Hypocrisy squared

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More from the incredible but true department.

1. King Juan Carlos, monarch of Europe’s biggest basket-case economy (which has 50% youth unemployment), has been constantly bleating about how he lies awake at night worrying about the plight of his subjects. And then we discover that he’s been on a $10,000 a day safari in Africa shooting elephants, if you please.

2. Cameron & Co announce their determination to go after all those plutocrats who use ingenious wheezes to avoid paying tax in the UK. And guess what? It turns out that Cameron’s inheritance came via an ingenious wheeze cooked up by his Dad and involving tax havens.

Secret services

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Lovely comment on the NYTimes report of the fiasco in Cartagena, when a US Secret Service agent disagreed with a prostitute about the cost of ‘escort’ services rendered in the hotel at which the agents were staying.

So our agents being responsible for international security of the president don’t have a clue about the cost of an escort lady, how to communicate in Spanish, how to keep things under control when emotions get out of hand, etc. This should have been a test executed by the CIA to check Staff FMC (Federal Manpower Capabilities) before such characters are sent to a foreign country. We should pay that lady the full amount and thank her profoundly for doing our work.

Is there a correlation between forward-looking Google searches and prosperity?

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Fascinating research paper in Nature on “Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward”. Summary:

In this study, we present a cross-country analysis of search engine queries, and demonstrate a strong link between behaviour online and real world economic indicators. By considering searches for years represented in Arabic numerals, an almost ubiquitous written representation, we can evaluate worldwide interest in years in the future (such as “2013”) and years in the past (such as “2011”). These representations have previously been considered in an investigation of a large corpus of text from books, where analysis suggested that authors’ interest in the past has decreased over time7. Here, we compare the predisposition of Internet users in different countries to look more to the future, or more to the past. We find that the online “future orientation” of a country is strongly correlated with the country’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP).

The Marshall Plan: If you think it’s too loud, you’re too old.

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Lovely piece about Jim Marshall by William Weir in The Atlantic.

When Jim Marshall designed his first amplifier in 1962, he used the 12AX7 vacuum tube, a seemingly slight deviation from the 12AY7 tubes of the popular Fender amps—because Marshall couldn’t find any in Britain at the time. This accident of geography meant that customers of his music store suddenly had a little more crunch in their guitar sound. In rock and roll—a genre forever entwined with technology—a mere vacuum tube begat a major shift in the music’s history.

Marshall, who died last week at 88, also had the fortune of having a 20-year-old Pete Townshend for a customer. Townshend told Marshall he wanted to hear himself over The Who’s audience and rhythm section. Thus was born the first 100-watt amp. Add to that two cabinets, each bearing four speakers—together, the components came to be known as the Marshall stack—and Marshall secured himself a permanent spot on any history-of-loudness timeline.

Loudness is strictly a psychological phenomenon referring to how the brain perceives the strength of a sound. But exactly why loudness appeals to so many of us is still a mystery. In his book, Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin suggests that very loud music saturates the auditory system, causing neurons to fire at maximum rates. Studies have shown that louder music causes us to shop more and work out more enthusiastically.

So what exactly did Facebook buy for a billion dollars?

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This morning’s Observer column.

So Facebook has bought Instagram, a company with a single product – a photosharing app – for $1bn in cash and (FB) shares. Just to put that in context, Instagram has been in existence for 18 months, employs 13 people, has 30 million users and has had a grand total of $7m in investment funding. Oh, and it has precisely zero dollars in revenue.

Sound familiar?

There’s been lots of really interesting commentary about the Instagram deal. Writing in the FT, John Gapper made two interesting points:

  • The deal looks much more like the kind of thing companies do after they go public and start to run out of steam. The fact that Instagram was snapped up (if that is the right way to describe paying a billion dollars for something) is a measure of how scared Mark Zuckerberg has become of what might happen to facebook.
  • What’s he scared of? Well, says Gapper, scared of repeating the fate of many earlier Internet poster-children (like Bebo, for which AOL paid $850m in 2008 and flogged off in 2011 for $10m).

    • And Frederic Filloux, one of my favourite commentators, is also sceptical about the deal — and about facebook generally. “When I read the news of the Instagram acquisition”, he writes, “I wondered: Imagine Facebook already trading on the Nasdaq; how would the market react? Would analysts and pundits send the stock upward, praising Zuckerberg’s swiftness at securing FB’s position? Or, to the contrary, would someone loudly complain: What? Did Facebook just burn the entire 2011 free cash-flow to buy an app with no revenue in sight, and manned by a dozen of geeks? Is this a red-flag symptom of Zuckerberg’s mental state?”

    Other points Filloux makes:

  • Zuckerberg controls 57% of facebook shares, and therefore can do what he likes. This can be a mixed blessing.
  • Zuck is beginning to look like Bill Gates in the early years of Microsoft’s dominance — the years when he decided that Netscape had to be eliminated. Every challenge is seen as a potential threst. Only the paranoid survive, etc. etc. Facebook’s photo-sharing dominance was beginning to leak, and Instagram was one factor in that. So it had to be acquired or destroyed. “With this transaction”, writes Filloux, “the ultra-dominant social network acted like an elephant scared of a mice. Instagram has 35 million users? Fine. But how many are using the service more than occasionally? Half of it? How many are likely to switch overnight to a better app? Most likely many will. Especially since Instagram is not a community per se, but a gateway to larger ones such as Twitter and Facebook.”

    • LATER: Andy Baio has made an interesting attempt to work out an empirical rationale for the price Zuckerberg paid for his new toy.

    The life of the (hypocritical) mind

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    Adam Gopnik has a lovely piece about Albert Camus in the April 9 issue of the New Yorker (sadly, behind a pay wall) in the course of which he neatly evicerates the hypocrisy of a certain celebrated caste of French intellectuals:

    For all their self-advertised agonies, the lives Sartre and Camus led after the war mostly sound like a lot of fun. Their biographies are popular because they dramatise the agonising preoccupations of modern man and also because they present an appealing circle of Left Bank cafes and late-night boîtes and long vacations. A life like that implicitly assumes that the society it inhabits will go on functioning no matter what you say about it, that the cafes and libraries and secondhand bookstores will continue to function despite the criticism. A professor at the College de France who maintains that there should be no professors at the College de France does not really believe this, or else he would not be one. This isn’t a luxury that thinkers in Moscow, still less Phnom Penh, ever had. Sartre’s great sin was not his ideology, which did indeed change all the time. It was his insularity. The apostle of ideas in action didn’t think that ideas would actually alter life; he expected that life would go on more or less as it had in spite of them, while always giving him another chance to make them better. Nice work, if you can get it.