Self-explanatory, really.
The oriental Leica?
Lots of excitement among photographers about the Fuji X100, which must be the most-anticipated camera for years.
This is the first proper movie preview that I’ve seen. Quite informative, but lacks any photographic results.
LATER: There’s an image gallery from dpreview here. (Thanks to Sebastiaan ter Burg for the link.)
The thin blue light
The Internet and freedom: understanding the context
Very thoughtful piece in Technology Review by John Palfrey. One of his contentions is that
the technology matters far less than the context of the politics, culture, and history of the place and people involved in using the technologies. In Tunisia and Egypt, it was crucial that a minimal number of people, commonly both young and elite, had high literacy rates, access to the technologies, and skill in using them. These states have very large youth populations and growing levels of sophistication, at least among the children of the wealthy, in their access to and use of digital technologies. One organizer of the Egyptian uprisings is now known to have been 30-year-old Google executive Wael Ghonim. He had created a Facebook page to commemorate 28-year-old Khaled Said, a businessman beaten by police the previous June. The sophistication of the activists and the corresponding lack of sophistication of the autocrats matters enormously.
The regional context matters in another way. It is plausible that the domino effect that we are witnessing in the Middle East and North Africa has something to do with the network as well. In some respects, common language and use of the same Internet-based tools is more important in a digitally mediated world than geopolitical boundaries are. The fact that the uprising in Tunisia prompted sympathetic protests in the region, and as far away as Turkey, may have something to do with the extent to which digital networks carried news of the uprisings very quickly, through social media and formal news outlets, in Arabic, English, French, and other languages. This is not to say that the governments in Libya and Bahrain will necessarily experience what the governments in Tunisia and Egypt have. It is instead to say that linguistic and regional affinities may be strengthened through digital networks, and may in turn lead to tinderbox-like conditions in certain regional settings.
He also has a useful categorisation of the four phases of governmental interactions with the Internet:
1. Open Internet: 1983-2000
2. Access denied: 2000-2005
3. Access controlled: 2005-2010
4. Access contested: 2011-
Freedom from the Cloud?
This morning’s Observer column.
“The novelties of one generation,” said George Bernard Shaw, “are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.” An excellent illustration is provided by the computing industry, which – despite its high-tech exterior – is as prone to fashion swings as the next business. Witness the current excitement about the news that, on 2 March, Apple is due to announce details of the new iPad, the latest incarnation of what the Register disrespectfully calls an “uber-popular fondleslab”. Yves Saint Laurent would have killed for that kind of excitement about a forthcoming collection.
To put the hysteria into some kind of context, however, consider how we got into this mess…
Stonehenge, IKEA-style
A clipping from a wonderfully witty ‘infographic’.
Democratic revenge: a dish best eaten cold
As I write this at 22:46 GMT, it’s clear that the Irish electorate has handed out a really severe thrashing to Fianna Fail, the party which has dominated Irish politics since the 1930s and which was the architect of the country’s current economic predicament. And what a thrashing: the Deputy Prime Minister, for example, has just lost her seat in Donegal — something that nobody believed would happen.
What’s going through my mind is all the prior journalistic speculation about why the Irish people seemed so passive in the face of what was happening to them as they were forced to pay up for the stupidity, venality and criminality of the people who ran their banks and their politics. Why were there no riots in the streets, like there were in Greece? Why were people apparently taking it lying down?
Well, now we know: my countrymen were biding their time, waiting to hand out the punishment in an impeccably democratic way — through the ballot box.
It’s an awesome moment. Though not perfect: Gerry Adams has just been elected to a seat in the Dáil.
The dying of the light
Early evening on the Donegal coast.
The road to Classiebawn
On the Sligo coast, the castle (distant, on the left of the picture) that once belonged to Lord Louis Mountbatten before he was killed when the IRA blew up his fishing boat in August 1979, defies the elements.
I had often wondered how Mountbatten could afford such a magnificent holiday home. It turns out that his wife Edwina, who was the daughter of the banker Ernest Cassel, one of the richest men in Europe in his time, inherited it. The castle was begun by Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary famous for gunboat diplomacy, who was notorious in Ireland for the way he cleared his estate of tenants during the Famine.
As a summer visitor, Mountbatten seems to have kept a low profile. “The Mountbattens”, wrote a local historian, “were absentees”.
“Their visits created no stir among villagers, who were well used to visitors of all types. For most here, the only indication that the Mountbattens were in residence was the house flag flying from the roof. Or they might see the ill-fated Shadow V [Mountbatten’s fishing boat] leaving the harbor, or returning.
Sometimes, the old man could be seen puttering about with a shrimp net in the harbor. For the most part, he and his wife minded their business and villagers minded theirs. Most had no idea of his close relationship to the Royal Family, nor cared.”
The Boy Scouts who often camped in the woods on castle grounds flew the Irish tricolor over their camp. The story goes that the flag was spotted by Mountbatten’s wife when she was being driven down to the village. She complained to the chauffeur that it shouldn’t be flown on their property — with a view to getting him to do something about it.
Mountbatten, however, disagreed. ‘Why shouldn’t they fly it?” he said. “It might be our property, but it’s their country'”
Political advice
Today is Election Day in Ireland.
This looks like a better bet than putting one’s faith in any of the established parties.
Meanwhile, an enterprising band has taken a leaf out of Pink Floyd’s book: