Francis Crick is dead

At the age of 88, he has succumbed to cancer of the colon after a long battle. Not many people can be said to have changed the world, but Crick and his colleague James Watson did when they discovered the double-helical structure of DNA — the molecule that determines every form of life — in 1953.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by Watson’s book, The Double Helix, and it was one of the reasons I applied to Cambridge as a student — not because I wanted to do molecular biology, but because I longed to study at a place where such things could happen. When I arrived in 1968, Crick was still working in the University (in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology), and could often be seen around town.

I ran into him twice in the period before he departed for the Salk Institute in California. The first time was at the party given for E.M. Forster by the Cambridge Humanists (of which Crick was a leading light) to celebrate the writer’s 90th birthday. The second occasion was a quiet Sunday evening in the Berni Inn steak bar which used to be on Trinity Street. My wife and I were having a meal and suddenly Francis and his French wife arrived and took the adjoining table. Given that this was England, we did not of course acknowledge their existence, but I remember being torn by conflicting emotions: pride at being in the vicinity of such a great man; and a guilty amusement that Crick and his spouse spent the entire meal engaged in low-level marital bickering — just like any other boring couple!

Update:Excellent obituary in the New York Times which challenges the myth that Crick and Watson unfairly gained access to the crystallographic data of Rosalind Franklin. One of the things I hadn’t known is that Rosalind spent her last remission from the cancer which killed her in the Cricks’ home.

Prius review

We’ve had our Toyota Prius for nearly three weeks now, and I’m working spasmodically on a review — but it has to wait until I’ve finished all the more urgent things I’m doing at the moment. In the meantime, occasional reviews are showing up on the Web — like this one by Matt McGlynn. There was also a nice review by Michael Booth in the Independent. Apropos its appearance, he says: “Pondering its ungainly profile, I was reminded of the comment by one of Ferrari’s chief designers upon first seeing the original Mini: ‘If it wasn’t so ugly, I’d shoot myself,’ he said. How many other manufacturers, I wonder, have thought the same about the Prius?”

Dan Gillmor on the Google IPO

“I don’t discount Google’s potential to live up to its valuation, and perhaps then some, because it has such rich possibilities beyond its search technology. The company is building an Internet platform that could well be a key part of the next generation of computing, in a much more fundamental way than mere search might imply.

But I have a weak stomach for speculation, and at these prices, Google’s stock leaves me queasy. You may have a higher tolerance for this kind of risk.

If you do, understand this. As the company itself says in its filings, you should be in this for the long term. You should be prepared to lose much of what you’ve invested if things go badly. In other words, don’t put your kid’s college fund into this IPO.

And you should absolutely heed the company’s warning, which it made again Monday: ‘If your objective is to make a short-term profit by selling the shares you purchase in the offering shortly after trading begins, you should not submit a bid in the auction’.” [From his column.]

Help at hand for lazy iPod users

From Silicon.com:

“US-based LoadPod is offering music fans with more CDs than time a way to get all their favourite tunes onto their iPod without having hours of ripping ahead of them. LoadPod will come to the door, pick up the CDS, rip all the tunes to an iPod and return them within five days.

The service costs $1.50 (it’s only available in some states of the US and Canada at the moment) per CD and a $20 pick up fee, which is waived for those who want more than 100 CDs ripped. The CDs have to shop-bought rather than home-made, so the company can avoid any tricky legal wrangling over piracy.”

Google slowed by worm?

This afternoon, the new variant of the MyDoom worm arrived in my inbox, complete with the usual infected zip file. It transpired that a lot of XP users must have clicked on it because Google and other major search engines were bombarded by infected machines. The interesting development is that, in addition to ransacking victim’s address books and hard drives for other potential victims, it also causes infected machines to bombard search engines with queries seeking email addresses. “Those search requests have been overloading the search engines,” said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology for Keynote Systems Inc., which measures Web site performance. The worm, Taylor said, was believed to be slowing performance on Google, AltaVista, and Yahoo. Looks as though the automatic unzipping facility in XP has a serious downside. Here’s the BBC Online report.

