Er, you just stick it in the ground. Ideal for picnicking drinkers. $7.95 from Crate & Barrel.
Daily Archives: June 2, 2006
Problems of the “hive mind”
Interesting essay by Jason Lanier challenging the “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis.
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It’s been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it’s a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that’s actually interesting information.
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…
The $130 laptop
From ZDNet.com…
Nicholas Negroponte showed off the latest prototypes of the fabled $100 PC. It’s not longer a $100 PC, however. The ruggedized, two pound Linux desktop (Fedora) system, with mesh networking will sell for about $130 to $140 (san shipping) to governments starting in April 2007. Negroponte expects to reach the $100 price point by the end of 2008. The colorful system can turn into a tablet, and Negroponte said that it “will run like a bat out of hell.” Pricing depends on how much RAM, but key is the display, he added. “It has to be sunlight readable.
That won’t be done until August/September.” Then there will be a beauty contest among three systems and go into manufacturing for shipping, he said. Current seven countries are evaluating the system. The most enthusiastic are Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand and Argentina. In addition, China, India and Egypt have shown interest, as well as Russia, Mexico and Indonesia. Negroponte said that manufacturing has to reach 5 to 6 million to get scale pricing…
It gets worse
From GMSV…
Now comes word that the Justice Department has told Google, Microsoft and other major Net companies that it wants them to keep records of every Web page their users visit for two years, a polite request now, maybe a law later. Search sites, portals and ISPs are sweating, not wanting to side with the pedophiles and terrorists but not wanting to appear to bend over so readily that their customers scream. “Child pornography is disgusting and illegal,” said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google. But he said any proposals related to users’ data “require careful review and must balance the legitimate interests of individual users, law enforcement agencies and Internet companies.”
Current regulations require companies to preserve data that is the subject of specific criminal investigations for up to 180 days while law enforcement collects evidence that could support a warrant or subpoena. “This is a radical departure from current practices,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Mercury News. “We’ve opposed it because we think it creates an unnecessary risk to privacy and security of Internet users.” And that risk is only one of the problems. Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said requiring companies to keep such data could end up costing billions of dollars, raising the price of Net access. “The Department of Justice has yet to tell us what they want us to store.”‘ McClure said. “If they decide they want us to store everything, there isn’t a storage facility in the U.S. large enough to store that.”
Dorneywood: a correction
Just realised that I was wrong to claim that Dorneywood was intended as a country residence for the Foreign Secretary. It has in fact generally been regarded as a perk for either the Chancellor or the Home Secretary — as Simon Jenkins points out this morning. Chevening is the Foreign Secretary’s country residence.
Jenkins is also good on what motivated rich people to donate these grand houses to the government.
Dorneywood is one of a set of houses round London donated in the last century as a snare for naive Labour ministers. They were supposedly for the relaxation of those without “places” of their own. Both Chequers (1917) and Dorneywood (1942) were given during the tribulations of war and with socialism looming. Lord Stanhope gave the spectacular Chevening in 1967, obscurely for use by the Prince of Wales, the prime minister or another cabinet minister. Since 1980 this has tended to mean the foreign secretary.
The gifts had a mixed reception. Lord Haldane considered Chequers “a dangerous distraction” for those “unaccustomed to the charms of a country house”. Ministers would lose touch with government business and go native. Arthur Lee, Tory donor of Chequers, regarded this as precisely the point. A fine old house was architectural psychotherapy, to subvert whatever revolutionary instincts its occupant might harbour. The trust deed stated: “It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power will be drawn … To the revolutionary statesman, the antique and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history.” Maurice Hankey put it more succinctly: “Chequers should have a marvellous effect on these Labour people.”
Cooking the book
TH Huxley described science as “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by ugly facts”. The same might be said of biography. It turns out that the famous Mrs Beeton (she of the eponymous cookbook) couldn’t cook and didn’t write it.
If Mrs Beeton had been alive today she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale, the Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday.
The image of the original domestic goddess and author of the definitive book on cookery and household management has been tainted. The real Mrs Beeton was in fact a strip of a girl who could not cook.
The historian Kathryn Hughes has written the definitive biography of a woman born in 1836 who became a template for hardworking housewives.
Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead.
How did she come to write the seminal book? “The answer is she copied everything,” Hughes said. It took Hughes five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.
But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. “Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.” Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for…