A journalist once remarked that Harold Wilson’s sons had become a head teacher and a professor of education (in fact, a distinguished mathematician). ‘Well, I certainly hope my children do better than that,’ Blair retorted.
Tells you everything you need to know about New Labour, really.
Did you know that lawyers in US courts are allowed to use PowerPoint in making their arguments? Neither did I, until I read this:
Perhaps the most common misuse of what some legal scholars call “visual advocacy” is the emblazoning of the word “Guilty” across a defendant’s photo. Almost always the letters are red—the “color of blood and the color used to denote losses,” as one court wrote. Two months ago the Court of Appeals of Missouri ruled in a case where the prosecution, in closing argument, presented the following slide:
The defendant, Chadwick Leland Walter, had been convicted of attempting to manufacture methamphetamine and of maintaining a public nuisance. The photo used for the slide was Walter’s booking photo—hence, the orange jail clothing. As the appeals court noted, the state could not force Walter to appear before a jury in jail garb, because that could undermine the presumption of innocence. But the prosecution’s use of the booking photo had the same effect.
From an interesting interview with Owen Jones:
The other influence is perhaps more surprising: the first Gulf war that followed Ba’athist Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which shocked him and his colleagues at the école. “It was a very strong event, because sometimes we say that governments cannot do much against tax havens, they’re too powerful. And suddenly we’re able to send 1 million troops 1,000km away from home to give back the oil to the emir of Kuwait. I was not sure this was the right redistribution of wealth.”
The west’s general relationship with the Middle East – “the most unequal region in the world”, he says – is one that troubles him, not least because it exposes grotesque inequalities. “Take Egypt: the total budget for education for 100 million people is 100 times less than the oil revenue for a few dozen people in Qatar. And then in London and in Paris we are happy to have these people buying football clubs and buying apartments, and then we are surprised that the youths in the Middle East don’t take very seriously our democracy and social justice.”
I can’t stand Downton Abbey, the current opiate of the couch-potato class. Neither can Polly Toynbee:
To control history by rewriting the past subtly influences present attitudes too: every dictator knows that. Downton rewrites class division, rendering it anodyne, civilised and quaintly cosy. Those upstairs do nothing unspeakably horrible to their servants, while those downstairs are remarkably content with their lot. The brutality of servants’ lives is bleached out, the brutishness of upper-class attitudes, manners and behaviour to their servants ironed away. There are token glimpses of resentments between the classes, but the main characters are nice, in a nice world. The truth would be impossible without turning the Earl of Grantham and his family, the Crawleys, into villains, with the below-stairs denizens their wretched victims – a very different story, and not one Julian Fellowes would ever write.
Much attention is paid to detail. Place settings are measured to perfection with a ruler, the footmen’s buttons absolutely correct, yet everything important is absolutely wrong. Start with the labour: what we see is pleasant work by well-manicured maids in fetching uniforms, healthy and wholesome, doing a little feather-dusting of the chandeliers, some silver polishing, some eavesdropping while serving at table and some pleasant cooking with Mrs Patmore. There is even time for scullery maid Daisy to sit at the kitchen table improving herself with home education. In Downton the hierarchical bullying of servants by one another is replaced by the housekeeper and butler’s benevolent paternalism: what a nice place to work.
What we never see is bedraggled drudges rising in freezing shared attics at 5.30am; slopping out chamber pots, heaving coal, black-leading grates, hauling cans of hot water with hands already made raw by chilblains and caustic soda…
Right on. Terrific rant.
Now here is a lovely story about technology and ingenuity:
My colleagues and I just 3D-printed a ratcheting socket wrench on the International Space Station by typing some commands on our computer in California.
We had overheard ISS Commander Barry Wilmore (who goes by “Butch”) mention over the radio that he needed one, so we designed one in CAD and sent it up to him faster than a rocket ever could have. This is the first time we’ve ever “emailed” hardware to space.
Details are fascinating. Worth reading in full.
