Googled!

I wrote once that Google was one of the wonders of the world, but even I am regularly amazed by it. Recently Quentin discovered that if you type arithmetic expressions into the search box, then Google provides the answer. It will, apparently, tell you everything from 5+5 to the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight. But now comes something even wackier. Someone’s written a hack which uses Google’s image search to ransack the web for random photographs. Think of the Web as a giant collection of shoeboxes and you’ve got it. Amazing what people take pictures of.

Mein Camp

Simon Waldman is Director of Digital Publishing at the Guardian. He also publishes a really nice Blog. Some time ago, someone gave him a 1938 copy of Homes and gardens magazine which had a gooey, gushing piece about Hitler’s country retreat in the Bavarian Alps. It was the usual tosh. The predominant color scheme of Hitler’s “bright, airy chalet” was “a light jade green.” Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, “a droll raconteur,” decorated his entrance hall with “cactus plants in majolica pots.” (Gosh — nothing changes.) Simon scanned the piece and put it on his site. Then he received a message from the current publishers of H&G demanding that he take it down. So he did, and wrote a nice reply to the Editor. But of course by then the thing was all over the Net. The case raises interesting issues about copyright and fair use, as the NYT pointed out this weekend.

It all depends what you mean by…

On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was interviewed by presenter James Naughtie. Straw was being his usual evasive self. After one particularly slippery passage Naughtie burst out “Oh come on, that’s Jesuitical”. I fell to wondering how many listeners would know what that meant. Naughtie clearly thought of it as synonomous with ‘cleverly evasive’, but strictly speaking it simply means ‘of or pertaining to the jesuits’, the religious order founded by St Ignatius of Loyola in 1534. As someone who was educated by the Jesuits, I assumed for years that the term ‘Jesuitical’ was a compliment, but somewhere along the line the Order’s reputation for tortuous justification of indefensible propositions gained the upper hand, and the term acquired its modern connotation: ‘characteristic of their principles and methods. designing; cunning; deceitful; crafty’. In this case, therefore, I suppose Naughtie was correct.

Come to think of it, the severely bespectacled Straw would make a rather good Jesuit. I can see him in a soutane now.

Why micropayments won’t work

If you could sell a joke a day for a cent a day to enough people on the Internet then you’d be a billionaire. So ran the reasoning in the early days of the Net. The only problem was that there was no way of collecting the cent — the ‘micropayment’. But that would surely come, one day. I have to confess that I believed that too, in my time.

But now comes a terrific essay by Clay Shirky, one of the most thoughtful commentators on the Net, arguing that the cent-a-day scenario is untenable, and explaining why. He’s right and I was wrong.

At last! Clarification on Iraq from Dubya

Ah, so that’s it. The reason the US and the Brits invaded Iraq was to lure in all those crazy Islamic terrorists and have a turkey shoot. Only problem is that it’s not clear yet who are the turkeys.

The nub of the Kelly story

Politics, so the cliche goes, is a rough business, and so it is. But rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse of how political and ideological expediency rides roughshod over human beings as is emerging from the Hutton inquiry. Yesterday, Dr. David Kelly’s widow and daughter gave evidence on how he was left twisting in the wind by the Ministry of Defence and the Prime Minister’s office. Nobody comes out of this looking good — including the media, though some organs (especially Murdoch’s Sunday Times) behaved especially disgracefully. Here’s how the Guardian summed it up this morning in a Leader:

“Though Mrs Kelly’s evidence was at all times calm and restrained, there were here and there explosive words such as betrayal: his betrayal – his own word – at the hands of superiors who were ready to feed his name to the press, who failed to give him support when he so needed it, who were even content, as the media pack closed in, to leave him to find his own place to hide. If the MoD (and behind them, as we now know, 10 Downing Street) were cold and neglectful, the media, descending on the Kellys’ Oxfordshire village, were predatory. Here, too, there was a betrayal, as the Sunday Times, on the basis of a fraught and hurried conversation, printed what looked like a full-scale interview, inevitably suggesting, Dr Kelly believed, that he had broken his word not to talk to the press.

The big events, such as the call to appear before select committees, one of them televised, and the small, unremarked ones tightened the pressure. Jack Straw, or so someone told Dr Kelly, had been disappointed that no one more senior could be found to accompany him when the foreign secretary met the foreign affairs select committee. Yet again, this acknowledged expert, who lived for a job to which he subordinated everything else in his life, had been demeaned and slighted – treated, he said, like a fly. ”

Blogs and the US Presidential election

Transcript of Larry’s interesting interview with Joe Trippi, Governor Dean’s campaign manager, about the role of Blogging in the campaign.

If at first you don’t succeed… — ask Google

Lovely story by Larry Lessig about how he solved the problem of threading optical fibre through the cable conduit in his new house.

Why the Hutton Inquiry is a smokescreen

Michael Heseltine (former Deputy Prime Minister), writing in today’s Guardian:

“In Iraq the military victory was swift, which in itself raised questions about the reality of the threat. But at least the sceptics could be silenced. Where the inspectors had failed it would now be possible to succeed. But that needed evidence and there was none. The government was faced with a growing demand to follow the precedent that, as an opposition, it had so loudly demanded. Not an inch did it give.

I vividly remember listening to the news of David Kelly’s death. I also remember the coincidental announcement of a judicial inquiry and my reaction to it. The squeamish will not like what I now say but the squeamish do not last long in politics or understand the ruthless survival instinct of politicians under pressure. Dr Kelly’s death gave a new urgency to the demand for an inquiry but it also provided a lifeline. The government could concede the case for an inquiry, but one with narrow terms of reference that precluded any investigation of the major matters now of growing concern. Of all modern governments this was the one pre-eminent in steering the news and controlling the agenda. Of course there were downsides. There could be uncomfortable revelations. But all this would be as nothing to the dangers that could arise from the alternative and far-reaching inquiry that the government was so determined to avoid. ”

Catastrophe Theory

Every time there’s a newsworthy virus attack, someone asks me where will it all end. The answer is in catastrophe. We are building a networked society on incredibly insecure foundations, and it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to bring the entire system down. Actually, someone has already figured it out. Nicholas Weaver at Berkeley has written a fascinating paper on the possibility of what he calls a ‘Warhol worm’, so called because it could overwhelm the Internet in 15 minutes. The First Law of Technology applies here: if it can be done, it will.