Quentin has been clearing out his files and he came on this — a little essay I wrote for the Observer about his role in the invention of the webcam. It was one of the most rewarding pieces I’ve ever written because it was what caused me to meet him, thereby launching a great friendship, an unending series of gadget wars (in which each tries to bankrupt the other by buying gizmos) and a fascinating sequence of not-for-profit joint enterprises (not all of which were intentionally charitable!) Sometimes journalism is its own reward.

PDF of the article here.

Verily, you couldn’t make this up. Passing a sweetshop in Cambridge I came upon a tasteful window display showing the two principals in the Windsor-Middleton merger rendered in jellybeans. Not having a wide-angle lens, I had to be content with Himself — and the reflection of the Belisha Beacon in the shop window.

Details here.

What all golf courses should be like, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I grew up playing on links (i.e. seaside courses laid out in sand-dunes) and I still think that only links courses are ‘real’ golf courses. Today we came on a lovely links course which is one of Ireland’s best-kept secrets — the Narin and Portnoo club at Narin. Lovely, unpretentious and utterly charming.

What you learn if your formative years are spent on links courses is never to hit the ball high. Because most of the time you’re battling against serious wind, the name of the game is to keep the ball out of it.

Er, I can bore for Ireland on this topic. (Hmmm… I see that I already have — here.)

Larger image here.

So if we believe that students learn best by interacting in the classroom, why don’t university teaching rooms have these chairs?

Lovely Benjamin Wallace piece sending up the contemporary craze for high-minded talkfests.

The appeal is complex. For would-be world-savers enthralled by “the power of ideas,” these conferences are a stand-in for “a time when governments did shit, like put people on the moon,” per one curator. For even die-hard technologists, interacting via disembodied avatars gets old, and occasional 3-D mingling is refreshing. For a certain prosperous tier of the citizenry, the conferences serve as a higher-brow Learning Annex. But most simply, these events are about establishing and reinforcing new hierarchies. In a culture where social rank is ever more fluid, an entrepreneur who overnight goes from sleeping under his desk to IPO-ing into a billionaire needs a way to express his new status, stat. “We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” as Andrew Zolli, PopTech’s executive director, puts it.

Thus the rise of a cohort of speakers and attendees who migrate along the same elite social-intellectual trade routes. Throw in Sundance and SXSW and Burning Man, and you get what Michael Hirschorn has called “the clusterfuckoisie,” tweeting at each other as they shuttle between events. This is so exactly the sort of thing that David Brooks lives to break down into one of his fictive comic-sociological characters that, in his latest book, The Social Animal, he describes Davos parties as “rings of interesting and insecure people desperately seeking entry into the realm of the placid and self-satisfied.” But Brooks is himself a leading citizen of the realm, having spoken at TED and, regularly, the Aspen Ideas Festival. For public intellectuals with books and brands to promote, the new conferences are force multipliers, unpaid gigs that offer intangible yields. “Obviously it’s not the money,” Brooks says. “For me, it’s the chance to get out of my political-pundit circle and meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. There are psychic rewards.”

Hmmm… Is it significant, I wonder, that in last year’s The Muppets movie, Scooter is updated to be a Google employee and TED attendee?