It measures 5x7 feet and weighs 120 pounds. It'll also set you back $10,000. Read more here. And if you have some loose change handy then buy it here.
(Via AWAD)
A sober British judge opines on Gunatanamo Bay:
As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice.The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials. The answer can be given quite shortly: It is a resounding No.
The term kangaroo court springs to mind. It conveys the idea of a preordained, arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice. Trials of the type contemplated by the United States government would be a stain on United States justice. The only thing that could be worse is simply to leave the prisoners in their black hole indefinitely.
Looking at the hard realities of the situation, one wonders what effect it may have on the treatment of United States soldiers captured in future armed conflicts. It would have been prudent, for the sake of American soldiers, to respect humanitarian law.
Second, what must authoritarian regimes, or countries with dubious human rights records, make of the example set by the most powerful of all democracies?
Third, the type of justice meted out at Guantanamo Bay is likely to make martyrs of the prisoners in the moderate Muslim world with whom the West must work to ensure world peace and stability.
See also this BBC report.
(Via Dan Gillmor)
I've just finished reading Why Innovation Fails by Carl Franklin. Top-line summary: A bit of a waste of time and money. You're much better off reading Clay Christensen.
The good: It deals with an important, and perhaps unrepresented, subject. It also debunks the most ridiculous forms of futurology reasonably effectively.
The bad: The case studies and insights are veneer-deep. It feels like it was written in a hurry and there's very little that's noteworthy or original in the 200-plus pages.
The ugly: For a journalist, Franklin's writing is very poor. The text is full of cliches and throwaway phrases. It's also got far, far too many exclamation marks! What was Franklin's editor doing through all this, sleeping?!
There are a few useful checklists to help you assess your own innovations and their chances of success, but they're pretty obvious. You could probably come up with lists of your own that are equally good in less time that it takes you to get through this book.
Why don't fuel stations sell car insurance by the mile? Why don't mortgages automatically give customers the benefits of refinancing when interest rates fall? Why don't public libraries have coffee shops? Why can't you rent the cleaned-up airline versions of movies?
These and lots of other thought-provoking ideas at Whynot.net.
(Via The Economist — subscribers only)
I recently finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel. You should read it. I don't want to ruin anything by saying more.
I've just finshed Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. It's a long time since I read such a sublimely written piece of utter bullshit, so I thought I'd post a review.
The story, set in the near future, revolves around themes taken (apparently at random) from life in the late Nineties early Noughties: CamelCase BrandNames, internet-mediated kiddie porn, and, above all, genetic engineering.
What Crake had said was this: "Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinately. Homo sapiens doesn't seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words — and up to a point, of course — the less we eat, the more we fuck."
Er, no we don't. Like most of the rest of the book, this passage uses well-crafted sentences to describe concepts that are plain wrong.
So, if you're going to read this this work of science fiction for the fiction then you'll probably enjoy it because the quality of the writing is outstanding. (Also noteworthy is the sheer malign rage of the prose — including plentiful and varied use of the f-word. This would have come over as self-conscious swaggering if it had been written by a twentysomething man, but feels genuine from a female author of Ms Atwood's maturity and skill.)
However, if you're looking for any science — or a vaguely well-informed and considered discussion of the perils of genetic engineering — then it would be better to look elsewhere.
There's been quite a few botched experiments [in trying to transfer cat characteristics to human-like animals], as Snowman recalled. One of the trial batch of kids had manifested a tendancy to sprout long whiskers and scramble up the curtains; a couple of the others had vocal expression impediments; one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.
This isn't Molecular Biology 101, it's Tom & Jerry's Greatest Hits. Perhaps it's supposed to be a joke, but it doesn't come over that way, set as it is among almost 400 deadpan, angst-ridden pages. Ms Atwood appears to think that scientists can mix the genes of diverse pairs of animals to derive viable organisms with recognisable characteristics of both just as easily as she mixes the letters of their names to create such mythical beasts such as pigoons and rakunks. Well, they can't.
The book has other credibility problems too: the major genetic engineering disaster upon which the plot relies assumes that it would be quite easy to wrap a malign biological virus in a pharmaceutical product and feed it to a large proportion of the human population before anyone realised what was going on. But it isn't, either technically, legally or logistically. In fact, I can't imagine, even in my worst nightmares, such a thing being possible at all given the way that drugs are developed and regulated — and the trends are towards it becoming more, not less, difficult. (The only virsues for which something like this is possible are the software variety; maybe, somewhere in Ms Atwood's fertile imagination, she's got the two confused.)
