… it can buy you a yacht.

This is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s boat, trying to dock at Antibes. I first heard about it on Stephen Heppell’s phone blog, and followed the link to the pdf brochure. It’s called Octopus and is allegedly the world’s largest privately-owned yacht. It cost Allen over US$200 million and has a permanent crew of 60, including several former Navy Seals.

The vessel has two helicopters, seven boats, a 10 man submarine and a remote controlled vehicle for crawling on the Ocean floor. The submarine has the capacity to sleep eight for up to two weeks underwater. (Er, why would anyone want to sleep for eight weeks underwater?)

According to the brochure, on average, owners must spend a minimum of 10 percent of the purchase price every year to keep these yachts in good working condition and cover crew salaries. Therefore “Octopus” requires a US$20 million annual budget.

I’m sure that all those dedicated Windows users will be delighted to see that their license fees are being so well spent. Here, for example, is the ‘Starboard Bar and Spa’.

So tasteful, don’t you think? And how thoughtful to include a hot tub.

John Lanchester has a lovely piece in the latest London Review of Books about Cityphilia — worship of the City of London and its pernicious effects on London in particular.

This uncritical and uninformed governmental Cityphilia, he writes,

received its biggest shock in decades this autumn, with the near collapse of Britain’s fifth largest mortgage lender, Northern Rock. Britain’s first genuine bank run in more than a hundred years shone a light in many places where the sun doesn’t routinely shine, and one of the first things to be brought into question was the ways banks work. As I’ve already said, my father was a banker, and I grew up hearing about that mythical beast, the bank run. It was often spoken of but rarely seen in the wild. Bankers are said to dread a bank run, but my dad talked about them with a certain black humour. They were always a sign that somebody had fucked up, big-time. They can also be a sign that something in the financial system is fundamentally wrong. The question hanging around in the residue of the Rock’s near implosion is which type of bank run this was – a fuck-up, or a harbinger of meltdown?

It’s a great piece. Here’s the opening para:

At the point when we bought our house in 1996, average house prices in the UK, adjusted for inflation, were some way below the levels they’d hit in the late 1980s bubble. Clapham was then still a place people moved to when they had families and wanted larger and cheaper houses, and were willing to move south of the river to get them. When house prices began to go up, this area began to be colonised by bankers and City types. We were the last non-City people to move into the street where we live – the last of the aborigines. These days, as houses become an ever more critical capital asset, there is a constant va-et-vient of renovation, a non-stop turmoil of attics being done, basements being dug out, skips being filled, scaffolding put up and everything knockable being knocked through. In a street two hundred metres long, there is at the moment one skip, three sets of scaffolding, two basement conversions, a loft conversion and two full renovations. Most of this activity is generated by the City people, since we aborigines for the most part tend not to move; we’re all still here. But the bankers move all the time, doing up and selling on houses, usually to move to the Old Rectory in Shaghampton, Wiltshire, with the husband spending three or more nights in town until the inevitable happens. (‘Half of my business is “The Old Rectory, Wiltshire”,’ a cheerful divorce lawyer once told me.)

Worth reading in full. Can’t find Shaghampton on Google Maps, though. Pity. But a Google search for it already returns one hit — the LRB article.

Like many people, I subscribe to Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Alertbox’ newsletter, partly because it’s good for the soul to be annoyed by people with whom one often disagrees, and partly because he sometimes has interesting things to say. (The current issue argues that “Web 2.0 can be dangerous”, btw.)

I’ve just noticed that his site includes a link to a page of downloadable hi-res photographs of the great man. There are, er, 61 such photographs.

No hiding lights under bushels there, then.

Wow! Technology Review reports that

IBM Corp.’s expansion in developing countries shows no sign of relenting. The technology company revealed Friday that it now has 73,000 employees in India, almost a 40 percent leap from last year.

IBM did not provide updated figures for its work force in the U.S., which has held steady around 125,000 people in recent years.

Nor did IBM project its total head count. It had 355,766 employees worldwide at the end of 2006.

If the total has risen by the same rate as in 2006, almost one in five IBM workers now is in India, its second-largest center…

Interesting FT.com column by Christopher Caldwell about Harvard’s change of strategy on student support.

This week, Harvard announced a new financial aid system that will revolutionise the economics of American undergraduate education. Henceforth, students whose families earn up to $180,000 a year will pay no more than 10 per cent of that income to Harvard. Loans will be eliminated from financial aid packages and replaced with outright grants. Home equity will not be taken into account in determining contribution levels. It is a great step forward from the Harvard I attended in the 1980s. Whether it is a step forward for American society is harder to gauge.

The money needed to get this new programme up and running – about $22m – is a drop in the bucket for Harvard. Its $35bn endowment makes it (if we compare Harvard’s assets with various gross domestic products) a mightier economic force than Syria or Bulgaria or the Dominican Republic. Last year, the Harvard portfolio earned a 23 per cent return overall. At those rates Harvard’s largesse can be paid for with about four days’ worth of interest on the interest.

From Matt Williams’s review of the Bic Crystal ballpoint pen that he purchased from Amazon.co.uk…

Since taking delivery of my pen I have been very happy with the quality of ink deposition on the various types of paper that I have used. On the first day when I excitedly unwrapped my pen (thanks for the high quality packaging Amazon!) I just couldn’t contain my excitement and went around finding things to write on, like the shopping list on the notice board in our kitchen, the Post-it notes next to the phone, and on my favourite lined A4 pad at the side of my desk.

My pen is the transparent type with a blue lid. I selected this one in preference to the orange type because I like to be able to see how much ink I have left so that I can put in another order before I finally run out.

When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.

I have a helpful tip for you that you might not know about – if you let the ink dry for a few seconds you can avoid the smudging that sometimes happens if you rub the ink immediately after writing. Fortunately the ink used in this particular Bic pen seems to dry very quickly.

On the third day of ownership I went on a trip to London and took my pen carefully packed away in my brief case, but I needn’t have worried, this isn’t some temperamental ink pen that leaks when you store it at the wrong angle. I sat at my meeting and confidently removed the cap from my pen and it wrote flawlessly, almost immediately…

Interestingly, “1,408 of 1,417 people” found his review “helpful”. Who said irony was dead?

I went to a couple of very good lectures the other day — by Etienne Wenger and Yrjo Engestrom. Before the show started, however, this mysterious message was flashed onto the screen. What could it mean? That it was disgraceful to be seen in such company? It’s a truly idiotic notice.