Lovely video.
Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
Bath Roman
Well, a Roman spotted in Roman Bath, as it were.
Device creep
Interesting story from a colleague at lunchtime. His son — a young man — was driving in London for the first time. While stopped at a traffic light, he consulted a map on his smartphone. When the lights changed, he put the phone on the seat beside him and drove off — only to find himself being pursued by a police car with lights flashing. He pulls over and Constable Plod sucks his pencil and informs him that, under the Road Traffic Act 1988, Sections 2 & 3 and Construction & Use Regulations, Regulation 104 and 110, he has committed an offence. The punishment: £60 file and three penalty points on his licence — which, given that he is a young man, can be seriously damaging to his prospects of being able to rent a car.
He wasn’t, of course, using his phone as a phone but as a data device that happens to be able to display maps. And his car was stationary at the time, while he waited for the traffic-lights to change. But, according to Law on The Web,
The term “driving” has a very wide definition in motoring law matters. You can generally still be considered to be driving, even if you are stationary, sitting in your vehicle off the road, but with your engine running. Turning off your engine may be enough to prevent a successful prosecution.
If you are stuck in a traffic jam, then again you are still driving your car as far the police are concerned and you open up yourself to prosecution if you use your mobile phone other than through a hands-free kit. Every case is different and it is very difficult to lay down hard and fast guidelines.
Using a mobile phoneMost policemen believe that if they see you with your mobile phone or PDA in your hand while driving your car, then you have committed the offence of using a mobile phone while driving.
For there to be “use” of the phone there has to be some form of interaction with the device – so looking to see who is calling, or looking up a number, or dialling a number, as well as, of course, speaking or texting someone with it.
So far so bad (or good, depending on your point of view). It gets interesting when you ask whether the lad would have been prosecuted if he had been engaged in jabbing a postcode into a TomTom sat-nav device? The answer, apparently, is no. Why? Because the TomTom is not a phone.
But then, asked Quentin (who was also at lunch), what happens if — as Q does — you happen to have the TomTom app installed on your iPhone?
It’s gets murkier and murkier, the more you think about it. For example, it would be ok to use an iPad, because that isn’t a phone (even though you can put a SIM card into it and use it for mobile data), but not a Samsung Galaxy Tab, which happens to be able to make phone calls.
Bath Abbey
Remembering Dennis Ritchie
My Observer tribute to Dennis Ritchie.
It’s funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you’re reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.
The software in question is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time…
Steven Pinker and the decline in violence
I have a long piece in today’s Observer about Steven Pinker’s new book
Steven Pinker is one of those wunderkinder that elite US universities seem to specialise in producing. Born in Canada in 1954, he’s currently a professor of psychology at Harvard, but ever since he arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1976 he’s been bouncing like a high-IQ tennis ball between Harvard and its prestigious neighbour, MIT (he has professorial chairs at both institutions). By profession he’s an experimental psychologist who began doing research on visual cognition but eventually moved into studying language, especially language acquisition in children. He probably knows more about mankind’s use of verbs, and particularly the distinction between irregular and regular ones, than any other man, living or dead…
Plutocratic hysteria
Lovely NYTimes column by Paul Krugman about the hysterical reaction of America’s financial and political elite to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
Right on!
Hitler and the iPhone 4S
See here for details.
Myles celebrated
Lovely celebration of Flann O’Brien by Roger Boylan.
He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”
In fact, it’s every bit the masterpiece Greene said it was—a thrilling mix of wild experimentation and traditional Irish storytelling. Stylistically, “At Swim-Two-Birds” runs the gamut from mock-epic … to a kind of arch naturalism… The narrative is divided into three parts, described with admiration by Jorge Luis Borges: “A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists.” It’s an intricate puzzle played for laughs, a novel simultaneously subversive of, and reverent towards, the Irish epic tradition. It was ten years before the Luftwaffe’s draconian edits were reversed and the book was reprinted…
Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: an interview
As many readers of this blog know, I have a new book