Another satisfied Windows user

Thanks to Acta Informatique

America the scared

Lovely piece by Jonathan Raban in the Guardian about the current mood in the US. Last para reads:

“This is an extraordinary moment in American history. Half the country – including all the people I know best – believes it is trembling on the very lip of outright tyranny, while the other half believes that only the Bush administration stands between it and national collapse into atheism, socialism, black helicopters, and gay marriage. November 2 looms as a date of dreadful consequence. A bumper sticker, popular among the sort of people I hang out with, reads: Bush-Cheney ’04 – The Last Vote You’ll Ever Have To Cast. That’s funny, but it belongs to the genre of humour in which the laugh is likely to die in your throat – and none of the people who sport the sticker on their cars are smiling. They are too busy airing conspiracy theories, which may or may not turn out to be theories.”

Advice to Bill Gates, newbie Blogger

There’s a story that Billg is thinking about publishing a Blog. Jay Rosen has some good advice for him:

June 28, 2004

Dear Mr. Gates:

Welcome to weblog writing. Since you are the person who least needs my advice, I am perhaps the best person to give you advice on the matter of what your weblog should be about, and how to do it reasonably well.

Instead of, “I need a blog myself,” start at: I need a self to blog with. You are less likely to go awry that way. Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says: know my blog, know me. This condenses into five words his experience of meeting people who said: man, you’re exactly like your weblog. Jarvis thinks there is something common to successful weblogs in that experience, and I agree.

Dave Winer, who’s been doing this a while, calls it, “the voice of a person.” (A group weblog: the sound of six people.) Joi Ito says: my blog is like my house. People hang out there because they like the atmosphere. Of course, the author has to be comfortable in the house first.

It’s the person that comes through. That’s what these authors are saying. Self filtered through world.

This is good advice. I know lots of people who have started Blogs and then run into trouble because they cannot find an authentic ‘voice’. That’s probably why many Blogs by teenagers don’t work — because they’re still forming as people, they don’t know who they are, and that uncertainty makes them unable to communicate. Thinks… Gates is unlikely to have that difficulty though.

Why is Internet Explorer so retarded?

I don’t use Internet Explorer if I can help it, but when I do my first thought is how kludgy and old-fashioned it now seems compared to Mozilla, Safari, Firefox and Opera. This leads to a second thought: why did Microsoft apparently stop developing IE? After all, it’s a flagship product and Billg is always ranting on about how Microsoft innovates.

Now comes an interesting piece in the Guardian by Ben Hammersley which addresses that very question. His answer, in a nutshell, is that Microsoft stopped developing IE because the company could see it metamorphosing into a threat to Windows and Office. After all, if browsers and web applications become so sophisticated that one can do serious work inside your browser, why worry about operating systems and Office suites?

Hammersley also points out that Google’s upcoming email service may offer the first sign that this is happening. Some recent testers report that Gmail is much, much slicker and faster than any previous webmail service — and in some cases preferable even to using a specialised email client program. Supposing this is the thin end of a wedge — that Google has other web applications (word-processing with unlimited storage?) in mind for its huge Linux cluster? What then?

We’re moving towards a world in which people want applications that do what they want, and are agnostic about how precisely those applications are delivered. I often make that point in lectures by asking the audience to indicate if they use Microsoft software. Most hands go up. How many people use Macs? A few hands. How many use Linux? Usually no hands go up. Final question: how many use Google? All hands go up. “Congratulations”, I say, “you’re all Linux users then”. It’s a dirty trick to play on businessmen, I know, but it doesn’t half make the point. And in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I got the idea from Tim O’Reilly, Whom God Preserve.

How geeks spread sweetness and light

Take a look at this:

It’s a bike adapted by Josh Kinberg for his master’s thesis in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York City. The bike receives text messages and prints them in foot-high chalk letters, then blogs a digital photo and GPS map of the printing, all while the rider cruises along.

A self-described “hacktivist,” Kinberg’s other school projects have included Magicbike (a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot he and a professor take to outdoor cultural events) and the Hello World Project, which let people laser-project their own messages onto landscapes and landmarks all over the world.

Josh will officially, er, roll out the bike during August’s Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project is as much performance art as protest. The project homepage can be found here.

Now I know what you’re thinking: this may be very clever but what use is it? Wrong question IMHO. What’s lovely about these projects is that they are enjoyable to do, require considerable ingenuity, and give innocent pleasure to millions. [Thanks to Dave Hill and Popular Science.]