Deliciously savage Review by Andrew Ferguson of Tom Friedman’s new book. Samples:

‘That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back” is a landmark in American popular literature: It is the first book by Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and mega-best-selling author of “The World Is Flat,” “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” and so on, in which an alert reader can go whole paragraphs—whole pages, in a few instances—without fighting the impulse to chuck it across the room.

As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White’s Rule No. 9: “Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner.” “The World Is Flat” & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author’s own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.)

And,

Mr. Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer. He announces that “America declared war on math and physics.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that we’re “waging war on math and physics.” Three sentences later: “We went to war against math and physics.” And onto the next page: “We need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both.” Three sentences later: We must “reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics,” because, we learn two sentences later, soon the war on terror “won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math.” He must think we’re idiots.

As someone who’s on record as describing Friedman as a master of the catchy half-truth, I’m not his greatest fan. But I wonder if some of the asperity in Ferguson’s review has anything to do with the fact that it appears in the Wall Street Journal and Friedman is a star columnist on that paper’s deadly NYC rival, the New York Times?

Nicest Tweet of the morning came from Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147 on Twitter):

Favourite neutrino joke so far: To get to the other side. Why did the neutrino cross the road?

Backstory: Wired sums it up thus:

If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light.

In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it’s sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. “I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.”

The data come from a 1,300-metric-ton particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy’s subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the Earth from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. As the particles hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles.

Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.

Hmmm… I’ve always been fascinated by neutrinos, and often use physicists’ belief in them as evidence that religious fundamentalists aren’t the only people who believe implausible things. Just ponder this passage from the Wikipedia entry on the neutrino:

Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the Sun. About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth.

What this implies, for example, is that a neutrino can pass right through the earth without noticing the obstacle in its path. Now I know (pace Rutherford’s famous experiment) that atoms are mostly empty space, but still… Makes you think, doesn’t it? It makes me think of JBS Haldane’s famous suspicion that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”.

This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s my problem. My password has expired and I need to set a new one. So I think of something and type it in. The system rejects it as being insecure. That’s funny – it’s about the same level of complexity as its expired predecessor. Then I remember – the organisation has recently acquired a new chief information officer and he’s embarked on a root-and-branch overhaul of the system, which presumably includes upgrading security rules.

So I think of a really secure, incomprehensible password and type it in. The system rejects it as laughably inadequate. So I try another and another and another. Same result each time. At this point, I’m getting irritated. Since it’s a Microsoft network, I decide to see what advice Microsoft can give me. I go to the company’s “Safety and Security Center” where’s there’s a helpful page on how to create strong passwords in four easy steps.

The late, great Roger Needham was one of the wisest men it’s ever been my privilege to know. He was one of the world’s great computer scientists, utterly incorruptible, unimpressed by power and status, and always said what he thought, no matter what the social context. He and his wife Karen Sparck-Jones (who had many of the same qualities) built their first house in the village of Coton with their own hands and lived in it for the best part of four decades. He was a Labour County Councillor for years, owned about two sports jackets and two ties, and made a point of always wearing a red tie whenever a Tory came in to dine at his (and my) Cambridge college. In all the time I knew him he never once sat down at a meeting. Instead he would pace up and down while talking.

He also had a lovely, pithy way of summarising awkward truths. When my OU colleague, Martin Weller, and I launched You, your computer and the Net — the Open University’s first major online course — it attracted 12,000 students in its first presentation and nearly broke the university because our regional colleagues suddenly had to recruit, interview, train and mentor enough part-time tutors to meet the university’s 20-to-one tutorial ratio. When I told Roger about this he said: “Ah, I see. What you’ve created is a success disaster”.

He had a phrase to describe projects or products that were near completion and kind-of worked: “Good enough for government work”, he would say.

I’ve just been reading a terrific paper by Frank Stajano on his proposed solution to the growing problems of password-based authentication in which he quotes another of Roger’s famous aphorisms. “Optimisation”, he said, “is the process of taking something that works and replacing it with something that almost works, but costs less.”

LATER: This post prompted a nice email from a friend who also knew (and admired) Roger. It reminded him, he wrote,

“of a talk Roger gave (by video, because he wasn’t well) at a conference I was organising for the Cambridge Society in Lancaster on the Cambridge Phenomenon. There were all kinds of big-wigs there from Lancaster, and from Cambridge. Roger’s talk was on what made the Phenomenon work. It was a brilliant performance – greatly enhanced by his dry comment (speaking as a pro-Vice-Chancellor) that one of the things that made it work was the the University was friendly to it. He added: ‘It wasn’t friendly as a matter of policy; it was far too inefficient for that’ There aren’t many pro-V-Cs of any institution who would risk making a comment like that!”