Ironically, the world described in this book — depressing, brutal, feral — feels a lot more like the world that mankind emerged from a few thousand years ago than the one towards which we're heading. There are a lot of things worth debating about artificial genetic modification (including selective breeding as well as genetic engineering), but you won't find them in this book. Instead we have a fine example of something else in the modern world that's depressing, and perhaps even dangerous: an outstanding and popular writer wasting their considerable talents on a thesis that holds less water than a macrame eggcup.
Yup, we're celebrating Fair and Balanced Day over here too, along with all those other good people. (Thanks to The Agonist for the pointer)
Update: The Economist has a bit of background in an article called Patent the Absurd (sadly for subscribers only; summary: absurd as it seems, Fox may have a case). Funnily enough, it's right next to a piece about the commercialisation of blogging (which is free for all :-).
Having just returned to London from San Francisco, I am reminded of the three things whose remarkable popularity in America continue to convince me that I can never truly fit in over there:
That last link greeted me on my return courtesy of this posting to Dave Farber's IP list. The article starts off as follows:
Today marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).
It goes on to describe how Americans are becoming more religious and fundamentalist in their views even while most of the rest of the world is, if anything, becoming more secular and rational.
I recently finished reading A Devils Chaplain by Richard Dawkins. Predictably enough, he takes a lot of swipes at religion. Also predictably enough, I quite enjoyed them. His discussion of transubstantiation (the Roman Catholic belief that the wine of the Sacrament actually becomes the blood of Christ) was particularly entertaining. Religion, Dawkins explains, requires mystery, and transubstantiation handily conjours up two whole mysteries — (i) that wine has become blood and (ii) that it nevertheless continues to look and taste just like wine — out of thin air where there was previously only one completely mundane fact — it's just wine.
Should we be worried that a large proportion of the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, including many of their leaders, are willing — nay, eager — to believe in this sort of thing? Is it a cause for concern when 83% of them accept that Mary was a virgin despite the fact that the oldest known written accounts make no mention of this fact and the story probably arose from a mistranslation of a word meaning "young woman"? Don't these people shown themselves to be even more credulous when they accept Mary's own Immaculate Conception, which was only added to the official story in 1854? Is it potentially dangerous when people irrational enough to believe all of the above, but at the same time dismiss evolution, hold sway over the world?
I think the answers to all these questions are yes. But I don't know what to do about it — I can always turn down the sourdough or turn off Fox TV, but those gullible carriers of the Hebrew Myths meme are just about everywhere.
I've just received the following remarkable piece of correspondence from London Energy, my electricity and gas supplier:
As you may remember, we wrote to you recently informing you of proposed changs to our tariffs.The changes to your terms and the date, from which these changes take place, were outlined in such correspondence. As a result of this notice confirming the change to your terms we are now required to advise you of your loegal entitlement to give valid notice to terminate our contract. Should you exercise this right within 14 days of receipt of this leaflet, by notifying us at London Energy, Admail 1025, London, WC1V 6LA, we will not seek to enforce this variation.
Forget for a moment the obvious inability to punctuate correctly and concentrate instead on the message, which I translate here into English:
"We recently wrote to you to tell you that we're raising our prices. But if you have the time and presence of mind to decode this deliberately obfuscated letter and write back to us, we won't put up your prices after all."
Which planet is London Energy on? Do they really think that playing games like this will create loyal cusomers? Gits.
Lest there be any doubt that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is one of history's greatest hypocrites, reflect for a moment on the fact that even while he uses his money and influence to put himself beyond prosecution on numerous counts of commercial and political dishonesty, he's using the same legal system to try to silence his critics.
Whenever the weather has turned hot in London in recent years, it's never taken long for some newspaper columnist or dinner party guest to remind us all that the high temperatures and passenger densities regularly reached in London Underground trains are, according to European law, unfit for transporting farmyard animals. Whether this be true or apocryphal, its a good conversation starter because almost everyone — Tube-haters, animal-lovers and Europhobes (and most Britons probably belong to all three groups) — can nod in earnest agreement.
Now this story from The Economist (subscribers only, I fear) brings an interesting parallel story from the US, this time less about our modern way life than about a modern (and particularly American) way of death.
Topsy the elephant of Coney Island, NY, was electrocuted a hundred years ago for killing three men. Her quick, silent death led Thomas Edison (the brains behind the whole scheme) to lobby NY politicians to introduce electrocution for human criminals — and, of course, many American states still use this method today. Except that electrocution is now considered inhumane for elephants and no longer used for them.
Thus flows the strange and tortured logic of state-sponsored execution.
Bob Cringely's Snapster idea has been getting a lot of attention, at least in geek circles.
As others have pointed out in those discussions, the idea is very unlikely to fly because (i) in the short term, record companies only have to come up with a licence that precludes this type of use, and (ii) in the long term, most lawmakers are idealogically closer to the RIAA than to Cringely.
