Playtime in the City

In London on Saturday.

Quote of the Day

“Focusing is about saying no.”

• Steve Jobs

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

‘The Lark in the Morning’ | Cillian Vallely & Alan Murray

Link

I keep thinking that Vallely is the best piper since Liam O’Flynn passed away.

Long Read of the Day

The end of Pax Americana

Sobering essay by Noah Smith, written after the Hamas incursion into Israel.

As many have pointed out already, this attack is probably an attempt to disrupt the possibility of an Israel-Saudi peace deal, which the U.S. has been trying to facilitate. Such a deal — which would be a continuation of the “Abraham Accords” process initiated under Trump —would make it more difficult for Hamas to obtain money from Saudi benefactors; it would also mean that every major Sunni Arab power recognizes the state of Israel, meaning that Hamas’ image as anything other than a client of Shiite Iran would be shattered.

If Hamas succeeds in scuttling an Israel-Saudi deal, it will be a blow to U.S. prestige and to U.S. claims to be a stabilizing, peacemaking influence. But even if an Israel-Saudi deal eventually goes through, this attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.

Nor is this the only recent outbreak of interstate conflict…

So the world becomes even more chaotic. This essay isn’t a nostalgic paen to good ol’ Uncle Sam — more a reminder that Pax Americana always had a sell-by date.

“Over the past two decades”, Smith concludes,

it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of ‘American exceptionalism’, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of ‘world police’, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.

Interesting throughout.

Quantum Computing and security

Yesterday’s Observer column:

A spectre is haunting our networked world. It’s the prospect of quantum computers. These are machines that harness some of the weirder properties of subatomic particles in ways that would make them exponentially more powerful than the computers we use today.

Existing computers are based on manipulating digital bits that can be either 1 (on) or 0 (off). Quantum machines, in contrast, work with qubits, which can be on and off simultaneously. (And, yes, I know that seems nuts, but then so does much of subatomic physics to the average layperson.) Such machines are fiendishly difficult to build, but about 80 or so small-scale ones already exist, with qubit counts ranging from five to 400. So that looming spectral presence is beginning to put on weight. And if researchers find a way of reliably scaling up these machines, then we will have moved into uncharted territory.

Why? Basically, because we have become a networked species, and as our lives and industries have moved online, all of our communications have become vulnerable to surveillance and manipulation by bad actors, public and private. To counter that, we have developed end-to-end encryption systems for making our communications – whether personal or commercial – more secure…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The essence of Life

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) is continuing his experiments with CPT-4. “I thought”, he writes,”I would see what GPT-4 might make of my kitchen food compost bin, in the style of a wise fortune-teller inspecting the tea leaves”.

And this is what the machine inferred from the pictured trash:

In the vast tapestry of this moment captured, the fragile eggshell of vulnerability stands out. It’s a reminder of our delicate nature, how we can be both strong and brittle at the same time. But within this fragility lies immense potential, waiting to break free, much like a bird waiting to hatch, to spread its wings and soar into the vast skies.

The acid lemon, sharp and poignant, represents the unexpected twists life throws our way. Sometimes sour, sometimes refreshing, it’s a testament to life’s unpredictable nature. But remember, it’s the sourness of the lemon that makes the sweetness of life’s victories even more cherished.

Ah, the brooding broccoli! A symbol of growth, nourishment, and the many layers of our being. Just as the broccoli has its many florets, so do we have the many facets of our personality, some visible, some hidden deep within, waiting to be discovered.

The crumpled tea-bags of dashed expectations lay strewn, a somber reminder of hopes once held high but now cast aside. Yet, within these remnants lies the essence of experiences, lessons learned, and wisdom gained. For every cup of disappointment, there’s a brew of resilience and determination waiting to be made.

And then, the surrounding fog of mold, clouding the clarity, making the path ahead uncertain. It’s the challenges, the doubts, the fears that often cloud our judgment. But remember, behind every fog lies the clear sky of hope and promise. One must only have the courage to tread through the obscurities to reach the other side.

