If, like me, you’ve ever wondered about the death wish which seems to afflict teenagers who walk and cycle everywhere with their iPods rendering them insensible to the outside world, then this poster by the New South Wales police may ring a bell.
Category Archives: Asides
Thirty years on…
This morning’s Observer column marking the 30th anniversary of Gary Thuerk’s famous email mistake.
Looked at from the perspective of today, when my spam filter is reporting that it has blocked 5,700 messages in the last month, Thuerk’s unsolicited email seems touchingly innocent. For one thing it actually imparts some useful and interesting information.
If I had been an Arpanet researcher on the west coast in 1978, I would have been genuinely interested to learn that the network’s protocols had been incorporated in the operating systems of a major vendor. In that sense, it provides a stark contrast with the invitations to purchase penis-extending drugs, fake Rolexes and mining shares which nowadays clog my spam filter. And it’s sobering to see how such pernicious weeds can grow from such an innocuous beginning…
Clinton fantasies
Timothy Noah doesn’t think Hillary Clinton can win the nomination. Here’s why.
Please, let’s stop pretending there’s much suspense about who the nominee will be. As an arithmecrat, I will not consider anyone the winner until a candidate achieves 2,025 delegates. But neither am I obliged to believe Hillary Clinton has a plausible shot. She doesn’t.
His arithmetic is interesting — and plausible.
Bertie Wooster elected!
Yep. He’s London’s new Mayor. And all the while he thought he was running for the Wine-Tasting Committee of the Drones Club. Much public entertainment lies ahead.
Bad news for the Supreme Leader, though. The game’s over. And it doesn’t have all that much to do with Gordon Brown’s competence/incompetence. It’s simply that Labour’s time is up. Three reasons for this:
Gin, Television, and cognitive surplus
Wonderful talk by Clay Shirky
I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation…
It’s funny: I get asked the same question a lot. How do I find the time to pay attention to all the stuff that’s on the Net? And part of the answer, of course, is that I don’t watch television. So I’ve got 22 hours extra a week free for intelligent pursuits. I was a TV critic for a major national major newspaper and, before that, a serious weekly magazine for 13 years, so I’ve done my time in front of the box.
Actually, come to think of it, even when I was a TV critic I watched relatively little television. At a time when the average British viewer was watching 22.5 hours a week, I was watching no more than seven. I was just very selective for the simple and obvious reason that one cannot write a weekly essay about 23 hours of TV. And I’ve never, ever watched an episode of Coronation Street or EastEnders!
Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it!
Lovely story in the New York Times…
Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of Brooklyn and Queens, drives a 2008 Chevrolet Impala, leased for $219 a month. Representative Michael R. McNulty, a Democrat from the Albany area, gets around in a 2007 Mercury Mariner hybrid, a sport utility vehicle, for $816 a month.
“It gets a little better than 25 miles a gallon,” Mr. McNulty said.
Charles B. Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is not so caught up in the question of gas mileage. He leases a 2004 Cadillac DeVille for $777.54 a month. The car is 17 feet long with a 300-horsepower engine and seats five comfortably.
“It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs,” Mr. Rangel, of Harlem, said cheerfully this week. “I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane.”
Modest or more luxurious, the cars are all paid for by taxpayers. The use of a car — gas included — is one of the benefits of being a member of the House of Representatives.
There are few restrictions on what kind of car the members can choose, and there is no limit on how much they can spend. But the benefit can be politically sensitive, given the growing concerns about automobile emissions and an economy that has left many people struggling to pay for the rapidly rising cost of gas, which was averaging $3.63 a gallon nationwide earlier this week…
That’s what I like to see. No pennypinching in the Congress. There’s something especially touching in the Chairman of Ways and Means riding around in a Caddy, don’t you think? His ways, taxpayers’ means. Wonder how many legislators lease Hummers? You could get an entire tech start-up into a stretched one of them.
Still, none of them is a patch on Lord Berners (1893-1950), who had a piano installed in his Rolls. He also had a pet giraffe. And a foolproof system for always having a railway compartment to himself. Before the train started off, he would stand at the entrance to the compartment, frantically beckoning people in. It being England, he then travelled in solitary splendour.
They don’t make them like that any more, alas.
On this day…
… in 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the war was over.
The photograph shows a North Vietnamese tank entering the Presidential palace on the day.
A night at the Opera
We went to see English touring Opera’s production of Don Giovanni last night. It was competent and enjoyable, though not first rate. As usual, I had to be restrained by my lovely companion from singing along — especially when the tenor playing Don Ottavio, er underplayed Il mio tesoro. Here’s how it should be done, IMHO:
Or, even better, here’s John McCormack:
For some reason, my household seems to think that my operatic performances should be restricted to the bathroom. Bah!
BT bundles MS Office with Linux laptop that won’t run it
Sometimes, you wonder what these folks are on. This from The Register …
This week’s award for the Most Astutely Selected Software Bundle goes to BT after the teleco tried to hook potential purchasers of Asus’ Linux-running Eee PC 900 by offering to ship it with a copy of Microsoft Office.
BT is offering the 20GB 900 for £335.99, but if anyone out there is willing to buy it for £422.34, the telco will include a copy of Office Home and Student in the box.
This despite the fact that, just a little way further down the page, BT’s list of Eee specifications admits that the elfin laptop is not “Office ready”.
The Register calculates that buying the bundle saves each punter a whopping £1.76 on the cost of purchasing the two products separately.
Like I say, what are these guys smoking?
The price of failure
Wow! This from Technology Review…
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese electronics maker Toshiba said Friday its net profit plummeted a staggering 95 percent in the January-March quarter due to losses related to its exit from the next-generation video HD DVD business.
Toshiba Corp.’s profit stood at 1.25 billion yen ($12 million), sharply down from 26.17 billion yen a year earlier.
”Our net profit sharply fell due to the end of HD DVD business,” Toshiba spokeswoman Hiroko Mochida said, adding the one-time for pulling the plug on its HD DVD business cost about 48 billion yen ($461 million)…