But Cringley nevertheless deserves huge credit for coming up with an orginal and enlightening idea in an area desparately in need of creative thinking.
This from the BBC:
Two Democrats, John Conyers and Howard Berman, have proposed legislation which would make file swapping of pirated music and software a crime.The Authors, Consumer and Computer Owners Protection and Security Act of 2003 — known as the Accops Act — carries penalties of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for uploading a copyrighted file to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network.
"I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music," [Michael] Jackson said in a statement.
"It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail," he added.
So who is it, exactly, who's supposed to be out of touch with reality?
A recent reader's letter to The Times quoted a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson at Nuremberg in 1946:
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason.
The full speech is here.
Given recent events in Guantanamo Bay, do you thimk George Bush & Co. might like to reflect on this?
George Bush rides roughshod over science. Well, he's not the first beneficiary of nepotism to use his influence in this misguided, dishonest way.
2blowhards report on why bestseller lists are no more reliable than a war report from Comical Ali.
Who's sillier, a passenger on a transatlantic flight who wears a badge saying "Suspected Terrorist" or the captain who throws him off? You decide.
It's good to see that the Postmoderism Generator is still going strong after all this time. (Hit reload a few times and you'll get the idea.)
The Independent has a sobering, if one-sided, account of the lies, half-truths and public ignorance that has characterised the Second Gulf War.
This week's Big Idea in Mobile Telephony is "push-to-talk" (if you're a teenager that's " voice instant-messaging, and if you're over 30 think of it as "walkie-talkie mode"). Sounds to me like it'll catch on. But then I said mobile phone photography was never going to be a hit and I was wrong about that.
A delicious attack on homophobic Anglicans (and by extension on all revealed religion) was published on the letters page of the Independent on Sunday and reproduced in The Week. I can't find it anywhere online, so I'll reproduce it here:
As the central biblical injunction against homosexuality occurs in Leviticus, and since such an injunction would have no moral force if we could pick and choose our proscriptions, it might be an idea for the clergy to develop a test of belief in this 3,000-year-old desert religion — the Leviticus Test.Prospective clergy would be inspected for mandatory circumcision. Any other mutilation would render them unfit, as would a confession of having eaten pork, shellfish, insects (other than locusts) etc. A male must not touch the dead... except for his mother, father, son, daughter, brother... or virgin sister.
No priest with a blemish may offer to God or come near the vicarage.
This test would be simple and pure and thus appeal to those who worry about other people's sex lives. And it is eccentric, irrelevant and slightly mad, which will appeal to dogmatists.
Robert Harmon, Hastings
Junichi Saga was both cool and forgiving in his response to the news that these Bob Dylan lines were lifted almost word for word from his (obscure) novel, Confessions of a Yakuza:
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound.Sometimes somebody wants you to give something up, And tears or not, it's too much to ask.
Saga's anwser, my friend:
Why would I sue? To take something that made people around the world happy and try to exploit it for money - that's poverty.
No sooner had they permitted all-night drinking and bartop dancing when the Singapore authorities went and allowed their citizens to bungee jump and reverse bungee jump too. Where will it all end? Will spitting in public and smoking cannabis be next?
Everyone and his blog has been commenting about AS Byatt's criticism of JK Rowling. So why should I be the only one left out?
I think your stance on this depends on whether you see books as primarily a source of entertainment or erudition. Having read both Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone and Possession, I can say that I definitely consider the latter to be the better book. But that's because I enjoy AS's disappear-up-your-own-arse style of metaphor and scholarship. Frankly, 99% of the human race don't — they'd rather have JK's derivative schmaltz. (It was presumably for similar reasons that Star Wars was voted the best film ever.)
JK's stuff may be two-dimensional but both of those dimensions are rather well crafted and there's no denying that her books have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure. Why begrudge them this?
AS's stuff is more worthy. But does that make it better? Perhaps to some (including me). But her arguments start to lose credibilty for me when she claims Terry Pratchett to be a "genius". (I've read only one of his books and it really is the biggest load of purile, trite junk that I've ever forced my way through.) I'll also note that, though her sentences can be sublime, AS's contribution to world culture also includes probably the worst movie ever made.
A (Japanese) friend of my (Japanese) wife recently had a baby in Switzerland. The midwife was shocked to see that it had a flat head and suggested that baby and mother both see a doctor to investigate this deformity. She didn't seem to know that many – perhaps most – Japanese babies have flat heads. (Similar things happen with Mongolian spots, which most orientals have at the base of their spine and which can be mistaken for a bruised bum – a sure sign of abuse to paranoid medics.)
