… is how we describe a wet day in Ireland. Here is rain seen from the Departure Lounge of Derry Airport.
Daily Archives: August 28, 2005
Fighting the last war
CNN reporter Miles O’Brien has been sent to New Orleans to cover the looming threat of hurricane Katrina. He’s keeping a Blog. Here’s an excerpt:
This morning as we arrived at Newark with one way tickets booked only 12 hours prior to departure, we all received secondary screening from the TSA. I am going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: terrorists will pop for a round-trip booking if they try to use airplanes as cruise missiles again. Perhaps we should learn from the past war — instead of fighting it over and over again — mindlessly.
Google grows up…
… and becomes just another ruthless corporation? There was a lot of inane comment this week about a “Google backlash”, but the sad truth is more prosaic: Google is no longer a cheeky start-up but a multi-billion dollar outfit which will obey its founders’ prescription to “do no evil” just as long as it doesn’t impede corporate strategy. In that context, the New York Times has an interesting piece by Randall Stross. Here’s the gist:
Last month, Elinor Mills, a writer for CNET News, a technology news Web site, set out to explore the power of search engines to penetrate the personal realm: she gave herself 30 minutes to see how much she could unearth about Mr. Schmidt [Google’s CEO] by using his company’s own service. The resulting article, published online at CNET’s News.com under the sedate headline “Google Balances Privacy, Reach,” was anything but sensationalist. It mentioned the types of information about Mr. Schmidt that she found, providing some examples and links, and then moved on to a discussion of the larger issues. She even credited Google with sensitivity to privacy concerns.
When Ms. Mills’s article appeared, however, the company reacted in a way better suited to a 16th-century monarchy than a 21st-century democracy with an independent press. David Krane, Google’s director of public relations, called CNET.com’s editor in chief to complain about the disclosure of Mr. Schmidt’s private information, and then Mr. Krane called back to announce that the company would not speak to any reporter from CNET for a year.
CNET’s transgression is unspeakable – literally so. When I contacted Mr. Krane last week, he said he was not authorized to speak about the incident.
So… it’s ok for Google to profit insanely from technology which provides all kinds of information about ‘ordinary’ people. But not ok to use the technology to provide all kinds of information about Google’s CEO. And it’s ok to boycott a legitimate news outlet which reveals this fact. That looks awfully like old-style corporate Stalinism to me.
We will have to get used to the idea that Google will become as powerful in due course as Microsoft is today. And more dangerous. After all, Microsoft only screws around with your computer (if you’re daft enough to use their stuff). But Google could screw around with your privacy.
The kindness of strangers
Andrew Brown has written a terrific profile of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Sample:
In the early 70s, as a graduate student at Harvard with no formal training in biology, he wrote five papers that changed forever the way that evolution would be understood. He came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs. Then he analysed the reasons why, in almost all species, one sex is pickier about who it mates with than the other; then the ways in which children can be genetically programmed to demand more attention than their parents can provide. Even the way in which patterns of infanticide vary by sex and class in the Punjab is predicted by one of Trivers’s papers.
None of which persuaded Harvard to give the man a professorship, btw. Great universities can be very stupid sometimes. Think of Cambridge and FR Leavis (or William Empson, for that matter). Or Brian Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize for physics and yet hadn’t been deemed good enough for a Cambridge Chair!
Google Talk
My interpretation of the Google Talk story, from this morning’s Observer. Summary:
Since its inception, Google has stuck to three basic principles. The first was to build and maintain the most powerful computing cluster ever seen. The second was to employ smart engineers and marketers to figure out revenue-bearing services that could be provided with such a system. The world knows Google for search, but that merely happened to be the first application that came along. The third (and perhaps the most important) article of Google faith is that the internet will in the end become the world’s operating system – the hub of everything (including telephony), with the web browser the dominant user interface.
Rephotographing Atget
If you love Paris, then this site may help to explain why. On a trip to the city in 1989, Christopher Rauschenberg found himself looking at a gate at Saint-Cloud which looked oddly familiar. Then he realised that he knew it from a celebrated photograph by Eugent Atget taken in 1924. This led him to a voyage of discovery — going to the locations that Atget had photographed between 1888 and 1927 and rephotographing them. The results are astounding, simply astounding. The Paris that Atget knew is still there — and astonishingly untouched by development. See for yourself.