… There’s a sobering essay in Foreign Affairs which argues that the most rational strategy that the infant Kim could follow is the one that NATO used in Europe against the threat of overwhelming Soviet forces on the ground.

It’s impossible to know how exactly Kim might employ his nuclear arsenal to stop the CFC from marching to Pyongyang. But the effectiveness of his strategy would not depend on what North Korea initially destroyed, such as a South Korean port or a U.S. airbase in Japan. The key to coercion is the hostage that is still alive: half a dozen South Korean or Japanese cities, which Kim could threaten to attack unless the CFC accepted a cease-fire.

This strategy, planning to use nuclear escalation to stalemate a militarily superior foe, is not far-fetched. In fact, it was NATO’s strategy for most of the Cold War. Back then, when the alliance felt outgunned by the massive conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact, NATO planned to use nuclear weapons coercively to thwart a major conventional attack. Today, both Pakistan and Russia rely on that same strategy to deal with the overwhelming conventional threats that they face. Experts too easily dismiss the notion that North Korea’s rulers might deliberately escalate a conventional conflict, but if their choice is between escalation and a noose, it is unclear why they would be less ruthless than those who once devised plans to defend NATO.

Brought to you by the New Yorker.

I particularly like this one:

OptiCal

This robust app seamlessly re-integrates your aggregation optimizers, and then pushes all the data to the cloud to provide a more accurate feed-based social metric, and a more robust, texturized social graph. “We have no idea what it does,” said an anonymous venture capitalist who’s contributed millions to the app’s development, “but we have to stay ahead of the curve.”

I want it

We went to see Nick Hytner’s National Theatre production of Alan Bennett’s latest play, People. Verdict: enjoyable and amusing, but not as memorable as his best work (for example A Question of Attribution). In it, Bennett works out one of his ongoing obsessions: what’s happened to British society, and Margaret Thatcher’s role in same. His vehicle is a comedy set in a decaying stately home whose decrepit aristocratic owner (played with great panache by Frances de la Tour) is trying to decide whether or not to hand it over to the National Trust. The comic relief is provided by (a) a nauseating fine art auctioneer of the Sothebys/Christies/Bonham/Phillips variety and (b) a group of film-makers who are using the premises as the set for a porn movie, complete with jokes about erections and a Latvian actress who whiles away the time between fornications knitting something warm for her aged grandmother back home. Her pleasant vacuity immediately brought to mind the sexy Swedish secretary hired by Zero Mostel in the original production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers.

The Trust, needless to say, doesn’t come out of it well: it’s mercilessly lampooned as an outfit that saves British ‘heritage’ by sanitising and trivialising it for the delectation of middle-class folks whose capacity for aesthetic (or indeed any other kind of) judgement has been anesthetized by modern consumerism. But it has at least the consolation of being represented by a terrific over-the-top performance by Nicholas le Prevost as its representative on earth. And maybe the moral of the story is that, just as we get the politicians or newspapers that we deserve, we also get the ‘heritage’ we deserve.

I’m an early adopter of gadgets, which means two things: on the one hand I’m poorer than I should be because I fritter cash on experimental gadgets; on the other hand, I have a hard-earned scepticism of the utility of gadgets. And what I’ve found is that few devices have the long-term utility of, say, the Swiss Army knife.

But here’s a gadget that has really justified its existence: a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. It just swallows paper and converts it into instantly into pdf files. This one (the S510M) is currently swallowing the vast archive of transcripts, notes and other documents which went into the writing of my history of the Internet. In the process the contents of about ten archive boxes of paper are being compressed into a folder on a hard disk (and, needless to say, into several copies of same folder on remote drives).

I got it originally because a colleague lost one of his Moleskine notebooks and realised that it was the one thing he possessed of which he didn’t have a back-up copy. One way of backing up a paper notebook is to feed it to a scanner. But which scanner? It was at that point that we discovered the ScanSnap. It wasn’t cheap, but it has more than justified its price. The one in the photograph has been running since 2009 and it’s one of the best devices I ever bought. The current model is the S1500M.