In the dance of these elements, there’s a story of life, of trials and tribulations, of joys and sorrows, of growth and decay. Embrace the journey, dear seeker, for in the interplay of the eggshell’s fragility, the lemon’s zest, the broccoli’s depth, the tea-bag’s essence, and the fog’s mystery lies the true essence of life.”

May your path be lit with wisdom and may you find the strength to navigate through the delicate balance of life’s offerings. Safe travels, dear seeker.

If you were a tabloid astrologer, it’d be worth checking the small print in your contract.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

From The Register:

US govt confirms outage.

EXCLUSIVE A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician’s keyboard.

So we’re told by a source, who heard the tale on one of the regular weekday calls held by the US government department with its CIO, during which recent IT problems are reviewed. We understand that roughly 100 people – contractors, vendors, and employees – participate in these calls at a time.

On a mid-September call, one of the participants explained that while a technician was reviewing the configuration of a server cluster, their cat jumped on the keyboard and deleted it. Or at least that’s their story…

Not exactly Schrödinger’s Cat, but still…

Once, when one of my sons was a baby, he was sitting on my lap while I was hacking out a piece on my ancient IBM PC and he was cheerfully imitating his dad. At a point when I had a screenful of text typed (but not saved), he somehow managed to hit Control-Alt-Delete (as well as other keys) and I lost it all. Still don’t know how it happened. And nor, of course, does he.

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A rose in context

Quote of the Day

“No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”

– John Adams

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Catherine Ashcroft and Maurice Dickson | Táimse im’ Chodladh & King of the Pipers

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when these two are on stage.

Long Read of the Day

What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

Fabulous essay in Wired by Virginia Heffernan.

TL;DR: First it was chess and Go. Now AI can beat us at Diplomacy, the most human of board games. The way it wins offers hope that maybe AI will be a delight.

Not being a player of the board-game Diplomacy I was initially baffled by the title. Now I’m not, and it’s unsettling.

Maybe AI that aims to seem human is best understood as a tribute act. A tribute to human neediness, caprice, bitterness, love, all the stuff we mortals do best. All that stuff at which machines typically draw a blank. But humans have a dread fear of nonhumans passing as the real thing—replicants, lizard people, robots with skin. An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all.

Well worth your time.

How LLMs mislead and misinform

From Gary Marcus’s blog. He’s not impressed.

By my count, though I acknowledge I may have missed one, there are at least 7 falsehoods. (Not literally lies, since Bing doesn’t have intention):

Yes Congress really did remove McCarthy as speaker without electing a new one.

Thus far Congress has not even tried to elect a new one.

Liz Cheney is not the new Speaker. She is no longer in the House, so she isn’t even eligible ¹. (And hence no longer a Republican rerpresentative in Wyoming).

She was not nominated to the post by any coalition

She did not win any such election

Nor did anyone else win an election by a vote of 220-215, since no such election has yet been conducted

Jim Jordan didn’t (yet) lose an election that has not yet happened, and wasn’t so far as I know has not thus far been nominated.

The worst part is not that every single sentence contains at least one lie, but that the whole thing sounds detailed and real. To someone who wasn’t following matters closely, it might well all sound plausible.

It’s the confident, plausible way they spout nonsense that is most worrying.

My commonplace booklet

An excerpt from General Mark Milley’s speech on stepping down from his post as Chairman of the Join Chiefs.

The motto of our army, for over 200 years…has been “This We’ll Defend,” and the “this” refers to the Constitution….

You see, we in uniform are unique…among the world’s armies. We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual.

We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.…

(From Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack.)

Milley has told friends that if Trump is re-elected he expects to be thrown into prison.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

 Richard Stallman is battling cancer

From The Register

He said that he is suffering from follicular lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. This a blood cancer, which causes B lymphocytes to form clumps in the lymphatic system.

