August 29, 2011
Freedom, Science Fiction and the Singularity: A conversation with author Vernor Vinge
August 26, 2011
August 25, 2011
ESR: what now for Apple in the wake of Jobs’ resignation?
Eric S. Raymond looks at the hard road ahead for Apple without Steve Jobs:
I’ve said before that I think Apple looks just like sustaining incumbents often do just before they undergo catastrophic disruption from below and their market share falls off a cliff. Google’s entire game plan has been aimed squarely at producing disruption from below, and with market share at 40% or above and Android’s brand looking extremely strong it is undeniable that they have executed on that plan extremely well. The near-term threat of an Apple market-share collapse to the 10% range or even lower is, in my judgment, quite significant — and comScore’s latest figures whisper that we may have reached a tipping point this month.
For Apple, the history of technology disruptions from below tells us that there is only one recovery path from this situation. Before the Android army cannibalizes Apple’s business, Apple must cannibalize its own business with a low-cost iPhone that can get down in the muck and compete with cheap Android phones on price. Likewise in tablets, though Apple might have six months’ more grace there.
Of course, this choice would mean that Apple has to take a massive hit to its margins. Which is the perennial problem in heading off a disruption from below before it happens; it is brutally difficult to convince your investors and your own executives that the record quarterlies won’t just keep coming, especially when your own marketing has been so persuasive about the specialness of the company and its leading position in the industry. This is a failure mode that, as Clayton Christensen has documented, routinely crashes large and well-run companies at the apparent peak of their success.
Does Tim Cook have the vision and the will to make this difficult transition happen? Nobody knows. But the odds are against it.
August 24, 2011
The origins of the “perp walk”
Tim Black outlines the Dominique Strauss-Kahn media drama, and explains the origin of the “perp walk”:
The whole tawdry affair looks to be petering out to a rather murky conclusion. Still, whatever else DSK might or might not have done, he has undoubtedly performed one vital function. That of the scapegoat. Historically, scapegoating referred to the ritual of investing an animal, a goat say, with the sins of the village, and then casting the burdened animal out. DSK, so-called, seems to have served a similar function. Strauss-Kahn was to be symbolically sent out of the community, taking the sins of men, especially French political ones, with him.
Nowhere was this strangely modern ritual more apparent than in the so-called perp walk. Introduced by FBI director Edgar Hoover in the 1920s to bolster public support for prosecutions, and used most famously with mobsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, it involves tipping off the press that the accused is about to be moved from one location to another. So as the ‘perp’ is walking between, for example, the jail and the police station, photographers appear to snap the accused in all their humiliation and shame. Yet although the perp walk has a long, ignoble, not to mention justice-thwarting history, it only really came into its own under then US attorney Rudolph Giuliani (a future mayor of New York) who, during the 1980s Wall Street-insider trading scandals, transformed it into a deliberately unceremonious ceremony. For example, in February 1987, handcuffed trader Richard Wigton was photographed weeping as he was marched from the trading floor of Kidder, Peabody & Co.
The purpose of the perp walk is worryingly clear. From the handcuffs to the embarrassment induced in the accused, we are encouraged to see the guilt before it has been proved. It is a spectacle designed to elicit condemnation — regardless of whether that condemnation is deserved or not. Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk was no exception. Snapped in all his handcuffed, unshaven and fallen-faced infamy as he was taken to a police station to be charged, the watching world was invited to see him as guilty, his sullen shame writ large in every defensive stride.
August 23, 2011
A nice reminder that I haven’t listened to “Finlandia” recently
Which I quickly remedied while reading this article:
Wildly popular a century ago as an icon of Finnish nationalism in a late-Romantic vein, Jean Sibelius was largely dismissed by music aficionados after World War II as something of a conservative lightweight. So why is the Bard Music Festival this month featuring his work in a series of concerts titled “Sibelius and His World”?
Because his condemnation, much like his popularity, was based on reductive assumptions colored by politics. Sibelius’s aesthetic paradoxes mirror those of his biography, and his iconoclastic work deserves close, fresh, sustained, and open-minded attention. A modernist in traditional musical trappings, a globalist whose work spoke in a nationalist dialect, an innovator whose pleasing tonalities snuck his inventions into the popular ear, Sibelius is as underappreciated today as he was perhaps overlionized between the world wars.
[. . .]
