cloudsoup

Two podcasts from Berkeley.

Firstly, Prof Margaret (Peggy) Anderson presents History 5 European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present – very fluidly delivered, well-structured, witty and interesting series of lectures on bit of history you might need to have filled in a little.

Secondly, Prof Hubert Dreyfus conducts Philosophy 6 Man, God, and Society in Western Literature. An odd one this, from the World’s leading Heidegger scholar, a romp through great literature starting with The Odyssey and The Oresteia through to Moby Dick. From the course description:

the goal of the course is both to illustrate how to read difficult texts and to provide an understanding of the cultural paradigms that have formed and focused our shared beliefs and practices

Dreyfus’s delvery is meandering and fascinated – he frequently wanders off-piste to debate points with himself. A very engaging speaker dealing with a huge theme.

A planet has been found that’s only 1.5 times the size of earth and appears to have liquid water running on its surface… Wow. That’s pretty amazing. What interests me is twofold. Firstly, obviously, is there life. Secondly, if there isn’t, how easy would it be to introduce some?

Tom Coates, Plasticbag.org, Links for 2007-04-26

Firstly, this planet hasn’t been direcly observed. Its presence is inferred from the behaviour of its star. No liquid at all has been discovered and certainly not observed on this planet. Certainly no water. It does not ‘appear to have water’ on its surface; running, skipping, or doing anything else.

Secondly – how easy would it be to introduce some life? Well, at 20 light years the planet is 9,460,800,000,000 km from us, or thereabouts. If Tom climbed into his car and started driving now at a pretty sharpish 120 km/h (75mph) he should arrive in about 9 million years, assuming he didn’t stop off for a burger and a snooze.

Google marked St David’s Day (St David – patron saint of Wales) with a few daffodils, which was pleasant. It put me in mind of the school Eisteddfodau I attended, with all the girls wearing daffodils and the boys sporting real leeks which were munched over the course of the morning.

St Patrick’s day was marked with a shamrock, begorrah, so it was. I didn’t notice what happened on St Andrew’s Day (St Andrew – patron saint of Scotland).

So yesterday was St George’s day, an easy date to recall as Shakespeare conveniently engineered his birth and death on the 23^rd of April. What did Google do to mark the day? Nothing.

When I was young the flag of St George was sported by the National Front (a fringe fascist group) and nobody else but latterly the flag has been restored to its proper place as a banner for English people, to mix it with the dragon of the Welsh, and with the Irish and Scottish flags or even the Stars and Stripes. But English nationalism, or even any overt regard for the great achievements of the English, is still frowned upon by the liberal bien pensant, bless their hand-knitted socks.

Google shouldn’t kow-tow to this nonsense. hope for better next year.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against infection, and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

On The Economist’s website is a sponsor’s puff from Accenture.

Let’s put aside the problem that the article about business excellence is a single, degraded image of text, with an unreadable embedded graphic, immediately making it clear that Accenture doesn’t care enough about website accessibility.

Instead read, if you can without falling unconscious, the content. Does it remind you of anything? It sounds to me very much like the deliberately obscure and often meaningless pretentious twaddle of postmodernist ‘texts’.

Here’s an example:

Accenture’s global services lines took up the challenge of understanding the contribution that capability mastery in key functional areas makes to achieving high performance (Our services lines consist of professionals organized internally along functional lines including Strategy, Supply Chain Management, Human Performance, Customer Relationship Management, as well as cross-functional groups such as Information Technology) . The central insight from these studies is that each high performer masters a highly select set of business processes and resources that we define as a “distinctive capability”. Unparalleled excellence in this set of functions constitutes a unique business formula for achieving competitive advantage. Lower performers, on the other hand, fail to achieve this mastery across a range of functions
that is the price of admission to even above-average performance.

Straight out of dack’s Web Economy Bullshit Generator, don’t you think? As far as I can tell, it is claiming that to do well you need to know what you’re doing. and people pay lots and lots of money for Accenture’s advice. Apparently.

If you want more in the same vein, try The Postmodern Essay Generator

The lead story on BBC Radio 4 news this morning was the split between the inbred halfwit heir to the throne and his posh bird girlfriend. The same story is lead on the BBC UK website.

Could I stop paying for it please?

update: it’s been the lead story for the entire day on the BBC

Tim O’Reilly has generated code of conduct for bloggers.

A short while ago, O’Reilly wrote the following in an email to me:

some people think that calling people names (your most recent being, “a big douchebag”) is a substitute for discussion.

And when I pointed out to O’Reilly that he was mistaken, that I’d never called him, or indeed anyone, a douchebag, he wrote:

I do apologize. It wasn’t you. It was another commenter. I don’t know why I thought it was you. In a previous post, you even deplored the language used by some of the other posters. Sorry. (But you’ll notice, I made the point privately, and didn’t accuse you in public.)

O’Reilly did apologise but he didn’t properly check his facts before accusing me and he implies ill-mannered private behaviour is more excusible than ill-mannered public behaviour. And he might have a point.

But it isn’t what he suggests in his prissy code of conduct.

Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person. … simply imagine the person you’re speaking to as a real person, standing in front of you. Would you say what you’re saying to them if you were in the same room

Seems to me that O’Reilly is very prepared to be rude in private, which gives him a lot of leeway in public, doesn’t it?

Robin in the garden, from Helen’s Flickr stream

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is on the TV here tonight. I’ve seen it just the once and I’ve been meaning to see it again. The proper temporal order is maddeningly difficult to work out in retrospect and I suppose there is no great benefit in trying, as if some revelation came with the completion of a crossword puzzle – but the film was impressive and Kaufman’s a fine artist (and, I’d say, the obvious auteur here).

I read the Pope poem, Eloisa to Abelard after I’d seen the film. The first stanza fits nicely with the theme:

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
Yet, yet I love!--From Abelard it came,
And Eloisa yet must kiss the name

and later,

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

We took a very brief break and went walking in Derbyshire.

One of the reasons I admire my friend Mena is that she is remarkably prescient

Anil Dash, a Vice President at Six Apart, co-founded by … Mena