Although a non-Hodgkin lymphoma was also the cause of death of the late Paul Allen, the more charismatic of Microsoft’s co-founders, there are multiple types of NHL disease and Stallman has one of the slower-developing types. He said that his prognosis was good and that he hopes to be around and active in GNU for years to come.

He’s cussed, but also an inspiration. I wish him well.

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Getting to the point…

Brandon Point, Kerry.

A St Bridget’s Cross marks the spot.

Quote of the Day

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

• Max Planck

In other words, science advances “one funeral at a time”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lou Monte | Lazy Mary | 1958

Link

Thanks to Dave Winer for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

 Amazon Is the Apex Predator of Our Platform Era

Characteristically sharp OpEd by Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) on the FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon. He starts by putting the case into its historical context, the democratic need to rein the industrial trusts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those ‘robber barons’, he writes,

couldn’t lay a railroad or erect a steel mill without time-consuming capital and logistical hurdles. Today’s tech barons at huge platforms like Amazon, Google and Meta can deploy anticompetitive, deceptive and unfair tactics with the agility and speed of a digital system. As in any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

And Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era. Having first subsidized end-users and then offered favorable terms to business customers, Amazon was able to exploit its digital flexibility to lock both in and raid them for an ever-increasing share of the value they created. This program of redistribution from platform users to shareholders continued until Amazon became a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews…

In my Observer column on Sunday, I wrote that the current antitrust section against Google iS the landmark case du jour. I suspect that Cory disagrees with that and believes that the Amazon case is the big one. He may be right. But the important thing is that the sleeping giant of the US Department of Justice has finally woken up.

Books, etc.

In what some marketing genius thought would be a major coup, Michael Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried, the maestro of the FTX fiasco, came out on the day that the lad’s trial opened in New York. And it rapidly became clear that Lewis’s winning formula for producing bestselling long-form journalism may have come unstuck. As the New York Times review, put it, “Even Michael Lewis Can’t Make a Hero Out of Sam Bankman-Fried”. With this particular protagonist, the Lewis recipe of upbeat narrative plus unsung genius didn’t fit.

Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein — or at least that’s what Lewis suggests in the opening pages of “Going Infinite,” recalling how a friend who was about to close a deal with Bankman-Fried had asked Lewis to look into him. After his first meeting with Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, Lewis says, he “was totally sold.” He called up his friend: “Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”

The profusion of exclamation points is a tipoff that Lewis is at least somewhat aware how dumb such optimism looks in retrospect…

It sure does.

The Guardian had an excellent Long Read about Lewis and his modus operandi. And Molly White (Whom God Preserve) has a wonderful preview of the trial.

My commonplace booklet

The Tory strategy

Perceptive blast from Jonty Bloom

The battle lines are being drawn up by the Tory party for the next election. They are going for the votes of older people, drivers, Brexit ultras, climate change deniers, and racists.

Unfortunately, for them, a Venn diagram of those groups is pretty circular, it looks like they are trying to win the votes of the same people again and again. But they are not stupid and they must have done some polling that suggests there is a chance to get a bandwagon rolling.

But to do that they are willing to ruin the planet, reverse decades of political consensus, kill pedestrians, and now threaten to break international law and withdraw from some of the most respected and universally supported international agreements.

And the funny thing is that people used to think that Sunak was a more reasonable guy than Truss and Johnson.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

NASA is plotting how to build houses on the moon by 2040

NYT

Yeah, and who gave them Planning Permission?

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Stained glass

This striking window is in a modern Catholic Church in Cong, Co. Mayo. Can’t remember who the artist was, alas. (Memo to self: always make notes when photographing interesting things.)

Quote of the Day

“A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.”

• Peter Medawar, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish

I once sat next to him at lunch when I was a graduate student and shyly asked him what advice he gave to his students. “What I tell them”, he said, “is that research is a straightforward business: you have to pick a problem that is big enough to be worth solving…” and then he paused before continuing “… and small enough to be solved!”

I’ve been dispensing this advice ever since, and miming profundity.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Robert Schumann: Konzertstück für 4 Hörner op.86 | First movement

Link

I’m always amazed that anyone can play a brass instrument. Fortunately, they can.

