Just think: no matter how fed up you are with the prospect of recession etc. this morning, imagine how you’d be feeling if McCain/Palin were being inaugurated today.
Modern Liberty: the convention
From Henry Porter in yesterday’s Observer.
Look no further than the news of recent days to know why the Convention on Modern Liberty, launched last week in London by Baroness Kennedy, is so critical and is inspiring such support. As co-director, I would naturally talk it up, but many have been struck by the contrast – actually, I would say lunatic hypocrisy – in a government where you have a foreign secretary who, swooning for Obama, called for Britain to champion the rule of law and “uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home” and a justice secretary who a few hours before had announced measures in the Coroners and Justice Bill (a tricksy little portmanteau if ever there was one) that will bring in secret inquests and legalise a vast exchange of personal data between government departments.
Convention is on February 28, at venues around the country. See the web site for details. You can also follow it on Twitter.
The downside of Web 2.0
Hmmm… It’s really tough. On the one hand, one cannot run a business nowadays without taking Google into account. On the other hand, one can’t build a business that depends on Google.
A number of Google services just announced that they are about to shut down. The Google Video team announced that it will shut down uploads in a few months, while the Google Notebook team announced that it is stopping development the service will continue to function, however. According to Danny Sullivan, Google is also closing Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that was bought by Google before it even launched, but which has lingered in invite-only mode ever since. Google Catalog search, which made shopping catalogs searchable, will also be closed soon.
Update: Google will release the Jaiku code under the open source Apache license, so that other organizations can pick up where the Google team left off. It is not clear if current users will be able to transfer their accounts.
Health Isn’t a Private Issue When You’re a Legend
Joe Nocera (whom Steve Jobs rang some months ago to berate him) returns to the question of when a CEO’s health is his own business, and when it’s of public interest.
It is really hard to write about Steve Jobs and his health problems. What you really want to do is root for him, not criticize him. Everybody — myself very much included — hopes that he will get well and come back to work. I can even understand why he doesn’t want to disclose details about his medical problems — it’s distasteful, and Mr. Jobs also believes strongly that it’s nobody’s business except his and his family’s.
But he’s wrong. There are certain people who simply don’t have the same privacy rights as others, whether they like it or not. Presidents. Celebrities. Sports figures. And, at least in terms of his health, Steve Jobs. Once again, his health is a material fact for Apple’s shareholders, and more disclosure is required. His vagueness about his health, his dissembling, his constantly changing story line — it is simply not an appropriate way to act when you are the most important person at one of the most prominent companies in the country. On the contrary: it is infuriating.
Enough is enough. If Mr. Jobs wants privacy, he should resign from Apple. If he did, of course, his health would no longer be anybody’s business but his own. Barring that radical move, Mr. Job’s medical problems will continue to be a “distraction,” as he himself put it in that recent e-mail message — and a big one. The time has come for Apple’s board to wrest control of this subject from Mr. Jobs, and do the right thing by the company’s shareholders. Say, once and for all, what is going on with Mr. Jobs’s health. Put the subject to rest. End the constant rumormongering. And then get back to the business of making the coolest products on earth.
Where you can see the Inauguration
Useful set of links.
After the president takes the oath of office and delivers his Inaugural address and following the departure ceremony for the outgoing President, he will be escorted to Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Luncheon. This is the menu:
Er, the first course will be served on replicas of the china from the Lincoln Presidency, which was selected by Mary Todd Lincoln at the beginning of her husband’s term in office. The china features the American bald eagle standing above the U. S. Coat of Arms, surrounded by a wide border of “solferino,” a purple-red hue popular among the fashionable hosts of the day.
How do I know all this? Why I visited the relevant Senate web site.
Joel Meyerowitz on street photography
Some interesting craft knowledge onveyed in this YouTube video. He uses a Leica M6, which has an onboard exposure meter that is much too fiddly for rapid use. So he takes a reading off his hand (using a Weston meter) and then leaves the camera set on this. (Good trick: I’ve used it from time to time.) What he doesn’t deal with in this clip is how to focus manually at a pace that’s quick enough for what he’s trying to do. My hunch is that he uses a 35mm or 28mm lens set to f8 — which gives enough depth of field that anything reasonably central in the frame will be in focus.
Small change in Zimbabwe
From Reuters.
HARARE, Jan 16 – Zimbabwe’s central bank will introduce a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknote, worth about $33 on the black market, to try to ease desperate cash shortages, state-run media said on Friday.
Prices are doubling every day and food and fuel are in short supply. A cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and a deadlock between President Robert Mugabe and the opposition has put hopes of ending the crisis on hold.
Hyper-inflation has forced the central bank to continue to release new banknotes which quickly become almost worthless.
There is an official exchange rate, but most Zimbabweans resort to the informal market for currency transactions.
In addition to the Z$100 trillion dollar note, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe plans to launch Z$10 trillion, Z$20 trillion and Z$50 trillion notes, the Herald newspaper reported.
Every time I think that things can’t get any worse under Mugabe, they do.
Art sale
Larger version here.
Just in case…
… you were feeling sorry for George W. as he heads into the wilderness as one of the worst US presidents in history, then have a listen to this.
The bean-counters’ sword
This morning’s Observer column…
In the summer of 1978, a Harvard student named Dan Bricklin was cycling along a path in Martha’s Vineyard, when he had a big idea. As an MBA student, he was being taught to do financial planning using a large sheet of paper ruled into a grid pattern. One entered numbers corresponding to sales, costs, revenues and so on, into cells on the grid, did some calculations and entered the result in another cell. This was called ‘spreadsheet analysis’ and it was unutterably tedious because the moment any of the numbers in the sheet changed, everything else that depended on it had to be recalculated – manually.
Bricklin’s big idea was that all this could be done by a computer program…
Footnotes:
John Dvorak’s engaging rant is here.
Dan Bricklin maintains some enthralling pages about the background to VisiCalc.