From Nicholas Carr’s Blog.
Still, the numbers add up. Google says "the average car driven for one kilometer … produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches." That means that the billion searches Google is estimated to do a day are equivalent to driving a car about a million kilometers. And that doesn't include the energy used to power the PCs of the people doing the searches, which Google says is greater than the power it uses.
Walt Mossberg in full flow. Good stuff.
We finally got to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery today. Verdict: very mixed. The glossy, showbiz, Vanity Fair pictures of celebs — Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Leonardo di Caprio with a dead swan draped round his neck (and not particularly in focus either) — are mostly vapid, though there are a few exceptions (Daniel Day Lewis reclining like an Edwardian roue, for example). And the best that can be said for her landscapes is that they are, well, dire.
But there are also some wonderful images: a terrific picture of Cindy Crawford, nude except for a python draped tastefully around her, shot in B&W against a background of lush vegetation; one great portrait of Susan Sontag in chemotherapy, wearing a black poloneck sweater and a wonderful crew-cut of white hair; a sensitive picture of Richard Avedon; and a sensational portrait of Leibovitz’s mother. Her four recent photographs of the Queen (which are shown outside of the exhibition proper, in the lobby of the NPG) are very fine indeed, nicely composed and beautifully lit. HM the Q looks very sombre, but the pictures make one think of Leibovitz as the Holbein of our time. (Come to think of it, her recent work seems increasingly painterly: for example her Louis Vuitton advertising pictures of Keith Richards in a New York hotel bedroom put one in mind of Vermeer and the way he lit and portrayed his subjects with their possessions.)
There’s also a moving image from Leibovitz’s time in Sarajevo with Sontag: a child’s bicycle lies on the ground, surrounded by a swirl of smudged blood. The kid was hit by a mortar just in front of Leibovitz’s car. They packed him into the car and sent it off to the hospital, but he died en route. In between these eye-catching prints are lots of snapshots from the photographer’s family life.
One unusual feature of the show is a room with two walls covered with proofs and contact prints of the pics in the exhibition; this gives a good sense of the variety — and in a way the ordinariness of her life.
The NPG shop is selling the Annie Leibovitz at Work book (above) which is basically her commentary on the pictures plus some other stuff (notes on Equipment, Ten Most Asked Questions, Publishing and Chronology). It’s intriguing, informative — and very reasonably priced at £15.
John Mortimer, the defence barrister in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and much else besides, has died, aged 85.
Spotted on a Cambridge street. Photographed by Pete.
Click on the image to see a larger version.
From this week’s Economist…
Constant improvements mean that more features can be added to these products each year without increasing the price. A desire to do ever more elaborate things with computers—in particular, to supply and consume growing volumes of information over the internet—kept people and companies upgrading. Each time they bought a new machine, it cost around the same as the previous one, but did a lot more. But now things are changing, partly because the industry is maturing, and partly because of the recession. Suddenly there is much more interest in products that apply the flip side of Moore’s law: instead of providing ever-increasing performance at a particular price, they provide a particular level of performance at an ever-lower price.
The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. Netbooks are great for browsing the web on the sofa, or tapping out a report on the plane. They will not run the latest games, and by modern standards have limited storage capacity and processing power. They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves: sales of netbooks increased from 182,000 in 2007 to 11m in 2008, and will reach 21m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm. For common tasks, such as checking e-mail and shopping online, they are good enough.
Aw, isn’t this nice.
The billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is to buy London’s Evening Standard tomorrow, in a dramatic move that would see him become the first Russian oligarch to own a major British newspaper, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
Lebedev is poised to buy a controlling stake in the ailing title, following a year of secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, its owner and the chairman of the Daily Mail General Trust.
Under the terms of the deal Lebedev will purchase 76% of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining 24%. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with Daily Mail General Trust tomorrow. The agreement will make Lebedev the paper's controversial new proprietor.
It’s a logical move, really. After all, the KGB already controls all Russia’s media outlets. It needed to diversify overseas.
So will Mr Lebedev be interfering in British politics? Perish the thought. “My influence would be next to zero,” he declared. He promised an “absolutely” hands-off approach, and said it would be up to the Standard’s editor-in-chief and journalists to agree the paper’s editorial line. Absolutely. But now at least his friend Vlad will get a fair deal from the Russophobic British press.
Wonder how long it will be until he has a peeerage.
Here’s something to make the troglodytes on the Today programme choke on their muesli.
