If, like me, you’re occasionally struck by a particular font in a web-page and would like to know what it is, Fount is a neat utility for providing the information. Drag it to your bookmark bar and then click it whenever you’re puzzled by a font. After activating it, you simple drag the cursor over a sample of the text. Like SoundHound for fonts.
Well, well. The US Air force is buying 18,000 32G wifi-only iPads and expects to save $50M as a result.
Using lightweight iPads instead of heavy paper flight manuals will amount to $750,000 annual savings on fuel alone, a spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command said in an interview with James Rogers of The Street. And the AMC will no longer have to print those flight manuals either, which will save a whopping $5 million per year.
Major Brian Moritz, manager of the AMC’s electronic flight bag program, said the Air Force expects Apple’s iPad to help save $5.7 million per year, which would result in savings “well over $50 million” over the next 10 years.
“We’re saving about 90 pounds of paper per aircraft and limiting the need for each crew member to carry a 30 to 40 pound paper file,” Moritz said. “It adds up to quite a lot of weight in paper.”
Rogers was embedded recently with the U.S. Air Force and got to see Apple’s iPad in action. He revealed that the switch from paper manuals to the iPad could cut up to 490 pounds in weight from a C-5 aircraft.
They’ll never work on Ryanair flights, though. The pilots would have to turn their iPad manuals off for take-off and landing, and so wouldn’t have a clue which levers to pull.
The US Department of Justice is taking a keen interest in this email.
Reading it, one can see why.
HT to John Paczkowski at All Things Digital.
A pair of housemartins have built an exquisite nest on our vine.
Sharp essay by Peter Singer.
When Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, went to Ukraine for talks last month, his Ukrainian counterparts reportedly laughed at him because he was wearing a Japanese quartz watch that cost only $165. A Ukrainian newspaper reported on the preferences of Ukrainian ministers, several of whom have watches that cost more than $30,000. Even a Communist member of Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, was shown wearing a watch that retails for more than $6,000.
The laughter should have gone in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t you laugh (maybe in private, to avoid being impolite) at someone who pays more than 200 times as much as you do, and ends up with an inferior* product?
That is what the Ukrainians have done.
He goes on to make the point that
We can adapt that judgment to the man or woman who wears a $30,000 watch or buys similar luxury goods, like a $12,000 handbag. Essentially, such a person is saying; “I am either extraordinarily ignorant, or just plain selfish. If I were not ignorant, I would know that children are dying from diarrhea or malaria, because they lack safe drinking water, or mosquito nets, and obviously what I have spent on this watch or handbag would have been enough to help several of them survive; but I care so little about them that I would rather spend my money on something that I wear for ostentation alone.”
Spot on.
* Oh and by “inferior” he means that these expensive bling watches are functionally worse than standard quartz devices.
Standing on a railway platform and a high-speed express train comes through. 250 tons of steel hurtles along at 125 mph, safely and predictably. And I’m thinking: this is the kind of unimaginable feat that good engineering makes possible. But when my friend Tim Minshall was thinking about this the only mention of “engineering” he could find in connection with railways were notices of travel delays “due to engineering work”. The result: an entire country which associates engineering only with trouble.
It’s an unexpected topic for the Wall Street Journal editorial columns, but — Hey! — it’s a Murdoch paper.
Today 12% of websites are pornographic, and 40 million Americans are regular visitors—including 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds, who look at porn at least once a month, according to a recent survey by Cosmopolitan magazine (which, let’s face it, is the authority here). Fully 94% of therapists in another survey reported seeing an increase in people addicted to porn. It has become a whole generation’s sex education and could be the same for the next—they are fumbling around online, not in the back seat. One estimate now puts the average age of first viewing at 11. Imagine seeing “Last Tango in Paris” before your first kiss.
Countless studies connect porn with a new and negative attitude to intimate relationships, and neurological imaging confirms it. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans in 2010 to analyze men watching porn. Afterward, brain activity revealed, they looked at women more as objects than as people. The new DSM-5 will add the diagnosis “Hypersexual Disorder,” which includes compulsive pornography use.
Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is thrilled, then doomed.
But here’s the good news: “the evolutionary plasticity of our mind makes this damage reversible.”
It was apparently the way in which young men nowadays learn about sex from porn sites that set Cindy Gallop off on the track which led to her new business, makelovenotporn.tv.
So where some people see a problem, others see an opportunity. Isn’t capitalism wonderful?
Well, isn’t this interesting. Turns out that Al Gore is quite well off. Almost as wealthy as Mitt Romney, it seems, according to this Bloomberg report.
In 1999, Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold $6,000 worth of cows.
The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.
Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.
Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.
That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.
And he’s still got another 50,000 Apple shares to go. Seems like Forrest Gump isn’t the only innocent to profit from Steve Jobs’s largesse.
Watching Nigel Farage being interviewed on the Andrew Marr show this morning suddenly brought on the realization that the UKIP leader is the new Boris Johnson! He has the same easy fluency on TV, the same line in plausible half-truths, the same appeal to the battier elements of the Tory Party.
All that remains now now is for him to be kebabbed by Eddie Mair.
People often thoughtlessly quote Keynes’s observation that “in the long run we are all dead” as a way of closing off an argument or a discussion. But, as Paul Krugman points out, the quotation is ripped completely out of its context. What Keynes actually wrote was: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the storm is flat again.”
Krugman points out that “Keynes’s point here is that economic models are incomplete, suspect, and only tell you where things will supposedly end up after a lot of time has passed. It’s an appeal for better analysis, not for ignoring the future.”
What’s interesting about this habit of misquoting Keynes is the way right-wingers use it as a way of ridiculing Keynes on the grounds that he was a homosexual. Brad DeLong highlights, for example, the way in which a succession of reactionaries — Joe Schumpeter, George Will, Daniel Johnson, Gertrude Himmelfarb and, yes, Niall Ferguson — have all used “in the long run we are all dead” as the basis for sneering homophobia. It is, one of them observed, only the kind of thing that “a childless homosexual” would have said.
LATER: To do him credit, Ferguson recanted and apologised. The statement on his website reads:
During a recent question-and-answer session at a conference in California, I made comments about John Maynard Keynes that were as stupid as they were insensitive.
I had been asked to comment on Keynes’s famous observation “In the long run we are all dead.” The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.
But I should not have suggested – in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation – that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.
My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.
My colleagues, students, and friends – straight and gay – have every right to be disappointed in me, as I am in myself. To them, and to everyone who heard my remarks at the conference or has read them since, I deeply and unreservedly apologize.
