If you’re running Firefox on a Mac, then try the PicLens plug-in. It’s stunning.
Daily Archives: June 19, 2008
Aphorisms
Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique. You can easily see why it’s compelling, but you can just as easily see its essential creepiness. (At least it’s up-front about its creepiness, using the term “follower” in place of the popular euphemism “friend.”)
Discuss.
[Source.]
Warming to his theme, the Source continues:
What are you doing? is the question Twitter asks you to answer. But in the world of Twitter, there can be only one honest answer: I am twittering. Any other answer is a fib, a fabrication – a production.
As with other media of the self, Twitter makes the act subservient to its expression. It turns us into observers of our own lives, and not in the traditional sense of self-consciousness (watching with the inner eye) but in the mass media sense (watching with the eye of the producer). As the Observer Effect tells us, the act of observing the act changes the act. So how does Twitter warp the lives of twitterers? If truth lies in the unlinkable, does life lie in the untweetable?
What to do with Twitter is down (which is often)
Go to twitabit and post your tweets there. Their server will stack them in a queue and make sure they get delivered.
Just thought you’d like to know.
Thanks to Dave Winer (who has a small stake in Twitabit).
Jonathan Routh RIP
Britain’s only world-class practical joker has died, aged (improbably) 80. The Economist ran a fine obit.
He also attempted to take a grand piano on the London Underground, and persuaded a crowd of tourists that Nelson’s Column needed holding up. He set up pyramids of plates to crash when people passed them, and rigged a mirror in a hat shop so that, when each matron posed simperingly before it, the glass cracked from side to side. His notion of a day’s work was to ask a passer-by for tuppence for a cup of tea and, having got the money, produce Thermos, milk and sugar for the astonished benefactor and inquire whether they wanted one lump, or two.
Mr Routh played pranks all his life. Uppingham ejected him for hanging a banner reading “Vote Routh, Communist” in the school chapel, and Cambridge parted company with him after he gathered hundreds of signatures to stop an imaginary motorway across Bletchley Park. In 1957 he put an ad in the Times: “Practical joker with wide experience of British public’s sad gullibility organises, leads and guarantees success of large-scale hoaxes.” He hoped never to do anything else…
Lisbon Treaty is dead. Get over it.
Terrific editorial in this week’s Economist.
Europe’s political leaders react to these unwelcome expressions of popular will in three depressingly familiar stages. First they declare portentously that the European club is in deep “crisis” and unable to function. Next, even though treaties have to be ratified by all members to take effect, they put the onus of finding a solution on the country that has said no. Last, they start to hint that the voters in question should think again, and threaten that a second rejection may force the recalcitrant country to leave the EU. The sole exception to this three-stage process was the Franco-Dutch no in 2005. Then, after two years of debate the politicians hit on the cynical wheeze of writing the constitution’s main elements into the incomprehensible Lisbon treaty, with the deliberate aim of avoiding the need to consult Europe’s voters directly again.
Now the Irish, the only people in the EU to be offered a referendum on Lisbon, have shot down even this wheeze. And as EU leaders gathered for a Brussels summit, after The Economist went to press, most had duly embarked on their usual three-stage reaction, all the while promising to “respect” the outcome of the Irish referendum—by which they mean to look for a way round it (see article). Some have had the gall to argue, with a straight face, that Lisbon must be brought into effect despite the Irish no because it will make the EU more democratic. This is Brussels’s equivalent of a doctor saying that the operation was a success, but the patient died. In truth, it is the Lisbon treaty that should be allowed to die…
The Myth of Multitasking
Interesting piece by Christine Rosen…
More recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”
Election phobia, EU style
I don’t much care for Simon Jenkins, the Guardian (and Sunday Times) columnist, but this time he’s spot on.
Have you noticed how the political establishment hates elections? It regards them as vulgar, foreign, exhibitionist and unpredictable. To those in power they are mere concessions to mob rule. If electors did not insist on them, elections would have been abolished long ago as Victorian gimmicks to appease proletarian sentiment.
There is no other explanation for Westminster’s reaction to Ireland’s weekend vote on the Lisbon treaty and to David Davis’s resignation over 42-day-detention. Nor is there any other explanation for the welcome that will be given to Hazel Blears’s forthcoming local government white paper. This will, it is rumoured, reduce the 95% of elections still held in Britain (local ones) to largely consultative status, to clear the ground for Gordon Brown’s Putin-style appointed regional government.
In the case of Ireland, the rule is clear. Any change in the constitution of Europe requires unanimity among the nations of Europe. Irrespective of what moved the Irish electorate, the treaty has failed and must be redrafted. Yet Britain, France, Germany and the rest are proceeding with ratification as if the vote had gone the other way. They are saying that Europe’s constitutional framework – good or bad – can be disregarded when inconvenient, for instance when democracy has rejected what they want…
Intelligent generosity
Nice to see that Ros and Steve Edwards have given £30 million to New Hall, one of Cambridge’s most distinctive (but poorest) colleges. It was founded in 1954 by Dame Rosemary Murray with one shilling and no name. The intention that it would eventually be given a name when someone endowed it properly. Which is what has now happened. As a result, New Hall will become Murray Edwards College.
This is the biggest single benefaction that I can remember (of course there’s the £200 million Bill Gates donated to set up the Gates Scholars Trust — Cambridge’s answer to the Rhodes Scholars scheme in Oxford — but that doesn’t really count because it’s such small change to Billg) since the Radio Rentals tycoon David Robinson endowed Robinson College in the 1970s.
Ros is a former New Hall student.
Hmmm… Just remembered that New College, Oxford — which was founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham — still hasn’t found a proper name. They really ought to get a move on.
Great Firewall of China, Olympic version
From Technology Review…
At the Beijing Olympics, foreign journalists may encounter systems designed to give the false appearance that Chinese Internet controls are minimal, according to Ronald Deibert, an associate professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. Today, Deibert, whose research group makes the censorship-circumvention tool Psiphon, will address the Beijing Olympics and other issues related to Chinese censorship in testimony to the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission in Washington, DC, as part of a hearing on access to information and media control in China…
Sweden caves in to Osama
Osama bin Laden’s campaign to eliminate civil liberties in the West has notched up another victory — this time in Sweden, formerly a paragon of sweetness and light in these matters.
Sweden this evening voted in favour of its controversial snoop law, after the proposal was amended earlier today.
Under the new law, all communication across Swedish borders will be tapped, and information can also be traded with international security agencies, such as America’s National Security Agency.
A total of 143 members of parliament voted to pass the bill into law, with 138 delegates opposed.
Earlier today, prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt failed to win the backing of his four-party coalition: the draft was sent back to the committee for revision. Key members of parliament who were likely to vote against the proposition were put under pressure by their parties, according to some reports.
Despite receiving copies of George Orwell’s book 1984 from protesters earlier this week, MPs from Sweden’s ruling party believe the law does not constitute the final nail in the coffin of democracy.