The font of all knowledge…

… was the headline on a lovely essay in yesterday’s Financial Times by Tom Vanderbilt. The peg for it was the announcement last January by the US State Department that it was ditching Courier New 12 as its official font and switching to Times New Roman 14. Not a promising subject, you’d think, but Mr Vanderbilt wove a lovely thought-provoking piece around it. Here are some of the thoughts he provoked in this reader.

1. We take typefaces for granted, but actually they are an extraordinarily important part of our daily environment. They often communicate instantly — almost subliminally — the identy of the sender of a message. For example, Eric Gill’s sans-serif typeface — Gill Sans — always evokes the BBC for me. And, as Mr Vanderbilt argues, it still stands as a symbol of modernity even though it’s 75 years old!

2. Courier became a dominant font by historical accident. It was designed for the IBM electric typewriters which dominated US (and later Western) offices in the 1960s and early 1970s. More importantly, IBM (for some reason) omitted to take a proprietary stake in it — so effectively Courier was released as an open source product! Because the US government used IBM typewriters, Courier therefore became synonomous with official documents, and also documents issued by US courts and legal firms. Which brings me to tangential thought number…

3. Memories of Charles Alan Wright, a famous US academic lawyer who was a good friend and was a member of the same two Cambridge colleges as me. He died in 2000. Charlie was an exceedingly eminent member of his profession: he acted as Richard Nixon’s lawyer in the closing period of his presidency; and for other clients he appeared three times before the US Supreme Court — and won twice. He was an amazingly prolific writer, reeling off long essays on legal and other topics, letters, reviews and reports. And all in Courier 12. So I never see the font without thinking of Charlie, and remembering one lovely thing he did.

In the Autumn of 1999 he visited Cambridge and there was a dinner for him in Emmanuel. My book had just been published, and I had just received two of the first hardback copies from the publisher. I gave one to Charlie with a dedication to him and thought no more of it. Indeed, I didn’t really expect him to read it — after all, what interest would a history of the Net have for an academic lawyer? But on the way back across the Atlantic on the QE2 (he always travelled in style — Concorde out, QE2 back) he read it thoroughly — and then posted the first ‘reader’s review’ on Amazon! I’ve no doubt that he printed off the draft in Courier 12. He was a devout Republican and very conservative in many ways. But he had a fine mind and a generous heart, and I miss him still.

4. Courier also reminds me of another lawyer friend — Larry Lessig, who is one of the great figures of our time, and now Professor of Law at Stanford. When I first started reading Larry’s stuff — long before his Code book — it was all aimed at legal audiences, and written in Courier. (Larry still uses an antique typewriter font for his lecture slides.) One of my ambitions is to live long enough to see him appointed to the Supreme Court. But I guess we will have to wait for a different kind of American President for that to be possible.

Correction: when we said we were ‘winning’ the war on terror, we actually meant ‘losing’

From CNN today:

“WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. government acknowledged Thursday that a recent report declaring a decline in terrorism in 2003 was wrong.

The report, released in April and touted by top administration officials as a sign of the success of the war on terrorism, was based on faulty data, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

In fact, he told reporters, the corrected report will show “a sharp increase over the previous year.” The corrected version is not yet completed, he said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the errors were the result of an effort to make the administration look good.”

Next TiVO will record off the Net as well as off air

From today’s NYT:

TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.

The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.

“This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television,” said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, “have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them.”

Rare skills department

Lovely example of an arcane skill currently on display in our village.

Blues

Steve Weber’s book on Open Source

Steve Weber has written a really insightful book about the open source phenomenon. I’ve written my Observer column this week about the phenomenon and Steve’s book.

D-Day commemoration — a strange anomaly

I’m listening to BBC Radio coverage of the anniversary celebrations, and also watching it on BBC TV. Interesting fact: the TV coverage is lagged by about a second. This is probably because the authorities want to be able to pull the TV plug instantly if there’s a terrorist attack. Now that’s what I call planning.

Update: Message from a technologically informed reader (Dave Hill) says “Methinks you’re working overtime on this one, John. It’s more likely simply that the delay is caused by the fact that the TV is carried on a DVB (Digital Video) link and there is an inherent coding delay of about 16 frames (at 25 frames/sec). Even if the radio commentary is also on a digital link, the coding delay is much less. It’s made even worse if you’re then watching on Sky Digital (because of an extra encode/decode *and* the uplink/downlink path of 44,000 km) and on Freeview Terrestrial (because of the extra encode/decode).”

Rats! The slaughter of a beautiful conspiracy theory by an ugly fact (to paraphrase TH Huxley). Sigh.

Ronald Reagan

So Ronald Reagan is dead. One is tempted to respond — as Dorothy Parker famously did when informed of the death of Calvin Coolidge, “How can they tell?” — but that would be tasteless, given that he had Alzheimer’s, a fate I would not wish upon anybody.

Still… The wave of sentimental tosh unleashed by news of his death is a bit hard to take. Gore Vidal used to call Reagan “the Acting President of the United States”, which always seemed to me the best description of a guy who made even the indolent Dubya look like a keen intern. You think I jest? Well, here’s an excerpt from Lou Cannon’s affectionate biography:

“On the afternoon before the 1983 economic summit of the world’s industrialized democracies in Colonial Williamsburg, White House Chief of Staff James Baker stopped off at Providence Hall, where the Reagans were staying, bringing with him a thick briefing book on the upcoming meetings. Baker, then on his way to a tennis game, had carefully checked through the book to see that it contained everything Reagan needed to know without going into too much detail. He was concerned about Reagan’s performance at the summit, which had attracted hundreds of journalists from around the world and been advertised in advance by the White House as an administration triumph. But when Baker returned to Providence Hall the next morning, he found the briefing book unopened on the table where he had deposited it. He knew immediately that Reagan hadn’t even glanced at it, and he couldn’t believe it. In an hour Reagan would be presiding over the first meeting of the economic summit, the only one held int he United States during his presidency. Uncharacteristically, Baker asked Reagan why he hadn’t cracked the briefing book. ‘Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night,’ Reagan said calmly”.

And Gannon’s is an affectionate biography.

Two things are especially galling about the obituarists’ charitable amnesia. The first is the way nobody mentions the Savings and Loan scandal, the biggest corporate swindle in US history (at least up to Enron), which was directly attributable to Reagan’s tolerance of private capital, and the way his regime funded (sometimes illegally, as in the Iran/Contra business) some of the nastiest guerrilla movements ever seen. The second is the almost universal acceptance of the proposition that Reagan caused the collapse of the Soviet Union by massively increasing US military spending, thereby bankrupting the ‘Evil Empire’. I’ve never seen any convincing empirical evidence for this: the Soviet Union was falling apart because it couldn’t provide any kinds of goods — not just military hardware — and was incapable of modernising because authoritarian regimes cannot embrace information technology. And of course Reagan’s allegedly masterful strategy had the useful side-benefit of boosting the fortunes of the US aerospace and weapons manufacturers who contributed so generously to his campaigns.

Britain’s bloody football culture

Photographed in a Cambridge sports-goods store the other day. I think it’s an ad for a new line of Umbro sportswear, and that the guy is wearing an England shirt. An appropriate precursor to Euro 2004? What is wrong with this country? What makes a sportswear manufacturer apparently glorify football hooliganism?

Gasoline prices: the US perspective

From the Economist of May 29th.