The test of a movie, I always think, is not so much the impact it has on one in the cinema, but whether it lives on in one’s mind in the days and weeks afterwards. Spielberg’s Lincoln, which we saw last night, passes that test with flying colours. There are lots of reasons for admiring the movie, and most of them have been extensively rehashed by critics more knowledgeable than me, so I won’t dwell on them here, except to say that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln is truly awe-inspiring in capturing the greatness and the humanity of the man: his inner confidence, his conversational style, his unique combination of patience and impatience, his combination of realism and idealism, his wit. And, above all, his weariness.

And who would have thought that you could make a Hollywood blockbuster out of 150 minutes of pure dialogue? But actually the film’s dialogue is a work of genius. Or, more precisely, of a genius, name of Tony Kushner, who strove not just for wit and sparkle, but also for historical accuracy. He worked with the 20-volume OED by his side, checking the historical accuracy of the terms used by the characters. The only made-up word, he told the Boston Globe, was “grousle” — used by Lincoln in exasperation at the cavilling of his cabinet: “You grousle and heckle and dodge about”, he expostulates, “like pettifogging Tammany Hall hucksters.” The dialogue I enjoyed most, however, came not from Lincoln but from Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones), whose withering scorn for his political opponents left this viewer awestruck with admiration. (I used to be a TV critic, and so am a connoisseur of invective.) When he moderated his radical stance (he was a fervent believer that all men are created equal) for pragmatic reasons to the statement that “all men are equal before the law”, he was challenged by George Pendelton of Ohio on whether he believed that all men were equal. “You”, he said, staring at Pendleton, “are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you.”

What’s most admirable about the movie is its willingness to embrace the complexity of the story of the Thirteenth Amendment. Politics is always a messy business, and politics in time of war is even messier. What the movie brings out brilliantly, though, is how politics is the art of the possible. It shows Lincoln achieving a supremely worthwhile end (enshrining the outlawing of slavery in the Constitution) by dubious – but not illegal — means. It leaves one thinking romantically about Churchill’s trope about democracy being “the worst system — except for all the others”. And shaking one’s head at the mess that Lincoln’s successors have made of his legacy.

Wonderful story in The Register about Jimmy Wales’s explanation for the popularity of Wikipedia in Chinese restaurants.

Wales also dropped some fascinating vignettes about the online encyclopedia. The organization was banned in China until the Beijing Olympics, and is still not as popular with local internet users as it is in the rest of the world. But the name has started cropping up on local restaurant menus.

He showed images sent in of menus listing beef brisket with Wikipedia, stir fried Wikipedia with peppers, steamed eggs with Wikipedia, and even a bread company that takes its name from the site. The Chinese Wikipedia editors are mystified by this, but Wales suggested a hypothesis.

“What we figured out was that just around the time of the Beijing Olympics a lot of restaurants were expecting millions of foreigners to flood into the county for the first time,” he said. “Restaurants that wouldn’t normally see foreigners decided to translate their menus and if you type almost anything into a search engine what’s the first thing that comes up? Wikipedia.”

Wales also showed off some country statistics that raised a few chuckles. The most popular type of category for Wikipedia articles in Japanese is pop culture information, he said, which given the country’s documented obsession with such matters is unsurprising.

But in German the most popular topic is geography, which raised a smattering of chuckles from those who know their 20th Century history. In France, one of the least popular categories was sex, which Wales attributed to the fact that the population spent more time actually having sex and so was less inclined to read about it.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

By Tim Peters.

Working on the Web and need to make a note without leaving the browser?

Just open a new tab and type this in to the address bar:

Hit Return and voila! — a notepad.

I learned this lovely trick from Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga, Whom God Preserve.

Tired of people tweeting what they’re about to eat? Well, according to the NYTimes, so are high-end restauranteurs.

When it comes to people taking photographs of their meals, the chef David Bouley has seen it all. There are the foreign tourists who, despite their big cameras, tend to be very discreet. There are those who use a flash and annoy everyone around them. There are those who come equipped with gorillapods — those small, flexible tripods to use on their tables.

There are even those who stand on their chairs to shoot their plates from above.

“We get on top of those folks right away or else it’s like a circus,” Mr. Bouley said.

Just for the record, I’m having tea and toast with home-made marmalade at the moment. Not worth a photograph.

Answer here.