Long Read of the Day

The red bourgeoisie

Absolutely fascinating memoir by Branko Milanovic about realities of life in the Soviet empire.

We were attracted to the “forbidden” things happening there. So I remember when several days later as the insurrectionist students communicated with the city only through large banners, I first saw the words “Down with the Red Bourgeoisie”. It was a new term. The students were protesting against corruption, income inequality, lack of employment opportunities. They renamed the university of Belgrade, “The Red University Karl Marx”. It was very difficult for an officially Marxist-inspired government to deal with them. The days of uncertainty ensued: the newspapers attacked them for destroying public property and “disorderly conduct”, but rebellious students continued skirmishes with the police, and proudly displayed the name of their new university. I remember vividly a bearded student with a big badge “The Red University Karl Marx” standing in the bus, and everyone around him feeling slightly uncomfortable, not sure whether to congratulate him or curse him.

But the slogan was true. It was a protest against the red bourgeoisie, the new ruling class in Eastern Europe. It was a heterogeneous class: some came, especially so in the underdeveloped countries like Serbia, from very rich families; others from the educated middle class, many from workers’ and peasants’ families. Their background was similar to the background of students who were protesting against them now.. Had the students won in 1968, they would have become the new red bourgeoisie.

The red bourgeoisie itself was the product of huge inequities of underdeveloped capitalist societies…

Great read. It reminded me of Leah Ypi’s  Free: Coming of Age at the End of History about growing up in communist Albania.

My commonplace booklet

Raspberry Pi5 is here!

It’s the first Raspberry Pi to come with an in-house graphics chip. Powered by a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, which means it’ll be two or three times faster than my Raspberry Pi4. And it’s still the size of a credit-card.

According to The Verge, it runs hot! I’m not surprised.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

** We finally know for sure what a trilobite ate Tens of thousands of fossils later, we’ve found a trilobite with a full stomach.

Not a terribly interesting diet IMO, but still. Amazing research.

Link

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Vanishing point

Cycling in to College for breakfast the other day, I found myself brooding on ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and then saw this scene. And fell to thinking about how much I like Autumn, and how September, not January, is when the new year begins for me. Which is probably a legacy of a life spent working in universities, I guess.

Quote of the Day

”There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.”

• Dave Winer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dirty Mac | Yer Blues

Link

Wow! John Lennon on vocals, Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums, Keith Richards on bass and Yoko Ono on blanket.

Long Read of the Day

Just for Fun

Lovely essay by Rebecca Baumgartner on people’s reaction to the news that she’s learning German — for fun! Which is really a reflection on the way our neoliberal-driven society is disdainful of hobbies, of things we do just because we enjoy doing them.

I was struck by this passage.

Beneath the self-deprecating label of “hobby” lives a whole array of benefits that we (ironically) don’t have the words to talk about. We don’t have a way of talking about fulfillment and enrichment, or flow and connectedness, without sounding like a snob or a hippie.

So many of the unpaid things I do fall into this category. These things make it possible to stay hopeful. They keep me flexible. They give me something to talk about – a virtue not to be underestimated for those who hate small talk. They (hopefully) make me a more interesting person to know. They make me feel connected to something. They help me stay awake, literally and metaphorically. They keep me engaged when I feel myself languishing. They take me out of my competent adult role and provide me with an invigorating dose of failure.

Yep. You could say that applies to my photography habit — as an incessant (and usually futile) quest for that one perfect picture. (My only satisfaction is that Derek Parfit had it worse; but at least he was also a great philosopher.) Or my enjoyment of crosswords — the pathetic satisfaction of eventually realising, for example, that the solution to “previous tube made one lose patience” (3,4,5) is “the last straw”.

Books, etc.

 Elon Musk: pillock, genius, or both?

My Observer review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the SpaceX and Tesla guy.