Last year, after the social-networking site MySpace found that its members included some 29,000 registered sex offenders, the nation’s top state prosecutors demanded a technological fix, asking that the industry “explore and develop age and identity verification tools for social networking web sites”. But a new study concludes that such technologies are unlikely to thwart anonymous predators and that the threat facing children online is no worse than it is in the real world.
“Our review found too little evidence that any given technology or set of technologies, on their own, will improve safety for minors online to any significant degree”, says the report, written by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group of 29 businesses, nonprofit organizations, academic groups, and technology companies that conducted the investigation with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, at the request of 49 state attorneys general. “Moreover, the Internet itself, the ways in which minors use it, and the communities in which they participate, all change constantly, and the available technologies are quickly evolving.”
While no single age-verification solution can solve the Internet’s problems, tools are available to those who choose to use them, and social-networking sites cooperate with law enforcement and actively root out reported problems, says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who led the effort. Some 40 technologies are already on the market, including age-verification products and Web filtering and blocking programs.
Readers of Roy Greenslade’s blog will have seen that he’s been wondering why Stephen Glover’s column about the decline of the Daily Telegraph was mysteriously pulled from the Independent.
However, Roy helpfully provides a link to the Google cached version, which reads in part:
With so much happening and going wrong, it may seem perverse to dwell on one subject: The Daily Telegraph. I do not apologise. It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening to that paper is a national tragedy. Yet I do not hear questions in Parliament. The leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition does not seem alarmed. The rest of the media, naturally concerned with their own difficulties, seems hardly to notice as this great national institution is being transformed and eviscerated under our very eyes.
I admit I am biased. The Daily Telegraph was the first newspaper I worked for, and it will always have a special place in my heart. It was the paper of the “small c” conservative classes. Of course it changed over the years, as the country changed, but never precipitately. Its circulation fell a little from its 1970s heyday, but unlike some other titles, it was not locked in some apparently irresistible cycle of decline. Then, in 2004, Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay bought it as Conrad Black, its previous proprietor – and, in my estimation, a pretty good one – was led off first to court, and then to an American jail.
The Barclay brothers love and revere the Daily Mail. And why not? Even its more knowledgeable critics generally concede that it is the most brilliant paper in Britain. But if there is one Mail, why do we need two – especially as the Telegraph lacks the resources, know-how and inspiration to emulate it? Nonetheless, the Barclays – brilliant businessmen, no doubt, though inexperienced publishers – would not be gainsaid. They recruited a chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, from the Mail group, where he was an expert on presses. In due course, he hired a gaggle of Mail executives, not all of whom, it should be said, were from the paper’s top drawer.
Since then, we have had purge after purge. The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister are in a state of permanent revolution. Dozens of the two paper’s best writers and executives have been pushed out. In the last few weeks, A N Wilson, Craig Brown, Joshua Rozenberg, Sam Leith and Andrew McKie have been sent packing. They were not bit-part players. They were the lifeblood of the paper. Slice by slice, the old Telegraph has been dismembered, and what is being put in its place increasingly resembles a weak imitation of the Daily Mail, which, by the way, has picked up several of the Telegraph’s best writers.
The first rule of newspaper ownership and editing is not to discomfort your core readers. Reach out for new ones, of course, but do not forget those who have loyally stuck by the newspaper. The Daily Telegraph’s readers have not been so much discomfited as shaken about like dice. I am sure that the newspaper’s editor, Will Lewis, is highly gifted, but he would scarcely recognise a habitual Telegraph reader if he bumped into one in full daylight. The newspaper’s much-trumpeted digital activities are all well and good, but they are ancillary to what should be the main point: giving traditional Telegraph readers what they expect and want.
The big mystery, of course, is why the Indie would censor a columnist just for going after a rival paper. Roy thinks there’s a bigger story here and he may well be right. But there’s a slightly dated air about it. In the old pre-Web days of media barons and press power this kind of intrigue was a big deal. But now? I don’t think so. As an ageing print hack, I’m interested in this kind of nonsense. But nobody under 30 gives a damn. Nor should they. That world is dying. People are more interested in whether Steve Jobs is terminally ill than in the spectacle of media moguls fighting like cats in a sack.
The Twitterverse and the Blogosphere are displaying signs of acute dementia as a result of the announcement that Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO until the end of June because his “health-related issues” have become “more complex”. Might be a good time to buy Apple shares, given that they are going to be much cheaper tomorrow.