High-tech masks
The kids have been playing with K’Nex (“the world’s most creative toy”). Interestingly, they don’t always use it to make ‘machines’. Instead they do things like this.
What’s interesting about K’Nex is that it escapes from the ‘mechanical’ rigidity of products like Lego (and ye olde Meccano) and introduces flexibility and connectivity more like what one finds in nature. Clever stuff.
Coup de Jour
Apparently ‘Sir’ Mark Thatcher, the dimwitted son of baroness Thatcher (aka Mrs Hacksaw) has been arrested in South Africa on suspicion of financing an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea, wherever that is. Much though I would like to believe that the old sleazeball is guilty of this batty crime, somehow it seems implausible. But the reverberations of his arrest have reached the ancient university city of Cambridge. I’m told that in the lovely-but-tiny Indigo cafe in St Edward’s Passage yesterday, the tin for staff gratuities was labelled “All tips go to fund coup in Equatorial Guinea”.
Two years on
It’s two years today since my beloved Sue died.
I was going to add “– and my life changed forever”, but in fact my life changed the moment I finally conceded that I would lose her. That moment came on August 22nd, when her consultant said to me “It’s time to prepare for the end”. Until that moment, although I had read the literature and knew the odds, I never really gave up. But then I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach, and found myself unable to speak.
Sue was a great planner, and she and I had discussed what she wanted at the end. She had said she wanted to die in a hospice. I was unhappy with that, but one doesn’t argue with somone who is dying and I made the necessary arrangements. She was due to go into the hospice on the morning of the 25th. It was clear that we would need to take her in an ambulance, so before calling one I asked her at 6am if she really wanted to go. She indicated that she didn’t, so we cancelled everything and looked after her at home, which was what I had wanted all along. And it was a wonderful thing to be able to do. But it wouldn’t have been possible if my lovely sister Steph — who’s a nurse — hadn’t dropped her job and flown over to be with us. It was the kind of generosity one never forgets, and cannot ever repay.
So how are we now, two years on? The children seem to be fine — happy and getting on with their lives. They have good friends, use IM and iTunes a lot, play games, are good at school, love their lives. They talk about their Mum a lot, but their memories never seem to choke them the way mine choke me. I’ve begun to understand why children are so resilient — they live in the present and future, and dwell only intermittently in the past; whereas we adults spend a lot of time there.
And me? I’m struck by two things C.S. Lewis said in his lovely book on bereavement. The first is that you never stop being married to a spouse who has died. The second is that one ‘gets over’ a loss like this the way an amputee ‘gets over’ the loss of a leg. But, as Lewis observed, “he will never be a biped again”.
I’m also overwhelmed sometimes by small kindnesses: my older son deciding to come home last night to be with me; an email this morning from someone I know only through email saying that she was thinking of us today; and a friend who currently has an unbearable burden of her own turning up at Sue’s grave this morning to leave a small bunch of Fuschia — Sue’s favourite flowers.
In the end, only three things matter in life — love, children and friendship. I often think of EM Forster’s lovely observation that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the courage to choose the former. Me too.
The NotsoBig Mac
See below for the story behind this picture.
Five years ago, the Churchill, a pub on the Madingley Road favoured by the Naughtons — not to mention graduate students from the Institute of Astronomy across the road — suddenly metamorphosed into a Mcdonalds. For the first couple of years, it did a roaring trade — often causing traffic jams as people queued to get into the car park. But in the last 18 months or so, the joint’s trade died away — to the point where one would often see only one or two cars parked outside it in the evening. It’s not clear why this happened. Was it a response to 9/11 (unlikely, given the clientele)? Were people reading Fast Food Nation and deciding to eat more healthily (equally unlikely)? Whatever the explanation, in the end capitalist logic took over and the site was sold for housing development. Will its new inhabitants be more or less obnoxious? We shall see.
Cloud nine
We’ve been having crazy weather — torrential showers followed by patches of sunshine. And amazing cloudscapes.
Face painting
Observed at the Summer Picnic at my son’s school.
Schadenfreude over Google
Lots of people are licking their wounds over missing out on Google. Nice piece in today’s NYT based on talking to some of the Sand Hill Road venture capitalists who were offered a slice but failed to see the opportunity. The piece quotes one such loser as saying:
“The thing we couldn’t come to grips with was, ‘Gee, can we work with these two guys?’ It was clear our vision of how things had to be done were totally incompatible with their vision.”
“We were wrong,” he said. “It would’ve been a great investment. But nevertheless, if you think you’re going to be instantly in conflict with the principals, you don’t want to make the investment.”
One meeting, he said, left him feeling that the two Google founders, then in their mid-20’s, were headstrong and naïvely egalitarian in ways that seemed incompatible with their ambitions.”
I love that bit about Larry and Sergey being “headstrong and naively egalitarian”. It didn’t put off John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, the two venture capitalists who did bet on Google. When it was reported that the pair had put $25 million into the company I remember thinking “This will fly”, because Doerr has always had terrific judgement. His $11 million stake is now worth $3 billion. Not bad, eh?
Writing in the Boston Globe, Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center concludes that the company’s Dutch auction was a success. “Google gave the public a chance to buy shares directly, on an equal footing with banks and big traders,” he writes. “The response from the financial establishment was understandably sour. The result was that, during Google’s so-called ‘quiet period’ preceding the IPO, the information vacuum was filled by the establishment, which gravely identified the company’s ‘missteps’ and ‘blunders.’ … The auction worked as a pricing mechanism precisely because the valuable expertise of the investment banks and institutions was naturally folded into the bidding process, lowering the cheekily high price Google was initially seeking and leaving sentimental investors for once with the chance to sell brand new shares side-by-side with the big players when the opening bell rang.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself. In fact I did in my column last Sunday!
What the Appeal Judge wrote
The Judgment in the MGV vs Grokster case makes fascinating reading. Here’s Para 10:
“While Grokster and StreamCast in particular may seek to be the ‘next Napster,’ …, the peer-to-peer file-sharing technology at issue is not simply a tool engineered to get around the holdings of Napster I and Napster II. The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution. Especially in light of the fact that liability for contributory copyright infringement does not require proof of any direct financial gain from the infringement, we decline to expand contributory copyright liability in the manner that the Copyright Owners request.”
P2P file-sharing services are legal, says US appeals court
Wired story:
Peer-to-peer file-sharing services Morpheus and Grokster are legal, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The decision is a blow for record labels and movie studios which sued the peer-to-peer operators claiming that the services should be held liable for the copyright infringement of their users.
The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have long argued that rampant trading of copyright songs and movies on these file-swapping networks has crippled their businesses.
The decision upholds an April 2003 U.S. District Court decision that these services should not be held liable for the illegal behavior of their users. The studios and labels appealed the decision and the appeals court heard oral arguments on the case in February.
The district court correctly applied the law, wrote Judge Sidney Thomas, a member of the three-judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player,” Thomas wrote. “Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.”