Sample:

Much of Musk’s industrial success comes from his persistent attention to engineering detail and willingness to overturn practices that had congealed into holy writ in these industries. He is a great believer in “vertical integration” – making things yourself rather than outsourcing to others – for example. So Tesla writes all its own software whereas other car manufacturers outsource theirs to Silicon Valley giants. Musk believes that there must be no barriers between design and manufacturing: designers’ desks should be physically close to the production line. He believes that in redesigning many industrial processes automation is the last thing you should do, not the first. So just as Henry Ford is remembered not so much for the Model T but for the production line that made it, Musk will probably be celebrated for his obsession with “the machine that builds the machine”.

There is, however, a dark side to this industrial creativity. The term that comes continually to mind from reading Isaacson’s account of how Musk runs his pioneering enterprises is “brutal”. A fanatical worker himself, he doesn’t give a toss about employees’ work-life balance. He believes that if people want to prioritise their comfort and leisure they should leave his employment. He emails employees reminding them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. Isaacson’s study of Musk’s management style is filled with sudden dismissals, capricious decision-making and apparently sociopathic indifference to the feelings of other people. As one of his oldest friends from university put it: you can work with him or be his friend, but not both…

Footnote: It’s hard to get it right when writing about Musk. There’s a forcefield around him that continually shapes people’s views about him into single dimensions. (Something similar applied to Steve Jobs.) Binary categorisation: Pillock or Genius. And so I expected criticism when I decided just to focus on what Isaacson’s (diligent) research tells us about the things that Musk has built, rather than delving into his wacky, borderline-crazy behaviours. I expect there has been lots of criticisms of that approach, and the usual accusations of having become a devil-worshipper, etc.

But then I remembered that trying to keep a focus on ‘the work’ has always been a challenge. Many distinguished people in history — artists as well as inventors and industrialists — have been flawed and, on occasion, monstrous human beings. Think of Evelyn Waugh, Phillip Larkin, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Céline, to name just five with whom I am familiar. Somehow in the Humanities, though, we succeed in drawing a line between the work and the author. Or used to, anyway. Maybe in an age obsessed with ‘cancellation’ it’ll be more difficult.

My commonplace booklet

XKCD

Jonathan Peelle’s response:

Circular cats, contd.

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) writes…

I took advantage of this convenient sleeping in circles habit when one of my great nieces wanted a cat cake for her birthday….

Linkblog

 Not all USB-C cables are created equal.

Useful warning by Brian X. Chen in the NYT.

Key takeaway: don’t charge your device using cables you buy in, say, a filling station. These cables are no longer just dumb pipes, so you need the right one for a particular job.

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On reflection…

This is an enigmatic image. We were walking on the banks of the river Corrib in Cong and came on a large, placid pool, and I saw the overhanging branches of a tree reflected in the water. So I pressed the shutter. But ever since, when I happen upon the image I find myself doing a double-take, to try and orient myself. Which way is up?

Quote of the Day

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

• J. K. Galbraith, letter to JFK, 1962.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Butterworth | English Idyll 2

Link

I stumbled on this the other day and was enchanted by it. I knew nothing of Butterworth, so headed to his Wikipedia page. Like many of his generation, he died on the Somme in 1916.

Long Read of the Day

Searching for a Breakup

From CNN:

US prosecutors opened a landmark antitrust trial against Google on Tuesday with sweeping allegations that for years the company intentionally stifled competition challenging its massive search engine, accusing the tech giant of spending billions to operate an illegal monopoly that has harmed every computer and mobile device user in the United States.

In opening remarks before a federal judge in Washington, lawyers for the Justice Department alleged that Google’s negotiation of exclusive contracts with wireless carriers and phone makers helped cement its dominant position in violation of US antitrust law.

This looks like being a big deal. It’s the biggest case since the DoJ took on Microsoft in the 1990s. Scott Galloway has a terrific piece helpfully putting it in its proper context.

