The sky over my house last evening.
Daily Archives: October 11, 2005
The battle for control
Forceful piece in today’s International Herald Tribune by Carl Biltd, former Prime Minister of Sweden. Sample:
Beyond the headlines, a critically important battle for control of the Internet is being played out.
On the one side is the United States, which wants to retain supervision of the Internet and has managed to get the reluctant support of most of the global Internet community, which sees America as the least bad of the possible ultimate guardians of the system.
On the other side is a collection of states keen on getting as much as control as possible in order to curtail the Internet’s power to undermine their regimes. With the theocracy of Iran as the standard-bearer, this group brings together Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Venezuela. North Korea is probably keen to join in as well.
The European Union seems to be in the middle, wavering back and forth – and in its wavering it has recently come down with a position that has brought it enthusiastic applause from Tehran, Beijing and Havana.
Bildt thinks that the European Commission doesn’t know what it’s doing here, and I agree with him. In the end, the Americans will block this, and, for once, we may have reason to be grateful for their obduracy.
Thanks to Gerard for the link.
Hedgehogs and foxes
Freeman Dyson, writing about Richard Feynman in the current issue of the New York Review of Books opens with this paragraph:
Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called hedgehogs and foxes. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein was a hedgehog; Richard Feynman was a fox.
Well, I’m not a scientist, but I’m definitely a fox.
Signs of the Google times
Email from Pete…
Just typed in ‘to be or not to be’ in the Google search box, looking for the Hamlet speech – and guess what the first entry to appear is? Hot or Not?. Imagining some poor sod, on the verge of suicide, deciding to take counsel from the great Bard, and instead confronted with one of the outposts of 21st century voyeurism and vanity…Ye gods.