Status-Q

One of the first apps I installed on my first iPod Touch was ‘Shakespeare’, a conveniently-pocketable version of The Complete Works.

I’ve been surprised how often I refer to it, and I rather like the century-spanning blend of content and media.

But as the operating system and the application have matured and been updated, they’ve developed new and spooky abilities. I’m now getting messages from beyond the grave…

I like the fact that “Shakespeare” is in quotation marks. Even in the afterlife, perhaps, the authorship is disputed?

Another nice TED talk from Michael Shermer, which will help you understand the world, or at least, understand how you understand the world. (Watch this one first if you haven’t seen it it already).

End of an era…

Last year, the National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry was given the last roll of Kodachrome produced by Kodak. Yesterday, the last lab still developing the format took its last orders. He delivered it to them by hand.

He made good use of the roll, though.

In some ways it seems inappropriate to mourn the death of a media format – it’s happening all the time now. But this one is unusual, firstly in having lasted for 75 years, and secondly, in having so much of people’s lives bound up in it.

One day, we, or perhaps our grandchildren, may feel the same about paper.

My American readers will know the expression ‘to say uncle’ or ‘to cry uncle’, meaning to submit, admit defeat, ask for mercy.

It’s not a phrase we use over here, and I’ve often wondered about its origins.

Michael Quinion’s excellent site, which I’ve recommended before, has a plausible answer.

Useless fact of the day….

2011 is a prime number.

Only 13 prime-numbered years in the last century. Must be a good omen.

Actually, I’m rather tempted to write a spoof astrological-type book.

The Power of Primes, I’ll call it. How ancient Greek mathematical concepts can forge your destiny!

I’ll dig up lots of powerful correlations showing that prime numbers are indeed a good omen, and that non-primes are much more dodgy. There were no prime-numbered years during the two world wars, for example. The Sept 11th attacks happened in 2001, which was not a prime year, even though the surrounding 1997, 1999 and 2003 all were. Pretty sinister, eh? Yes, I think the first person to expose this hitherto-unknown law of nature could make a packet.

I shall set to work. I think 2011 will be a good year.

So will 2017, by the way…

Everybody’s talking about Wikileaks, so in general, I haven’t. People like John are doing a much better job than I ever could.

There was some discussion on a couple of the Twit.tv podcasts about the heightened emotions directed at Wikileaks itself, though, and I thought they came to some sane conclusions, which were roughly as follows:

• The person who committed a crime was the original source, who is now being dealt with by the law
• Wikileaks did no more than any newspaper would have done if it got its hands on the material, and is no more or less culpable than the New York Times and the Guardian and others who have been republishing it.
• Wikileaks just did it more efficiently and for different, and some would argue, more honourable, motivations than a newspaper’s. [This is the real novelty. People know how to interpret newspapers’ actions.]
• Those hackers attempting to target organisations that failed to support Wikileaks are guilty of suppressing the kind of freedoms of speech and action for which Wikileaks stands.
• The big danger is that any measures brought in to ‘deal with’ Wikileaks could be used against the New York Times and the Guardian in the future.

That seemed to me a pretty good executive summary, but what a lot of fun debate is going on about these, and all the ramifications, especially as initial outrages give way to more careful considerations.

They’re all missing the real question, of course: who will play Assange when the movies start to come out?

Here’s an excellent Nature article by Ahmed Zewail. Extract:

Some believe that more can be achieved through tightly managed research — as if we can predict the future. I believe this is an unfortunate misconception that affects and infects research funding.

I’ve always liked Einstein’s comment that “if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”.

There’s a good post on the Economist blog about the WikiLeaks affair:

My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America’s constitution. If he wants to use Sweden’s whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course.

It’s a bit of an over-simplification: if you’re an an anarchist, where should you live, since we no longer have Australia set aside for that purpose? But it’s basically a good point.

This makes me think of the observations by Dawkins et al that those who will flatly deny the validity of the scientific process when it challenges their view of the creation of the earth, or the efficacy of alternative medicines, will then happily get on a plane to fly home, where every minute of their very lives depend on hundreds of years of that same process.

This is the point at which, by the way, if you haven’t seen it, you should watch Louis CK’s comments on ‘Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy’:

Anyway, back to WikiLeaks: The other thing that bugs me is that the feeling that some of those who revel most enthusiastically in the WikiLeaks revelations would be those who would protest most loudly if their own privacy were compromised.

Just as ‘superstition’ is often the name we use for somebody else’s religion – and they for ours – so ‘freedom of information’ is often the name we give to invasion of someone else’s privacy, and, one day, might be used for invasion of ours.

Be careful what you wish for… You may get it!

Update: I should perhaps emphasise that I’m an advocate of freedom of information in general! But we’re starting to hear stories which remind me of what we’ve seen with the Human Rights Act in the past: the more such good intentions get formalised into legal structures, the more people come to think of them as unassailable rights in all circumstances, and the more they can be misused by those wanting to make a quick buck or write a sensational story.