This just in from Mark Anderson, the guy who told me about the sub-prime mortgage racket nine months before the collapse (and indeed before I knew what a sub-prime mortgage was):
When Dalian Wanda, China’s largest commercial real estate and entertainment firm, bought the US’ second-largest theater chain, AMC, a few years ago, I wondered what the result would be.
Already, we had started to see the effects of China’s desire to move its censorship efforts offshore and into the US film industry, with the increase in various levels of pandering to Chinese censors by US studios in an effort to get Chinese domestic distribution. Double endings, Chinese heros, Chinese settings, and even Chinese script approval, all became part of the new economics of making more money on blockbuster films.
This week, as Sony wrestled with how to manage the damage from North Korea’s hack of its networks, it waited for theater chains to ring in. According to the LA times, Regal decided not to cancel, but to delay showing The Interview, a comedy based on “taking out” Kim Jung Un.
And then AMC announced it would pull all of its US theaters out of distribution for the film. It was AFTER AMC’s announcement that Sony decided to pull not just the single Christmas day showing, but the entire distribution of the film.
Could Sony have launched the film in defiance of AMC’s pullout? I seriously doubt it.
Result: For all intents and purposes, it appears that China censored the American film offerings this season, and not Sony.
For some reason, all of the press seems to have missed this story to date.
“When I get asked in interviews to predict the future, I always have to struggle to come up with something plausible-sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn’t prepared for an exam. 1 But it’s not out of laziness that I haven’t prepared. It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren’t worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.”
And
“Another trick I’ve found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I’ve found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.
Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) So we suspended disbelief and funded them.”
Interesting OpEd piece by Tom Friedman.
IN March, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Mike Rogers, was asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he thought President Obama was handling relations with Russia versus how President Vladimir Putin had been handling relations with the United States. Rogers responded: “Well, I think Putin is playing chess, and I think we’re playing marbles. And I don’t think it’s even close.”
Hmmm. Marbles. That’s an interesting metaphor. Actually, it turns out that Obama was the one playing chess and Putin was the one playing marbles, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say today that Putin’s lost most of his — in both senses of the word.
Rogers was hardly alone in his Putin envy. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Fox News has had a veritable Putin love fest going since March: Sarah Palin opined to the network that: “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.” Fox contributor Rudy Giuliani observed on the same day that in contrast with Obama, Putin was “what you call a leader.”
Personally, I can’t understand why the West is obsessing about ISIS when Putin’s loose on the borders of Europe. That’s not to say that ISIS isn’t dreadful; but it doesn’t have nukes. And the more desperate Putin becomes as Russia’s economic woes increase, the more dangerous he becomes. Or so it seems to me.
This morning’s Observer column
When you walk into my GP’s surgery, the first thing you see is a screen on the receptionist’s counter. Displayed on it are the words (all in capitals) “TOUCH THE SCREEN TO ARRIVE FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT”. Being pedantic, the first time I saw it I pointed out to the receptionist that I had arrived for my appointment. She grimaced. I then asked if the medical implications of asking every patient to use the same touchscreen during, say, a flu epidemic had been considered. Another grimace. It was, she explained, “a new system”.
This system was provided by Epic Systems, a US corporation based in Wisconsin, which may explain why its software designers seem unfamiliar with the verb “to arrive”. It’s one of eight major vendors of healthcare information systems, all of which are based in the US, and it got its foot in the NHS door quite a long time ago. My doctor’s surgery has been using it for a while. At the beginning, the system’s user-interface was abysmal and dysfunctional. Now, several years on, it’s merely ugly. But at least it works…
LATER
One of my colleagues wrote, confirming my friend’s experience:
The only thing that marred our recent experience of Addenbrookes A&E (also with suspected broken foot/feet, there must be something in the water in Cambridge!), was the introduction of the new system:
there was a 20 minute wait to register once we had initially registered, because the details hadn’t come through, then the x-ray results had to be manually retrieved …and really very stressful for the staff who had to keep apologising and physically running between departments to get results.