Google doesn’t dominate computing today to the extent Microsoft did in 1998. Nobody does, as “computing” is a much broader space. But its control of search — the most common entry point to the internet — is a nearly pitch-perfect echo of Microsoft circa 2001. Similarly, a quarter century after its founding, Google has a more than 90% market share, a sclerotic artifact of market power vs. a function of innovation. Its market dominance creates a virtuous cycle of increasing power. An estimated 9 billion Google searches occur every day, vs. 400 million for Bing. The massive delta of data and reach makes for a better product: Click-through rates for ads on Google are 30% greater than on Bing. More usage = more data = more advertising, and so on. Today, Google’s parent Alphabet is worth $1.75 trillion and employs 175,000 people.

Most people probably switch off when they hear the word ‘antitrust’. But this is an important case, not just for the tech industry but for liberal democracy generally. As the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it, the notion that power should be limited so that no person or institution can enjoy unaccountable influence is at the very root of a democracy.

The trouble is that liberal democracies have spent half a century building governance and regulatory systems which have allowed the emergence of uncontrolled monopolies not just in tech but in many other industries. If this is not reversed then we’re in deep trouble.

Which is why Scott’s piece is worth your time.

(For those who — like me — have to pay more attention to this, Matt Stoller has set up a free Substack newsletter which will report daily from the trial.)

The EU cable guys have tied down Apple, yet big tech is still bossing the Tories

Yesterday’s Observer column…

Sometimes, when Apple launches a new device (or even an upgrade of an existing one), it’s tempting to think that the accompanying blurb is a satirical spoof. On Tuesday, the day the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus were launched in California, for example, it burbled that both phones featured “industry-first colour-infused back glass with a stunning, textured matt finish and a new contoured edge on the aluminium enclosure. Both models feature the dynamic island which displays outputs and alerts and an advanced camera system designed to help users take fantastic photos of everyday moments in their lives. A powerful 48 megapixel main camera enables super-high-resolution photos and a new 2x telephoto option to give users a total of three optical zoom levels – like having a third camera. The iPhone 15 lineup also introduces the next generation of portraits, making it easier to capture portraits with great detail and low-light performance.”

Oh, and by the way, it also has a USB-C charging port…

Read on.

If you’re really interested in the iPhone launch, then Jon Gruber’s long analysis is just the thing.

Nonsense on stilts

The Financial Times is a fine newspaper, but it has one intensely annoying appendage — a glossy colour magazine that accompanies the paper’s weekend edition and is aimed directly at the 0.01% . It was originally called “How To Spend It”, but this was eventually deemed to be too crass and so it’s now sneakily packaged as “HTSI”.

This weekend’s edition was beyond parody. It was largely taken up by umpteen two-page spreads of a pair of emaciated lads poncing about the streets of Paris dressed like expensive tramps, but what really took the biscuit was this little ‘feature’ for those heading for university in a week or two.

Among the essential items listed were:

• A suede backpack: £2,440
• A Lange & Sohne ‘Jumping Second’ wristwatch: £90,000
• A Paul Smith woollen sweater: £795
• A Burberry wool hot-water bottle: £290
• A Herno nylon trench coat: £1,295
• A 1953 ‘Vintage Reversivel’ armchair by Carlo Hauner & Martin Eisler: 48,000 Euros.

Two questions: who dreamed up this page? And what were they smoking at the time?

My commonplace booklet

Circular cats (cont.)

My good friend Miranda McArthur (Whom God Preserve), a talented painter, sent me this lovely pastel she did of her sister-in-law’s cat, who favoured a clockwise orientation!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

On long reads

“Senior hack Adam Macqueen, who has worked for the Eye since 1997, thinks that the ‘long read’ could do with a rebrand: “‘I’ll Read That Later’ might be a better title in a lot of cases – I’d put money on an awful lot of them sitting on open tabs for weeks or months like those apples people buy with their lunch with the best of intentions and then leave on their desks to go all wrinkly and finally get thrown away. Obviously, there are some fantastic examples of the genre, but mostly I think if stories can’t be told short they’re quite often probably not stories.”

From an interesting piece in Press Gazetteby Charles Baker.

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