Like many of his Finnish contemporaries, as a young man Sibelius embraced the idea and dream of Finland. The notion of the distinct Finnish nation was redefined along the lines of a mythic and literary heritage embodied in the epic The Kalevala. Ironically, the generational embrace of the Finnish language was somewhat awkward for him, because Swedish was his primary and dominant language. Nonetheless Sibelius, more than any other artist, managed to define and embody the spirit and aspirations of an emergent national movement. By 1914 he had become recognized worldwide as the standard-bearer of Finland. For the rest of his life (and to this day), Sibelius’s primary reputation has been as that nation’s granitelike icon.
Ah, “Finlandia”, followed by the “Karelia Suite” and the “Lemminkäinen Suite”. Lovely.
Blatchford comes not to praise Jack, but to bury him
Christie Blatchford displays great courage in saying publicly in her column what others may only be thinking in the privacy of their own minds:
Yes, his death at 61 was sad and too soon; yes, he made an enormous contribution to his party and a significant one to Canada (though I would quibble with NDP MP Libby Davies’ characterization that “He gave his life for this country”); yes, he fought a brave battle against cancer, as, mind you, does just about anyone who has it; and yes, he was a likeable, agreeable, smiley man.
Yet what was truly singular about him was how consumed by politics he was and how publicly, yet comfortably, he lived.
How fitting that his death should have been turned into such a thoroughly public spectacle, where from early morn Monday, television anchors donned their most funereal faces, producers dug out the heavy organ music, reporters who would never dream of addressing any other politician by first name only were proudly calling him “Jack” and even serious journalists like Evan Solomon of the CBC repeatedly spoke of the difficulty “as we all try to cope” with the news of Mr. Layton’s death.
By mid-day, after Prime Minister Stephen Harper had offered a few warm words about Mr. Layton’s death and rued that their oft-talked-about jam session had never happened, Mr. Solomon even expressed sniping surprise that “Jack Layton wasn’t the sole focus” of the Prime Minister’s remarks.
Mr. Harper, who clearly had not spent the day watching the national broadcaster and thus was unaware that the NDP Leader’s death was the only story of note, had gone on to mention the families of the 12 people (including six-year-old Cheyenne Eckalook; now there’s someone who died far too young) who perished in the Arctic plane crash on Saturday and the tumultuous events in Libya.
She also addresses the mawkish over-sentimentality of people who probably never met Mr. Layton leaving bunches of flowers, notes, and the like (at least in this case, we’re being spared the teddy bears) as public marks of grieving:
Held out as evidence of Canadians’ great love for Mr. Layton were the makeshift memorials of flowers, notes that appeared at his Toronto constituency office and on Parliament Hill, and in condolences in social media.
In truth, none of that is remotely unusual, or spontaneous, but rather the norm in the modern world, and it has been thus since Princess Diana died, the phenomenon now fed if not led online. People the planet over routinely weep for those they have never met and in some instances likely never much thought about before; what once would have been deemed mawkish is now considered perfectly appropriate.
Certainly, Canadians liked Mr. Layton, but the public over-the-top nature of such events — by fans for lost celebrities they never met, by television personalities for those they interviewed once for 10 minutes, by the sad and lost for the dead — make it if not impossible then difficult to separate the mourning wheat from the mourning chaff. His loss — his specific loss and his specific accomplishments — are thus diminished.
August 20, 2011
August 19, 2011
Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a rap music video
H/T to Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing (and I’m still a bit astonished I didn’t see it at Ghost of a Flea first . . .) [In-line update: of course he got there months ago. Silly of me to think otherwise.]
From the comments at BoingBoing, it’s apparently called “Chap-Hop“.
For some British rappers, nothing goes better with laying down rhymes than a gin and tonic and a Sunday afternoon stroll.
They have created chap-hop, fusing the American urban musical genre with the imagined lifestyle of the British upper classes. And this coastal town, with its candy-colored Victorian villas and seafront promenade, is the setting for the latest hip-hop feud.
In chap-hop videos, hip-hop tropes are subtly undermined: Barely clothed models are replaced with a ladylike redhead in a summer frock, cricket bats are substituted for uzis.
Professor Elemental, a self-styled “Steampunk Mad Professor” and leading chap-hop MC, is one of its top exponents. He is easy to spot in the Marwood Café here, even amid its décor of spectacle-wearing stuffed owls and dismembered mannequins. Clad in Victorian-explorer garb, complete with pith helmet, he is eager to talk about his planned trip across the Atlantic.
If you want to take the moral high ground, you must live up to it
James Delingpole has a bit of advice for the BBC and the Guardian:
The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you’re going to take the moral high ground — as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity — the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can’t do that, then bloody well shut up.
