John Seely Brown, photographed at the Royal Society last Monday. The portrait behind him is of Robert May.
Homeward bound
I cycled home from town yesterday. Along this lovely road.
Gateway
The gate in Clare College which leads to the Backs. Photographed this afternoon.
Autumn in King’s
King’s College Chapel this afternoon. Ruskin called it “a great upturned sow”. Silly man. It’s a wonderful building.
Another facebook valuation
From Jeff Jarvis…
A Deutsche Bank analyst says that a newspaper reader in 2004 was worth $964 a year. Today, that’s $500. Facebook’s 50 million active users translates to $300 per at that valuation. And newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users spend an average of 20 minutes each day inside the site vs. 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites, says DB…
CameronAir, the new luxury airline
Well, well. Dave “Vote Blue to get Green” Cameron and his chaps travel in style: they go in ‘Lord’ Ashcroft’s Falcon jet ($30 million secondhand).
Altogether shadow cabinet ministers and aides have flown 184,000 miles on the Ashcroft jet over the last five years with Andrew Mitchell, the shadow international development secretary, flying 65,453 miles and shadow foreign secretary William Hague flying 49,670 miles.
Analysis conducted for the Guardian reveals that Tory globetrotting has racked up 1,289 tonnes of carbon emissions. The biggest footprint was made by Michael Ancram when he was shadow foreign secretary and shadow defence secretary, according to environmental consultants Carbon Footprint. Mr Ancram’s flights emitted 372 tonnes, including trips to Cuba, Afghanistan, Egypt and Poland. The plane’s movements are being tracked by planespotters who logged it leaving Luton empty to fly to Khartoum to pick up Mr Cameron and return him to Britain. Indeed spotting the Ashcroft jet seems to have become a bit of cult on spotter blogs.
It would be churlish to complain about all this privileged transport, given Dave’s understandable pride in his privileged background. But there is still the small matter of Parliamentary declarations.
Mr Hague declares a trip on Lord Ashcroft’s jet to Belize, Brazil, the Falklands, Iceland and Panama as being worth £8,486, the equivalent of flying first-class. Yet to hire a Falcon with Premier Aviation would cost £55,000 for a one-way trip to New York alone.
Labour MP Tom Watson said: “There appears to be a huge discrepancy between, say, David Cameron’s declaration of £16,000 for the cost of his trip to Darfur and the cost of hiring a similar jet from a commercial firm. I got a quote of over £100,000 to hire a jet to go to Khartoum.”
If you’re interested in travelling Cameron-style, get the latest fares here.
So who didn’t ‘get’ it?
Lovely column by Geoffrey Wheatcroft which includes this gem:
As to the idea, flourished after the event by the dreaded liberal hawks as well as neoconservatives, that an invasion would bring democracy to Iraq, it’s tempting to say that comment is superfluous. In fact there is still something to be said – and it was said by Jacques Chirac at a meeting with Tony Blair that has been described by Sir Stephen Wall.
While reiterating his opposition to the war that was about to begin, Chirac made a number of specific points. He reminded Blair that he and his friend Bush knew nothing of the reality of war but that he did: 50 years ago, the young Chirac served as a conscript in the awful French war in Algeria, which Iraq resembles in all too many ways. Then he said that the Anglo-Saxons seemed to think that they would be welcomed with open arms, but they shouldn’t count on it. In a very percipient point, Chirac added that a Shia majority shouldn’t be confused with what we understand as democracy.
He ended by asking whether Blair realised that, by invading Iraq, he might yet precipitate a civil war there. As the British left, Blair turned to his colleagues and said, doubtless with that boyish grin we happily see less of nowadays, “Poor old Jacques, he just doesn’t get it.” Well, who got it?
Man who had sex with bike in court
No, I am not making this up. The Daily Telegraph report begins:
A man has been placed on the sex offenders’ register after being caught trying to have sex with a bicycle…
Fans of Flann O’Brien will not be in the least surprised by this. Bicycles loom large in his novel The Third Policeman, largely because of O’Brien’s curious take on the atomic theory of matter.
The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.
Postmen and policemen were particularly suspect in this regard, on account of the bicycle serving as their main mode of conveyance in those days (the 1930s). One sure way of telling if someone was more than 50% bicycle was to see if they tended to lean against walls and doorposts while stationary. And of course anyone seen sniffing bicycle seats was automatically suspect.
Having said all that, I can’t see why the chap reported in the Torygraph was hauled up before the beak. As one of the paper’s bloggers puts it,
He was in his hostel room at the time, behind locked doors (staff went in when they got no response from him). It was between him and the bicycle.
.
Quite. There’s a guy in Cambridge, by the way, who regularly rides around, stark naked, on his bike. Perhaps he’s a Professor of Divinity? Or of Natural Philosophy? You never can tell with academics.
Fact: I am myself only 4% bicycle.
Update: Several readers have commented on the ambiguity of the headline on this post. Nothing to do with me, guv: I just copied the Telegraph‘s lead!
Google is fifth most valuable company
From the New York Times Blog…
Much is made of round numbers. And so there will be some discussion today of Google’s stock hitting $700 a share.
That big-sounding number itself, of course, is testament to nothing more than the company’s founders’ insistence on not splitting its stock. It does show that Google’s value has increased more than eight times since its initial public offering three years ago.
But the most interesting number is Google’s market capitalization — the value of all of its shares combined. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider does a little fast fingering to calculate that with the $20 jump in Google’s stock in the last two days, its market value is now about $217 billion. That ranks it the fifth most valuable company in the country.
Most valuable are Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Microsoft, and AT&T. Google has now become worth more than Procter & Gamble, Bank of America and Citigroup. Google of course is a lot smaller than the companies it passed. P&G, for example, has nearly eight times the revenue and three times the profit of Google. But of course Google is growing far, far faster.
Hope for wrinklies
Bobbie Johnson, writing in the Guardian…
Saga Zone, created by the insurance and holiday company, launches today with the aim of becoming the social website of choice for the over-50s. Users of Saga Zone must be over 50 – but once they have joined members can create their own profile pages, contact friends or join in online discussions.
The site, which has been running in trial mode for four months, has more than 13,000 users so far – and the company hopes this will increase dramatically now it is officially open. “Older people aren’t shy of using the internet – they have a verve for life that applies online as well as offline,” said Paul Green, a Saga spokesman. “Thirteen thousand is just a drop in the ocean – in theory the membership is practically limitless. Social networking isn’t going to be for everyone, but the feedback so far has knocked our socks off.”
Footnote: mature folks like me who use both a BlackBerry and an Apple Mac are now officially known as “blackberry and apple crumblies”.