25 years ago today, IKEA opened its first UK store (in Warrington).

Interesting observation by Paul Krugman in today’s NYT.

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

wonder if it applies to the UK also?

My review of James Flynn’s new book – from the Guardian.

Not many academics have a phenomenon named after them, and when it happens they’re mostly hard scientists. In physics there’s the Bose-Einstein Condensate, for example, and the Josephson Effect. Eponymous phenomena are much rarer in the social sciences, for the obvious reason that consensus is harder to reach: the social world doesn’t provide the unambiguous yardstick of a meter reading. All of which makes James Flynn such an interesting exception to the rule, as even in the argumentative world of psychology, the “Flynn Effect” is recognised as an accepted fact…

There’s a lovely, reflective review by Michael Dirda of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life on the Barnes & Noble Review site.

I was struck by this quotation from Hofstadter about the philistinism of 19th-century US business, and thinking that nothing much has changed in the last hundred years.

The more thoroughly business dominated American society, the less it felt the need to justify its existence by reference to values outside its own domain. In earlier days it had looked for sanction in the claim that the vigorous pursuit of trade served God, and later that it served character and culture. Although this argument did not disappear, it grew less conspicuous in the business rationale. As business became the dominant motif in American life and as a vast material empire rose in the New World, business increasingly looked for legitimation in a purely material and internal criterion — the wealth it produced. American business, once defended on the ground that it produced a high standard of culture, was now defended mainly on the ground that it produced a high standard of living.

Amazing story in The Economist.

A FEW years ago Francis Schwarze noticed something unusual. Dr Schwarze, who works at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, in St Gallen, knew that sound travels faster through healthy wood, which is stiff and dense, than it does through the soft stuff left by a fungal attack. But some fungi, he found, do not slow sound. Moreover, the acoustic properties of wood so affected seem to be just what violin-makers desire. So Dr Schwarze had some violins made from the infected wood and discovered that they sounded like a Stradivarius.

But the really lovely bit is that at the end of the piece the magazine provides two audio recordings which enable one to compare a violin made from untreated wood with one that’s made from fungal-infected timber.

Trudy Miller, an Apple spokeswoman, released this statement yesterday: “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover…”.

Quite so. Thanks to Technology Review for the pic.

Mt friend Michael Dales has written a thoughtful blog post triggered by disagreement with something I wrote about Twitter in my Observer column.

Here’s the relevant para:

This new disenchantment with Twitter seems daft to me. […] as for the API restrictions, well, Twitter isn’t a charity. Those billions of tweets have to be processed, stored, retransmitted – and that costs money. Twitter has already had more than $1bn of venture capital funding. Like Facebook, it has to make money, somehow. Otherwise it will disappear. Even on the internet there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Michael says:

I agree with John’s reasoning, but not his conclusion that it’s daft. The reason why is this: in an effort to make money, Twitter is changing the product. I think it’s similarly daft to me (sorry John :), to assume that just because I liked product A, when it’s changed into product B, I should like it just as much. I don’t disagree that Twitter needs to find a revenue stream, or object that it should make changes to make that happen. I don’t agree however that I should like the new Twitter just because I liked the old Twitter.

I now have to repay the compliment. I agree with Michael’s reasoning. It’s not ‘daft’ for him to come to his conclusion.

The problem — I now realise — lies in my casual use of the term ‘daft’. When I wrote that the “new disenchantment with Twitter seems daft to me” I should perhaps have used the word “naive”. At any rate, what was in my mind as I wrote the sentence was that it’s naive or unrealistic to expect that a service that is expensive to provide can continue forever without its owners seeking to commercialise it in some way.

The etymology of ‘daft’ is interesting btw. The wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary says that it derives from the Old English gedæfte — meaning “gentle” or “becoming” — and sees a progression over the centuries from “mild” (c.1200) to “dull” (c.1300) to “foolish” (mid-15c.) to “crazy” (1530s).

Oh heck. I’ll just have to watch it.