Monthly Archives: May 2008

Clinton ‘explains’ her assassination reference

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Hillary Clinton said something foolish the other day, and has spent the time since trying to extricate herself.

BRANDON, South Dakota (CNN) — Sen. Hillary Clinton said Friday that she regretted comments that evoked the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as part of her explanation for why she was staying in the presidential race late into the primary season.

Earlier Friday afternoon, she told the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus Leader that “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said.

As devoted readers will know, the dangers to Obama in a gun-crazy culture have been on my mind too. But I’m not running for the nomination. What’s unacceptable is that Clinton appeared to be using the possibility of Obama’s assassination as a reason for staying in the Democratic race ‘just in case…’.

Dave Winer posted an MP3 of Keith Olbermann’s rant on the subject. It would have been just as effective at a quarter of the length. Olbermann hasn’t heard that brevity is the soul of wit.

The geek shall inherit the earth

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Nice column by David Brooks on the irresistible rise of the nerd/geek in American culture.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

Social networking site bans oldies

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At dinner in college last night I sat opposite a charming young woman who seemed surprised to learn that I had a FaceBook account. “Oooh”, she said, “Can I be your friend?”. “Certainly”, I replied, with what I imagined to be old-world courtesy, “I’d be honoured”. At which point one of her (slightly inebriated) friends further down the table shouted “Are you stalking her, then?”

Harrumph. But Lo! — here’s a weird report from The Register:

A social networking site has deleted most of its users over the age of 36 because it claims older users pose a danger of sex offending. It claims to be forced into the action by the Government, but the part of a law it cites is not yet in force.

Faceparty has deleted what it describes as “a huge number of accounts” from its social networking site in recent weeks. It lists ‘over 36 years old’ as one of its reasons for deletion.

“We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which,” it says in its explanation of the deletion of accounts.

“New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list,” says its notice. “This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme.”

I’d never heard of Faceparty, and the Register thinks that the company has misinterpreted the legislation, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?

And the real irony is that I’ve probably been on FaceBook much longer than anyone else at the table last night!

The Bridge

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Today is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Nice piece about it in the New York Times…

The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24, 1883, was a joyous occasion with “two great cities united.” That 125th anniversary is being marked with a series of celebrations over the holiday weekend. But few remember that the bridge’s public debut was marred days later by a stampede in which a dozen people were crushed to death, and 35 others injured. The May 30 mayhem was exacerbated by a false rumor that the bridge was going to collapse.

The traffic that surged onto the Brooklyn bridge as soon as it opened was overwhelming and dominated by pedestrians who were charged one cent to pass. There was room for 15,000 people on the footpaths at any one time (though overcrowding sometimes drove it to as high as 20,000).

On the second day, there was “a crush of foot passengers from 11 o’clock in the morning to 7 o’clock at night.” The pedestrians “collected at the entrance, compressed themselves into a funnel about 15 feet in width and then ran the gantlet, one by one, of the tolltakers.”

One of the best works of engineering history I’ve read is David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, a wonderful account of how the bridge was built.

Flat Earth News: the seminar

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Photograph by Michael Dales.

We had a terrific seminar last Monday in Wolfson. Nick Davies (left in the photograph) came to talk about his book, Flat Earth News, a scorching critique of the UK newspaper industry, and John Kelly (right) of the Washington Post was the discussant. The event was chaired by Phil Parvin (centre). MP3 of Phil’s introduction is here. For Nick Davies’s presentation, click here. And John Kelly’s comments are here.

John later posted a thoughtful account of the discussion on his blog. He also counted all the roundabouts between Cambridge and Oxford. Guess how many? Er, 71.

Things that are younger than John McCain

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Tut, tut! A web site devoted to listing things that are younger than John McCain.

Sample: Jack Nicholson, Zip Codes, duct tape, 90% of the US population, the ‘Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous’, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, penicillin, etc…

Shameful, eh? Disgraceful. Why, if I could find my stick I’d give them young fellers behind the site a good hiding. Meantime, has anyone seen my medication? Harrumph.

Down on the server farm

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Interesting piece in this week’s Economist about the environmental impact of cloud computing.

Internet firms, meanwhile, need ever larger amounts of computing power. Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

The availability of cheap power is mainly why there are so many data centres in Quincy. It is close to the Columbia River, with dams that produce plenty of cheap hydroelectric power. There is water for cooling, fast fibre-optic links, and the remoteness provides security. For similar reasons, Google chose to build a new data centre at The Dalles, a hamlet across the Columbia River in the state of Oregon.

Such sites are in short supply in America, however. And with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape…

Digital literacy

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Tony Hirst and I were talking over lunch yesterday about the differences between geek communities and ‘normal’ social groups. I give a lot of talks to non-technical audiences, and I’ve developed a standard routine for assessing how conversant they are with ICT. How many people read blogs? Anyone here who maintains a blog? Who uses BitTorrent? Anyone here who has not illicitly downloaded a music file at some point in their lives? Who uses Skype? And so on.

Tony has a simpler approach. He simply asks how many people do right-clicking? That is, how many people know that clicking the right-hand button generally opens a whole raft of useful options?

It’s a good question and it set me thinking about Umberto Eco’s wonderful essay arguing that the Mac was a Catholic machine while the PC was a Protestant one. Here’s the relevant passage:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

What has all this to do with right-clicking? Well, you may remember that the Mac originally came only with a single-button mouse. There was a lot of argument within the geek community about this — surely a two-button mouse would be more useful? But Steve Jobs was adamant — the whole GUI philosophy of the Macintosh would be undermined by having two buttons. One button was the route to salvation. As a child of a devoutly Catholic household, I was all too familiar with that kind of argument. Just check your brain in at the church door, do as we say and Salvation shall be yours. Yea, verily.

Eco was right. And of course Jobs was wrong about the single button. Just as the Holy Roman Church has been wrong about most things over the centuries.

The Moscow shootout

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There was something deeply comical about two ‘English’ football clubs, both owned and managed by foreigners and fielding only a handful of indigenous players, scrabbling in the torrential Moscovite rain until Manchester United eventually won on penalties. Interesting also that the two clubs labour under a combined debt of £1.5 billion. The most impressive thing, though, was to see the magnificent indifference of the Chelsea manager to the soaking of his expensive suit. Fergie, in contrast, wore a white waterproof jacket over his shiny mohair job. Waste not, want not. (Ancient Scottish saying.)