Status-Q

OK – apologies for the rant… Is it just me, or have light bulbs really gone downhill in recent years? It seems as if scarcely a week goes by without me having to replace one.

I’m sure it wasn’t like that in my childhood. I don’t think we have more in our house than my parents had in theirs, or that we use them more. Perhaps we have a higher proportion of ‘strange’ ones – spotlights, candles, globes… and these varieties haven’t evolved to the same degree as the common-or-garden species?

The worst ones seem to be Philips, but most of the places we shop don’t seem to sell anybody else’s any more. The Philips spotlight bulb I’ve just replaced after a couple of months claimed to have a one year lifetime (based on 3 hours’ use per day). Even if it had managed that, it doesn’t seem like a great achievement, in this day and age.

The low-energy ones often do rather better, as they should, given their cost, but I’m too fond of dimmer switches to be able to change to those in any wholehearted way, and I’m still rather dubious about whether the true environmental benefits over their lifetime, if any, justify the cost and inconvenience…

So tell me, am I just becoming old and cranky, or does somebody still make a good old 60-watter the way they used to when I were a lad?

Adrian van den Heever tells me he has been wondering what to do with all those bottles of champagne he opens but doesn’t finish in one evening; it seems a pity to let the fizz go to waste. The obvious solution – inviting me around to help polish them off – doesn’t work quite so well now he’s in Palo Alto.

So he sought out local expertise and found that some research on the subject had been done at Stanford – almost within walking distance, which is probably just as well.

This is what they found out.

I was visiting the London office of a large internet company today and was planning to demonstrate CODA to them, so was a little distressed when I arrived to discover that their corporate internet connection was down, and they had no connectivity!

It all worked out well, though, because somebody in the group had recently bought a Netgear MBM621 – a 3G-to-ethernet router.

We plugged the CODA kit and my laptop into this, and It Just Worked ™. What’s more, the performance was remarkably good. It would be interesting to see whether it worked well outside the confines of central London, but in this situation, it was a real godsend.

This type of device could be a game-changer; exhibition centres often charge exhibitors phenomenal amounts for internet connections at their stands, for example. That little scam may not be viable for much longer.

Netgear call this little box a ‘modem’, but it’s more of a router; it does DHCP and NAT, and the only downside I could see was that it only has one ethernet port, so you need a switch if you’re plugging in more than one device.

Well worth investigating if you need to set up an impromptu network somewhere.

Here’s a question for you. Which company was responsible for building the first business computer?

IBM, perhaps? Data General? DEC? or Lyons (the British tea company)?

Yes! Well guessed! It was Lyons.

The New York Times tells the story of David Caminer, who worked with Maurice Wilkes to create the LEO, and who died this month.

Gordon Brown said recently that improving social mobility is a “national crusade” in which Labour has not made enough progress.

I thought the BBC’s The Week In Westminster programme had some interesting comments from Matthew Taylor, a former advisor to Tony Blair:

I think we should be more critical than we are about the concept of ‘social mobility’, and I think we should set it against the concept of ‘equity’. You can have a society which is socially mobile but very unequal; you can equally have a society that isn’t terribly mobile but where there are high levels of equality, and probably, the evidence suggests, the thing that makes us content overall as a society is more equality than it is mobility, because the pure concept of social mobility means that for everybody who goes up, someone comes down, and generally speaking we’re more frightened about coming down than we are excited about going up.

Politicians talk about social mobility because it’s so much easier to talk about than ‘redistribution’, and because people only understand social mobility as an ‘upward’ concept. If people really thought through was was meant, for example, by a society that was quite happy to let unintelligent middle-class children not succeed then I think people might not see this concept through such rose-tinted spectacles.

For the next few days you can hear the interview here. This segment starts around 21:56 mins in.

See 3BucksForBrendan.

These ideas are great, but, like the Million Dollar Homepage, each one can probably only be done once…

The polarisation of American politics is a common subject of discussion. A recent Economist article suggests that “Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder.”

Where you live is partly determined by where you can afford to live, of course. But the “”Big Sort”” does not seem to be driven by economic factors. Income is a poor predictor of party preference in America; cultural factors matter more. For Americans who move to a new city, the choice is often not between a posh neighbourhood and a run-down one, but between several different neighbourhoods that are economically similar but culturally distinct.

For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you’ve heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be.

…

Because Americans are so mobile, even a mild preference for living with like-minded neighbours leads over time to severe segregation. An accountant in Texas, for example, can live anywhere she wants, so the liberal ones move to the funky bits of Austin while the more conservative ones prefer the exurbs of Dallas. Conservative Californians can find refuge in Orange County or the Central Valley.

Over time, this means Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views. In a book called “”Hearing the Other Side””, Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania crunched survey data from 12 countries and found that Americans were the least likely of all to talk about politics with those who disagreed with them.