I was raising serious questions about the whole basis of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and I actually went through considerable detail as to what I thought was wrong about it. Nothing I’ve seen in reality has changed it. I’m not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.
Alan Greenspan | 0
“When we have déjà vu, we don’t act on it,” Moulin says. “But these people refused to watch television, they stopped reading the newspaper.” The patients were what cognitive scientists call “anosagnosic” — unaware of their condition. They also found situations to be more than just familiar; they believed that they were really recalling them, so much so that they invented memories to justify that belief. They were, to use Tulving’s phrase, time traveling to a reality that had never existed.
– Déjà Vu, Again and Again, a fascinating NYT article from 2006 (via). | 0

A moment of unabashed Boris-fuelled pride, patriotism, and typically British hope.

A truly maginficent Boris masterpiece, encapsulating everything that makes Boris, well.. Boris. Blunt, hilarious, often painful, yet written in such a way as to demonstrate à la fois his unrivalled mastery of the English language, and something of the cultivated carefree “throw everything P.C out the window with gay abandon” attitude he has used to his advantage throughout his career, life, etc. Some tantalising snippets, illustrating the aforementioned… glorious approach to writing:

.. In any case, the Queen has made her first cinematic appearance – in the Bond movie segment – and deepened the admiration in which she is held in Britain and around the world. James Bond and the Monarchy – not to mention The Eton Boating Song… How can anyone call that Lefty propaganda?

We certainly didn’t spend the Beijing-style sums on fireworks – since the Chinese blew roughly the same amount as the British defence budget – but we unquestionably had the same global éclat.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, made a truly excellent speech, in which he paid tribute to the role of Britain in either inventing or codifying the sports we celebrate at the Olympics. Only a small proportion of his speech was in French.

As I write these words there are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade immortalised by Canaletto. They are glistening like wet otters and the water is plashing off the brims of the spectators’ sou’westers. The whole thing is magnificent and bonkers.

This is the blatant hurrah! Brits! Olympics! No real disasters, flag confusion, stadium key losing, lack of gold aside, patriotic glorious pride type moment. Raising my glass of Pimmm’s wistfully, from Bordeaux airport, soon to fly over aforementioned festivities on the way to SF! Go Team GB!

(source: Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (that still seems surreal over four years later), in his weekly Daily Telegraph column: London Olympics 2012: here’s 20 jolly good reasons to feel cheerful about the Games – Telegraph.)

2 Comments
…The real problem is that so many people have thought the internet would be an unalloyed good; in part that’s because it has had plenty of cheerleaders, especially companies that stand to benefit from it – especially companies that stand to benefit from its growth. And nobody likes to be the one saying “hold on” as everyone’s rushing to the door. But we don’t have to break the internet to improve it – just make people more aware that we’re social animals first and internet users second…
- Charles Arthur, The Guardian’s Technology Editor writing in The internet’s two-sided freedom. | 0
The Ethical Mirage: A Temporal Explanation as to Why We Aren’t as Ethical as We Think We Are, an HBS working paper [PDF]. | 0

A tale of three iPhone 4s, two untimely ends, and differing box sizes across the world

Whilst tidying came across the boxes for my three iPhone 4s (yes, three, only one of which is still alive today, I am suitably mortified1…) and noticed a few differences resulting from their differing origins: one British, one French, and one American.

Continue reading →

  1. I hasten to add that I’ve owned each generation of iPhone, and only one of each until the iPhone 4. I’m not sure whether this says something about the solidity of the iPhone 4 versus the previous models, or just my increasing clumsiness. [↩]
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3 things I learned while my plane crashed: Ric Elias on TED.com. Just watched this. Puts many life change I’m pondering right now into perspective. Hum. He learned:
  1. To no-longer postpone anything
  2. To eliminate negative energy: no-longer try to be right, but try to be happy
  3. That the most important thing for him was to be a good parent
| 5

AppleTV, HandBrake, and MetaX

This Christmas I spent some time ripping part of my DVD collection for consumption via the Apple TV1. To do this I used the excellent HandBrake, followed by MetaX to efficiently add the necessary metadata and thumbnail artwork2. All was going swimmingly until we settled down one afternoon to watch one of the aforementioned films and oh, it was just one long, black image. Five minutes of furious testing and Googling later, it turned out to be a conflict between the settings I was using in HandBrake and MetaX. I’m documenting this here in case anyone else should run into the same issue3.

The Apple TV preset in Handbrake makes uses of the “Large file size” option, which can be seen below:

Now, unfortunately, by default MetaX will choke on files from HandBrake created using the above Apple TV preset. To fix this, and therefore end up with working movie files, you need to enable 64-bit mode in MetaX from within preferences4 :

So, there you have it: in order to successfully pass files created using HandBrake’s Apple TV preset through MetaX, you need to enable support for large files within MetaX’s preferences.

  1. Whilst I was initially sceptical about the second-generation AppleTV and its lack of onboard storage, this simple little box has turned out to be quite the media nirvāna [↩]
  2. without which I’d naturally be unable to relax and enjoy my iTunes library [↩]
  3. And so hopefully won’t have to re-rip 30 or so films! [↩]
  4. As you can see, it’s helpfully labeled “Enable support for large files”. [↩]
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Encrypted, Rotating Time Machine Backups on Snow Leopard. Having recently had my previous Time Machine backup disk stolen, I’ve just set up the new disk with added encryption. Worth doing I think. | 0

Winning a Draw

New York Post Cover, 13th June 2010

This may go some way to mitigating the embarrassment after last night's pitiful 1-1 draw between England and the USA. Bear in mind that I work with 30+ Americans.

American friends, is the Post in any way respected, or is it more of a Daily Mail-esque publication?

(via mark)

3 Comments