In the last few months, you can’t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and the Guardian, have been dwelling on the News International phone hacking scandal with a shrillness and hysteria and foaming moral outrage out of all proportion to the nature of the offence.
Am I defending phone hacking or the leaking by police of confidential information to newsapers? Of course I’m not. I think it’s a horrible, grubby practice which must have left all the people who were victims of it feeling soiled and discomfited. But a) as we saw in the cities of Britain last week (and we’re also seeing on the stock markets) there are many problems far more deserving right now of the media’s crusading attention. And b) it’s not as if News International’s imprints which were the only newspapers playing this game. The gutter end of journalism is, of necessity, an unscrupulous, highly competitive business. Tabloid hacks stand or fall on the number of scoops they get over the opposition. It would be stretching the bounds of credulity to claim that other papers, besides those owned by Murdoch, have not engaged in similar dirty tricks.
August 18, 2011
This is so true
By way of Cory Doctorow’s post at BoingBoing, the wonderfully accurate Muphry’s Law:
Muphry’s Law is the editorial application of the better-known Murphy’s Law. Muphry’s Law dictates that:
- if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written;
- if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
- the stronger the sentiment in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; and
- any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.
Muphry’s Law also dictates that, if a mistake is as plain as the nose on your face, everyone can see it but you. Your readers will always notice errors in a title, in headings, in the first paragraph of anything, and in the top lines of a new page. These are the very places where authors, editors and proofreaders are most likely to make mistakes.
It always pays to allow for Muphry in anything you write, or anything you are checking.
August 17, 2011
The source of all those kitten videos
H/T to Ace.
Penn Jillette: The word “God” is just another way of saying “I don’t know”
Penn is promoting his new book, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, which includes appearances on various TV shows. I suspect this is rather typical:
Last week I was interviewed for Piers Morgan’s show (which used to be Larry King’s show). Piers beat me up a bit for being an atheist (that’s his job) and then beat me up a bit for being a libertarian (also his job). He did this by asking me impossible questions, questions that none of us, Harold, Richard, me, (or Piers), could ever answer.
He started with “How did you get here?” and I started talking about my road to showbiz and atheism and he interrupted and said he meant how the universe was created. I said, “I don’t know.”
He said, “God,” an answer that meant Piers didn’t know either, but he had a word for it that was supposed to make me feel left out of his enlightened club.
Then he asked me what we could do to help poor people. I said I donated money, food, medical care, and services and he said, “No,” he meant, what could society do to solve the problem of poor people. Again, I was stumped.
He said the government had to do it, which I interpreted as another way of saying he didn’t know, but he thought that made me look mean … even though I do care and do try to help.
What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist — I don’t know. If I don’t know, I don’t believe. I don’t know exactly how we got here, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we’ll get more, but I’m not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I’m not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I’ll wait for real evidence and then I’ll believe.
August 15, 2011
Terry Pratchett’s views on assisted suicide
Terry Pratchett is considering the option of assisted suicide as his own early-onset Alzheimer’s is starting to degrade his ability to write:
“I believe everyone should have a good death,” he tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.”
Pratchett has become an advocate for legalized assisted suicide in Britain, making him one of many voices in a global debate. Many oppose the practice for religious reasons or because they fear a slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia; but Pratchett has turned the legalization of assisted suicide into something of a personal crusade.
“I prefer not to use the word ‘suicide’ because suicide is an irrational thing whereas I think that for some people asking for an assisted death is a very rational thing,” he says. “People who I have met who have opted for it are very rational in their thinking. And indeed so are their families, quite often, because they know they are in the grip of a terrible disease for which there is no cure and they do not want to spend any more time than necessary in the jaws of the beast.”
Pratchett says that’s why he’s considering assisted death — even though his diagnosis could make it hard to recognize the right time to go.
“[It’s] always a problem for someone with Alzheimer’s,” he says. “Regrettably, quite a few people go earlier than they might need to, to make certain that they are totally coherent when they are asked various questions and fill in the various forms that they have to fill in.”
August 14, 2011
Mark Steyn wants to thank Londoners for re-enacting chapter 5 of his new book
In a column at the Orange County Register, he shows how well-timed certain recent news items have been for illustrating parts of his latest book, After America:
The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book — the usual doom ‘n’ gloom stuff — and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor’s went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history. Obligingly enough they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be the initials of my book: After America. Okay, there’s not a lot of “+” in that, but you can’t have everything.
But the news cycle moves on, and a day or two later, the news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western Civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.
