Broken Windows can be soooo embarrassing

Spot the deliberate mistake in this attractive puff for gee-whiz computer technology (i.e. leading-edge uselessness).

Yep — you guessed it. It’s another one of those Microsoft inactive “active desktops”! (For other sightings, see here and here.) You have to look carefully to see it, but my eagle-eyed colleague Andy Fisher spotted it. (Well, he does have a gorgeous big monitor…)

New 40-Gigabite iHOP holds up to 10,000 Pancakes

Er, from The Onion.

Thanks to Dave Hill, from whom no joke is hidden.

Mozart’s letters

Faber have just published a new edition, translated and edited by Robert Spaethling. Nick Lezard’s lovely review has persuaded me to buy it. Here’s an excerpt:

“Robert Spaethling’s approach has been, above all, to preserve the tone of the originals. I cannot quite believe this hasn’t been done before. Then again, I can. Here he is, 16 years old, in Bozen (now Bolzano), writing to his sister: ‘We are now already in Botzen [sic]. already? only! I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m sleepy, I’m lazy, but I am well. At Hall we visited the convent; I played the organ there. Botzen is a shit hole. Here is a poem by someone who was totally fed up with Botzen, and angry: Before I come back to this Botzen place, / I’d rather smack myself in the face.’ Spaethling kindly explains that he has translated the word ‘fozen’ as ‘face’, but that it also means ‘female genitals’. Spaethling says ‘face’ is ‘definitely the meaning here’, but I’m not so sure. The important thing, though, is that we are told about the alternative.”

Poppies

Why are they such evocative flowers? I photographed these earlier this evening on a roadside verge near where I live.

Technological determinism and the future of the BBC

One of the most disturbing and misleading myths current at the moment is the notion that technology must ultimately determine everything. So the commercial and anti-BBC lobby argues that the advent of multi-channel TV automatically makes an organisation like the BBC — funded by a general tax on every viewer — unjustifiable in political terms. What this view overlooks is that decisions about media are (and should be) ultimately made by politicians, not by technology. There’s interesting corroboration for this view in Paul’s Starr’s magisterial study of the history of US media, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, (Basic Books). He shows that at every stage in their evolution, US media were shaped by political choice, not by technological determinism. Or, to quote James Fallows’s excellent review,

“The decisions [Starr] describes are striking to the modern reader not so much because they turned out a certain way, but because they were made at all. They suggest a belief that societies and their governments can affect the path that technologies and markets take, rather than an acceptance of whatever the path turned out to be as inevitable. This concept seems utterly missing from current discussions of the media. Regulators and the public feel there is little they can do to steer the content or quality of the media (with the feeble exception of the F.C.C.’s punishing broadcasters for vulgarities that would barely be noticed on cable). Members of the media feel they have no choice but to give, immediately, what the market demands.”

So what’s the 8-digit code for launching a nuclear missile then?

Er, same as it always was during the Cold War — 00000000. How do we know? Interesting testimony from a former Strategic Air Command chap. Quote:

“Last month I asked Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, what he believed back in the 1960s was the status of technical locks on the Minuteman intercontinental missiles. These long-range nuclear-tipped missiles first came on line during the Cuban missile crisis and grew to a force of 1,000 during the McNamara years — the backbone of the U.S. strategic deterrent through the late 1960s. McNamara replied, in his trade-mark, assertively confident manner that he personally saw to it that these special locks (known to wonks as ‘Permissive Action Links’) were installed on the Minuteman force, and that he regarded them as essential to strict central control and preventing unauthorized launch.

When the history of the nuclear cold war is finally comprehensively written, this McNamara vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle. What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: ‘I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?’ What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the ‘locks’ to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the ‘secret unlock code’ during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.”

And to think that all through the period I slept easily in my bed, knowing that these missiles could only be launched with the most stringent safety procedures. Remember all those documentaries showing Minuteman crews shadowing one another and being tested for psychotic illnesses etc.? But then I was born naive, as my mother always said.