El Classico…
Category: flaneur
And so the theater continues – Julian Assange lost his plea against extradition yesterday, and although his lawyers are expected to appeal, it seems that he is heading north soon. What is truly amazing in all this is that throughout the entire odyssey (which involved a 250 000 pounds bail) he has not been officially charged with anything – he is merely wanted for questioning, you see. It is all based on a system of arrest warrants for which the phrase ‘guilty until proven innocent’ morphs into ‘guilty because…just because’. There will be many more high moments in this court drama until, in the end, it all quietly disappears from managed perceptions.
Below is a selection of useful articles on WikiLeaks:
Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors – Pepe Escobar
US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment – Simon Jenkins
WikiLeaks vs. the Political Class: Why they hate Julian Assange – Justin Raimondo
WikiLeaks’ Marketing Strategy: A Stroke of Genius – Gary North
The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics – Glenn Greenwald
Jean Michel Jarre is that rarest of creators who will always remain ahead of their time. This track was made in 1978 – one year after I was born, and is probably the first piece of music I ever heard. My father was listening to it on a tiny tape player, and the recording was a copy of copies, a chain of copies spanning the iron curtain. A message from a future that never came.
I just discovered Jolicloud – an open source, Ubuntu Linux based operating system made for the cloud. Apparently the original version – 1.0 – was made entirely with netbooks in mind, though the latest version I am downloading now – 1.1 – is hardware neutral and should run on anything. I am planning to run it in dualboot with Windows on my Hp Mini as a start and see how it goes from there. The access screen looks beautiful, with intuitive functionality and zero hints of the Linux beast under the hood running the OS. Start screen>
Update: I am writing this through Jolicloud on my netbook – the install is fast, smooth, and probably as painless as it can get. First screen asks to connect online, which is what one should expect from a cloud OS. The layout feels a bit like a cross between Ubuntu and Android, which makes sense to me. With cloud connectivity it should all be about speed and smooth experience, so I decided to test that by streaming music and doing a couple of other things simultaneously. So, while I am typing this I am listening to Henry Saiz streaming through the SoundCloud player app, while also running Prezi in another window for good measure, and the overall speed and experience make me a believer. I haven’t tested things like connecting to projectors or corporate wifi, but from what I see so far Jolicloud is a win.
This little graph from IHS Reseach has been making a lot of noise around the interwebs in the last three days. The message is that app store revenue is growing all over the board, in some cases quite dramatically, which is ultimately just another proof that the trend away from the desktop and towards the cloud is real and getting stronger. Android Market revenue grew 861.5% year-over-year – read that figure again. Of course the Android revenue is still puny compared to what Apple is making on its apps, but the other important figure is that the Apple App Store lost 10% of market share over the same period. With the three-way competition between Samsung, HTC and Motorolla for control over the Android hardware market only heating up, these figures can go only one way for Apple.
To make things even gloomier for Apple, Eric Schmidt just announced at MWC2011 that Android has 300 000 activations per day and rising, that YouTube apparently gets 160 million mobile views per year, and that ChromeOS is definitely coming this year. I will probably have another post with more on that speech.
Just received my copy of Nassim Taleb’s latest book The Bed of Procrustes. Excellent hardcover edition, beautiful typeface, and that’s not mentioning the sharp writing Taleb is famous for*. The aphorisms in the prelude already set the stage –
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion
– and it only gets better from there. The very idea of basing the book on the myth of Procrustes is brilliant. As Taleb points out in a footnote, the Procrustean myth isn’t just about the obvious allusion to an arbitrary frame into which everything must fit; it is also about changing the wrong variables when things don’t work. The same idea is captured in a poem by Bertold Brecht:
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
*Although I think the earlier Fooled by Randomness is sharper, more focused, more merciless, and altogether better than the more famous The Black Swan.
The main music theme from Wong Kar Wei‘s In the Mood for Love – probably the most exquisite music piece ever written for film. And what a film that is!
Gong Xi Fa Cai!
Happy Chinese New Year of the Golden Rabbit!
An insightful TED talk on the rise of China by Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World. He is tailoring the message and examples to the audience of course, but two of the points he makes I have never encountered so well enunciated before. First – that virtually all Western analysis of China is predicated on a very artificial perspective of how the world can possibly develop (in the footsteps of the West); and second – that Western conceptions of China remain at best locked in a rationalized version of this paradigm, and at worst (much more common) in a state of total parochial ignorance of the entirety of Chinese civilization – ignorance which is not reciprocated on the other side. First-hand experience and conversations with ordinary Chinese across different provinces confirm both observations for me.
Finally settled in Wollongong, more or less, and as luck would have it the weather has been humid, gloomy and very un-summerlike compared to Perth. Surprisingly to me, even though the place is practically a suburb of Sydney, all business is done extremely s-l-o-w-l-y, and the paperwork required to achieve something is in direct geometric relationship with the time it takes to achieve it. The wonderful, almost circus-like ineptness of the property agents here deserves a special mention. On the other hand, and in the spirit of fairness, it must be mentioned that it has already taken three different gas companies (AGL, Energy Australia, Origin) more than ten days to decide which one of them owns the gas connection at the place we are staying, and there is still no eureka moment on the horizon. Of course all three consider it beneath them to keep us mere paying customers informed of their deliberations, and I haven’t called a fourth simply out of fear its presence will prolong the process according to some no doubt equally confused formula. Don’t even get me started on what it takes (and how much it costs) to register a car which was perfectly roadworthy, comprehensively insured, and fine for Perth. Alas, enough. Rant over. After all New South Wales is a bankrupt state and deserves our condolences and tender understanding. The long break is over, let a thousand musings bloom.