Status-Q

In November I wrote a little piece entitled The Patent Cold War, outlining my frustrations with the patent system and a couple of thoughts on how it might be improved.

I stand by everything I said there, but it’s a pity that I hadn’t seen Kenneth Cukier’s excellent survey for the Economist, “A Market For Ideas“, published a month beforehand.

I was lucky enough to sit next to Kenn at a dinner recently and he listened with great grace to my outpourings without even hinting that most of them were a small subset of what he had worked on only a few months before.

This is a very interesting, well-researched and well-balanced 14-page survey, and comes highly recommended for anybody with an interest in this area.

It’s too bad that the Economist makes it so hard to get hold of a copy if you’re not a subscriber. I almost never pay for premium online content, but I would recommend doing so for this. It doesn’t look as if there’s any way to buy a copy of one survey without signing up for a subscription, though, so if you don’t subscribe I’d find a friend who does and ask them to order reprints.

Ah, and as a follow-up, have a look at John’s Observer column about the Blackberry proceedings.

Some work on Multi-touch interaction by Jeff Han, Yann LeCun and friends. Very pretty videos; well worth watching.

On the latest TWiT programme they mention a job advertisement… a company looking for somebody to establish a good reputation in online forums and then promote their products. We all suspect that this happens, but it’s starting to get more blatant.

Don’t believe what you read on the net, guys. And remember the user reviews and comments may be much more suspect than the page content they’re commenting on…

I have happy memories of a small backpacking hostel in Indonesia, where, in the evening, the owner and some friends sat around strumming guitars.

I joined in, in my amateurish way. We played variations on the greatest hits of Eric Clapton – the variations coming from the fact that they, without much knowledge of English, often misheard the original lyrics and were very keen to check with me that they were getting them right. They knew the basic sounds, and I remember one guy earnestly singing, “Snog, snog, snogging on the seventh floor”, where I think Clapton had intended to convey the concept of knocking on heaven’s door.

But I’ve been guilty of some of these, too. I remember being puzzled, in my youth, by the Toto song ‘Africa’ which stated that “there’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do”. (It’s actually ‘a hundred men or more’.) And, at a rather earlier age, my somewhat parochial horizons could be deduced from my belief that the Abba lyrics, “I was sick and tired of everything / When I called you last night, Francesco” actually referred to somebody calling ‘last night, from Tesco’ (a big supermarket chain here in the UK). Rose thought it was nice that Paul Simon could report that “Rene and Georgia agreed with their dog after the war”.

Anyway, I discovered today that such mis-hearings have a name. They’re called Mondegreens. Rose found a nice section on this page entitled “The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind” which explains the name, and, of course, there are quite a few on Wikipedia.

But, go on – add your own favourites in the comments. The original ones are the best…

What’s this?

It’s my attempt to photgraph this chap using a cheap camera and a cheap pair of binoculars:

I actually got some rather more successful shots, but they weren’t so pleasingly mysterious 🙂

I was interviewed on the BBC’s Go Digital programme about Ndiyo a few days ago. More info on the Ndiyo site if you’re interested!

Barcelona has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, often right next door to some of the ugliest.

The outskirts of the city seem to be mile upon mile of dull apartment blocks, and reminded me of nowhere so much as Moscow, though admittedly these ones looked a bit better kept!

But the centre of the city is a real jewel. I loved it. I spent ages burrowing my way into these little medieval streets and getting pretty lost and then I’d suddenly come around the corner and find a cathedral or an archway or a plaza which took my breath away.