Anyway, I laughed again about all this when I read a ridiculous story about babies that lie on their backs getting flat heads:
In severe cases of positional plagiocephaly, babies have to wear a custom-fitted headband, called a cranial orthotic, for up to 24 hours a day, to correct the shape of the skull. The treatment lasts between two and six months, depending on how severe the problem is and what age the baby is. It can cost as much as $3,000 (£1,800).
Wow! The main benefit of lying on their backs is, of course, that they don't die cot deaths in nearly such numbers as babies lying on their stomachs. Sounds like a small price to me. Lighten up, flat-head fretters! Babies, like adults, have different shaped heads. Variety is good and I reckon they all look pretty cute.
A survey of ordinary folk confirms that most of them don't know what the hell we techies are talking about.
This delicious parable by Terry Jones does for Alastair "Beelzebub" Campbell what Animal Farm did for Josef Stalin.
And if you're into jokes about Gulf War II, this might also raise a chuckle.
Kew Gardens becomes a World Heritage Site and makes this Friend of Kew happy.
This article about the decline of the single contains some interesting quotes.
Paul Weller (singer-songwriter):
"Unfortunately these days if you don't get a hit single, or your first album doesn't sell one point whatever million, you don't get a chance to make your second one... I wonder whether The Jam would have got on to All Mod Cons - we would have probably been dropped by then, as the first two records didn't sell that well."
Beverley Knight (singer):
"Back in the day the chances were that, unless it was a novelty record, it was a really good song... It's hard to sit at home and watch bands you know have been put together by a TV show. It's mediocrity dressed up as greatness."
Steve Levine (music producer):
"[Marketing is] more important [to record companies] than the music"
Chris Cowey (executive producer, Top of the Pops):
"[The charts are] dysfunctional [and] full of crap"
Apple's Music Store is encouraging individual song purchaes again, but IMHO record companies only have themselves to blame for the lacklustre, unimaginative, uninspiring and decreasingly lucrative singles market. And just in case you thought it's all down to piracy, read this.
A nice story about cracking voicemail systems to make free long-distance calls — and the use of a "Turning test" (nothing of the sort, in fact) to combat the villains.
The ever-excellent Mark Lawson has stayed up all night to review the new Potter book. His verdict: quite good, if predictable. He also has some good things to say about JK Rowling:
Mutter about media hype all you want - hiss that Philip Pullman or 100 neglected children's authors are better writers - it doesn't matter. The fact is that - against all historical predictions - this woman has made the antiquated dead-tree reading device called a book a must-have accessory for the young in an otherwise relentlessly electronic age. There is talk of making her a Dame; they should probably make her a saint.
And some less-good things to say about how the book was launched:
Writers and publishers may say that no book should be reviewed like this. Well, yes. But no book should be published like this. Rowling and Bloomsbury have turned literature into news, with all the embargos and immediacy that entails. To adopt a tone appropriate to a book about schoolchildren: they started it.
I must admit to having some sympathy for this view. If it wasn't for stress, I'd never get out of bed in the mornings.
The Economist has a nice piece (subscribers only, I fear) about unemployed wireless yuppies in the US hanging out in coffee shops and working on the next Big Thing.
So apparently all that stuff about the widespread theft of priceless artefacts from Iraqi museums was "bollocks".
Both these pieces are by journalists from The Guardian, the first one stationed in Baghdad. So can someone tell me what's going on here? Who are we supposed to believe? And since at least one of these views must be untrue, how and why did the media fall for it so completely?
Robert Fulford on why the paperless office is getting further away, not nearer, and why he believes most futurologists to be learned wankers.
Did you know that the US FDA allows peanut butter to contain an average of 30 insect fragments per 100g?
Having watched a few episodes of his late-night programme on Britain's Channel 4, I can attest that, short of camera tricks and heavy editing, Derren Brown seems to be a truly remarkable guy. He appears to be able to read people's minds by picking up the slightest involuntary cues from their expressions and behaviour, he can plant ideas in those same minds using subliminal suggestion, and he can play cards well enough to be thrown out of any casino in the known universe. Now he's playing for even higher stakes.
Having travelled through some of the more totalitarian parts of Africa, I'm used to having to hide cameras away at border posts and other government buildings. But I never thought I'd have to do the same in a coffee shop here in the 'free' world.
Some people are rising to challenge. I'll also see if I can get some snaps of the Starbucks down the road (England's Lane, London NW3) and post them here.
Saw this film on the plane back from LA. First time for ages that movie has moved me to tears. And this one isn't fiction.
The Evening Standard has faked a picture on their front cover that showed a jubilant Iraqi crowd in order to make the crowd appear bigger. They deny any wrongdoing but the picture seems to speak for itself.
Did you know that you can become more powerful that the government simply by taking out a patent? Scary!