has a new job. He will be working at Electronic Arts, which is about to buy his social-network-gaming startup Rupture for $30 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. His co-founder Jon Baudanza will also join Electronic Arts. We first heard of a possible deal back in February, but did not know who was the buyer. Rupture’s first product was a social network for players of the online video game World of Warcraft, but it only came out with a beta version and kept delaying its public launch.

Electronic Arts is buying the company for its technology, since it doesn’t have a lot of users (it was only ever in beta) and never launched the second version of its service. Presumably, creating social networks around massively multiplayer video games is a key component of its online strategy. The company has not yet officially announced the acquisition, but it is expected to do so soon. [Update: The closing of the deal is imminent, but there are still some papers to sign].

I’m glad that he has finally hit pay dirt. He changed the world, IMHO for the better.