The 2013 Lee Lecturer — Professor Margaret Macmillan, originally uploaded by jjn1.

On Thursday, Professor Margaret Macmillan gave the 2013 Lee Seng Tee Lecture at Wolfson. Her topic: the origins of the First World War. One of the factors she identified was the weakness of political leaders unable to control or restrain their military establishments. In the Q&A afterwards she mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s ability to resist the belligerent demands of his generals for military action against the Soviet Union and Cuba. Macmillan identified two factors which led Kennedy to resist. One was his bitter experience of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which had resulted from his willingness to accept military advice. The other was the fact that he happened to be reading Barbara’s Tuchman’s wonderful book, The Guns of August, about the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, and how the world slipped into catastrophe.

I love this. A web designer was so appalled by the aesthetics of the PRISM PowerPoint deck that she redesigned it to show what a proper web-savvy designer would do with it.

Best thing since Peter Norvig re-cast Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.

Nick Bilton has nice piece in the New York Times about the echo-chamber effect one gets when too many people of the same mindset are gathered together in the same location. The peg for it is Twist, an App for folks who are tired of having to text one another about ETAs when rushing to make meetings. Bilton’s question: does anybody else other than frenetic Silicon Valley types need such a thing?

Is Twist a great idea, or are Mr. Belshe and Mr. Lee [Twist’s inventors] falling into a local propensity for creating a product for technophile friends rather than the public?

Sometimes, Hollywood screenwriters create scripts filled with inside jokes that only people in Hollywood could appreciate. Sometimes, New York media writers write about other New York media writers. And sometimes, tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the south create companies best appreciated by other people who live and breathe technology.

Twist is hardly the only start-up whose target audience does not seem to extend far from San Francisco Bay. Among many, there’s BlackJet, which offers “affordable private jet” solutions for people in the area. And there’s Swig, which connects people with local liquor stores that provide home deliveries.

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that we are guilty in the Valley of designing things for ourselves, and we are not the target market,” said Andy Smith, who is the co-author of “The Dragonfly Effect,” a book about marketing, technology and entrepreneurship.

If you watch nothing else this week, watch this. Ten million people already have.

It’s amazing what’s on YouTube. At dinner I was talking to someone who hadn’t been born when the famous Panorama April 1 spoof went out. Suddenly occurred to me that it might be on YouTube. And — Lo! — it was, complete with time-code.

The key trick is to write about a global problem in a way that brings it home to readers without patronising them or over-simplifying it. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert does this better than most, as for example here:

A lot of what’s known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii. By the nineteen-fifties, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again. Keeling thought that it would be prudent to find out if that was, in fact, the case. The setup on Mauna Loa soon showed that it was not.

Carbon-dioxide levels have been monitored at the observatory ever since, and they’ve exhibited a pattern that started out as terrifying and may be now described as terrifyingly predictable. They have increased every year, and earlier this month they reached the milestone of four hundred parts per million. No one knows exactly when CO2 levels were last this high; the best guess is the mid-Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that point, summertime temperatures in the Arctic were fourteen degrees warmer than they are now and sea levels were some seventy-five feet higher.

She goes on to write about the decision that Obama has to make soon — about whether to approve the Keystone pipeline (for which the Canadian government is lobbying fiercely) which would bring oil from Canada’s tar sands to the US. And she points out something that I didn’t know (but should have), namely that tar-sand extraction is a fiercely energy-intensive process:

Tar-sands oil is not really oil, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. It starts out as semi-solid and has to be either mined or literally melted out of the ground. In either case, the process requires energy, which is provided by burning fossil fuels. The result is that, for every barrel of tar-sands oil that’s extracted, significantly more carbon dioxide enters the air than for every barrel of ordinary crude—between twelve and twenty-three per cent more.

At the Google Big Tent last week, I said that we need a theory of incompetent systems, i.e. systems that can’t fix themselves because the necessary remedial actions run counter to the short-term (and sometimes the long-term) interests of significant components of the system. Global warming is an example, which is why we — ie humanity — won’t fix it. The planet will fix it in due course because it’s a homeostatic system (I’m with James Lovelock on that): the trouble is that the planet doesn’t give a monkey’s curse for us.

This thought was received by the audience in depressed silence.

Amazing how posh, cut-glass she sounds. But then again, considering her background and the era, maybe she was just a standard upper middle class English gel. I love her writing. Not sure I’d have liked her in person. We’d have argued about Ulysses, for sure.