Fascinating piece in the Guardian by a Dutch anthropologist who is doing fieldwork in London’s financial district. Excerpt:

As I said, it’s a captivating world, and often all too human. This is what a lawyer said about dress codes in the City. We were sitting in a restaurant called L’Anima, a soberly decorated place near Exchange Square, one of the largest clusters of offices in the City. He scanned the tables around him and said: “Mostly lawyers here, I think. I see no trophy wives or trophy girlfriends, no extravagantly dressed women. I see men who keep their jackets on, which is what we tend to do as lawyers – many lawyers would not want to be the first to take it off and most lawyers I know leave it on anyhow. Keeping the uniform intact makes you look solid. I see inconspicuous ties, which is also a lawyer thing. This restaurant serves very good quality food but the restaurant is not flashy, I believe only this week the Sunday Times called the interior ‘boring’. Boring is good, for lawyers. We sell reliability, solidity and caution. We want our presentation to mirror that. And we often charge hefty fees, so we don’t flash our wealth because then clients are going to think: wait, am I not paying too much?”

He then proceeded to compare this to the outfit of an M&A banker. These may dress in a very flashy way and drive very expensive cars. The reason is, they are selling companies for their clients, making these clients very rich. If an M&A banker radiates wealth and success, potential new clients will not think: am I paying too much? Potential clients will think: this guy has made other people very rich, he must be very good, I am going to hire him so he can make me very rich too.

I hadn’t realised until last night that Jeff Jarvis had been at Ground Zero on the day. He lived to tell the tale in a sobering set of six audio files. It’s the most gripping account I’ve heard of what it was like to be there.

(I originally blogged this in 2006, but felt it worth re-posting today.)

Like everyone else, I can remember exactly where I was when the attacks of 9/11 started. After watching the TV coverage for a while and it became clear that it was a terrorist attack, I wrote in my diary: “Today means the end of civil liberties for my lifetime”. In an interesting New York Review of Books piece David Cole is less pessimistic. But his tally of the aftermath and implications of the attacks is worth a read. Looking back, what’s most striking about the decade is how wasteful it has been in both resources and lives. The US (and the UK) got themselves enmeshed in one necessary war (Afghanistan), which they then screwed up by getting involved in an unnecessary one (Iraq). Air travel has been transformed from a convenience to an infuriating, inefficient nightmare. State surveillance has increased a thousandfold, and ‘security theatre’ has become a way of life not just for real security authorities but also for the millions of jobsworths who wear uniforms in corporate foyers. Every time I’ve queued at an airport in the last decade, or been told by a cop that I can’t take a photograph in a public place, my first thought is that bin Laden won hands down.

And just think of the cost of all this:

How much are we spending on counterterrorism efforts? According to Admiral (Ret.) Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence under both Bush and Obama, the United States today spends about $80 billion a year, not including expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan (which of course dwarf that sum).1 Generous estimates of the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Blair reports, put them at between three thousand and five thousand men. That means we are spending between $16 million and $27 million per year on each potential terrorist. As several administration officials have told me, one consequence is that in government meetings, the people representing security interests vastly outnumber those who might speak for protecting individual liberties. As a result, civil liberties will continue to be at risk for a long time to come.

Cole’s main point is that most of the heavy lifting in dragging the US government back to towards a law-abiding position was done by civil society groups and activists.

These developments suggest three conclusions. First, the values of the rule of law are more tenacious than many cynics and “realists” thought, certainly than many in the Bush administration imagined. The most powerful nation in the world was forced to retreat substantially on each of its lawless ventures.

Second, there is no evidence that the country is less safe now that the lawless measures have been rescinded. Bush administration defenders often assert that its initial responses were driven by necessity, but the fact that we remain reasonably secure under a more law-bounded regime refutes that claim. Indeed, even some of Bush’s own security experts now recognize that our success rests on resisting overreaction. Michael Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center under Presidents Bush and Obama, maintained at the Aspen Security Forum in July that the way to defeat terrorism is “to maintain a cultural resilience,” and that if we do not overreact, “our basic principles that have held our country together…can continue to do so.”

Third, the choice to jettison legal constraints has inflicted long-lasting costs. The principal reason that we have yet to bring any of the September 11 conspirators to justice, ten years after their abominable crimes, is that we chose to “disappear” and torture them, thereby greatly compromising our ability to try them. And the decision to deny those at Guantánamo any of the most basic rights owed enemy detainees turned the prison there into a symbol of injustice and oppression, exactly the propaganda al-Qaeda needed to foster anti-Americanism and inspire new recruits and affiliates.

He finishes by quoting one of America’s greatest judges, Learned Hand, who once observed that

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can ever do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

Yep.

Oh, and btw, while we were diverted by the abovementioned security theatre, the world’s bankers were robbing us blind.

I’m not a bike geek but one of the most useful things I’ve ever bought is a Brompton folding bike. I got it about five years ago and it was fairly expensive at the time (and is even more so now). But it’s been a wonderfully liberating device. It usually lives in the boot of the car, and gives me amazing freedom from traffic jams in town. It also means that I no longer have to use the Tube when I go to London.

It had one flaw, though: the saddle that it came with was pretty mundane and uncomfortable. So this year when my kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday, for once I had an answer: I wanted a Brooks B17 leather saddle.

It’s a beautiful object which is hand-made in the English midlands.

There’s a quaint but informative company video on YouTube which explains how it’s done.

Oh — and it’s very comfortable.