Palm warned that after seven or eight apps, depending on footprint, we’d have to start closing some items to save memory, but we’ve taken the Pre up to 12 apps and beyond (including four browser windows, email, SMS / AIM conversations, the AccuWeather app, Pandora streaming in the background, dialer, and more) with no issue.

- Engadget

This makes me very happy.

- Stephen Bayley: Reject the Prince of Pastiche and his ludicrous architectural prejudices [Observer]

Filing this one away in case I ever forget why reading just the headlines and the standfirst of news stories never really tells you what’s going on:

Swine flu could affect third of world’s population, says study

Researchers say swine flu will spread around world within nine months, as UK confirms three more cases

The swine flu virus will infect a third of the world’s population if it continues to spread at its current rate, scientists warned today, as three more cases were confirmed in the UK.

In what the journal Science described as the “first quick and dirty analysis” of swine flu, a study by researchers at Imperial College London predicted the virus was likely to cause an epidemic in the northern hemisphere in the autumn.

One of the authors, the epidemiologist and disease modeller Neil Ferguson, who sits on the World Health Organisation’s emergency committee for the outbreak, said the virus had “full pandemic potential”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “It is likely to spread around the world in the next six to nine months, and when it does so, it will affect about one-third of the world’s population.

OH MY GOD. WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

“To put that into context, normal seasonal flu probably affects around 10% of the world’s population every year, so we are heading for a flu season which is perhaps three times worse than usual –

Oh.

– not allowing for whether this virus is more severe than normal seasonal flu viruses.”

That strikes me as rather a large “not allowing”.

So: scary headline, story that confuses more than reassures. Standard stuff, really.

I’m surprised we haven’t heard more objections to this clause of the proposed European Union Definition of Antisemitism:

Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include… Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Strikes me as problematic, to say the least.

Imagine if, instead of criticising each other in op-eds, engaging in showpiece letter-page spats or sprawling, hard-to-follow blog arguments, the thinkers of our time actually discussed things directly with each other? Rebutting and responding to each other in real time? And they let us watch? Wouldn’t it be, just, the best thing?

Don’t let the ramshackle presentation and iffy video quality put you off. If it plays its cards right, and maybe smartens up a little, the rapidly-growing Bloggingheads might just be the most important thing ever to happen anywhere (at least, since the last thing I said that about).

A case in point: This exchange - between semi-repentant neocon David Frum and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation (American think tanks always have three-word names, and one word is always “America”) is the best broad-reaching analysis of the current Middle East situation I’ve seen coming out of the recent Gaza debate. It provides a great impression of what the practical road to a palestinian state might look like - and a fantastic insight, for those of us used to the European viewe of the issue - an incredibly useful view of the conservative take on the current state of play and how we got here. There’s an audio download and podcast subscription options also available.

Someone on CNN just got rounded on by his colleagues for saying that he thought Obama’s speech lacked a truly memorable line on a par with “ask not what your country can do for you” or the oft-misquoted “We have nothing The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And I suspect he’s right: it was lacking a money shot, as it were. But I think that may be deliberate. For while the tasks facing Roosevelt and Kennedy in those speeches were straightforward, Obama’s was highly complex - too much so to be summed up in a single, memorable phrase.

Roosevelt’s task was to reassure a nation in the midst of crisis. That reassurance - a message of, to use the modern slogan, Hope - was all that people needed to take away from his inaugural. For Kennedy, the task was also simple: to stir a complacent nation into a greater level of engagement with the Cold War, the battle against poverty, and assorted other challenges, and in doing so add a sense of history to what was in fact a squeaked-through election victory.

By contrast, Obama’s speech had a double aim: not only to reassure the nation that it could weather the current crisis, but also to impress the seriousness of that crisis on the nation. Remember, when Obama first began selling his message of change to the nation, the financial crisis had barely begun. The problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, of failing schools and crumbling infrastructure, were those he promised to deliver America from. As the election continued, the crisis became central to Obama’s speeches and the number one issue for voters. But the true depth of the crisis has become clear only since the election. Just these last few days, the dire news from Bank of America and Citigroup show the bottom has not yet been reached.

Yet the true scale of the crisis, it seems, hasn’t truly hit home. Roosevelt addressed a people who had seen three long years of decline. They knew the extent of their woes, and were desperate to hear good news. While the period since Obama’s election may have seemed interminable, it was merely weeks, much of which has been spent on business-as-usual bickering about the Warren selection, the Burris farrago, Geithner’s tax returns and the like. In recent days Obama’s hopes to quickly secure his stimulus package have been stalled by increasing conservative concern about waste, partly a result of the supposed “failure” of last autumn’s bailout.

All of this is reasonable scrutiny. But none of it is commensurate with a sense of dire emergency. Plans on the scale of Obama’s require a sense of urgency of the kind which was seen after September 11. So the speech had a dual purpose: to provide the sense of hope which we associate with Obama, but also to lay out clearly to Americans, perhaps for the first time, the full scale of the challenge ahead.

Hence the blunt tone of the first few lines. Declaring himself “humbled by the task before us,” he spoke of taking the oath “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms”. The summing-up of the state of the union that followed was remarkably bleak:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood.  Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.  Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.  Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered.  Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. 

This from a man who was ridiculed last year as a happy-clappy peddler of loose promises! Even when the tone of the speech turned to the positive future, the tone was of gritty determination rather than high-flown dreams.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.  They are serious and they are many.  They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.  But know this, America -  they will be met.

At times, the tone was almost chastening. Obama blamed the financial crisis on “our collective failure to make hard choices.” His main biblical reference was almost damning: “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” For an America that has been coddled with praise for years by a simplistically patriotic president, this is a remarkable change of tone.

The next siginificant passage reminded this “childish” America of the sacrifices that brought us to this point. 

It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. 

This is the voice of a serious man with a deep sense of history. This is not feelgood stuff.

As the speech went on, Obama talked in more hopeful terms about his goals, and the shopping list is daunting:

We will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

But strikingly, the climax of the speech brought the tone back to one of marked uncertainty. More than once, he associated the current crisis with the question of the survival of the United States itself. First he recalled Thomas Paine’s words, read aloud to George Washington’s troops before one of the final battles of the War of Independence:

In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”*

Then in his closing paragraph he openly, albeit briefly, raised the spectre of the end of the American experiment:

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. [My emphasis]

This rhetoric is not aspirational. If this is an example of the audacity of hope, it is a hope tempered with a profound sense of foreboding at the scale of the task ahead. If this is inspiration for the future, it’s also deeply aware of the journey that has led us here. And if this is a message of reassurance for the people, it’s also one of responsibility.

It’s a nuanced message. A mature message. Even a conservative one. It reinforces, once again, my suspicion that Obama may truly be what he appears to be: a uniquely serious, thoughtful and determined man, potentially a remarkable leader.

These times require no less.

Read the full text of Obama’s inaugural speech

*Paine’s original words were “to meet and repulse it.”

Another vanity publisher is the last thing the newspaper sector needs. Alexander Lebedev, the wealthy former KGB agent, is close to buying one of the most influential London titles from Daily Mail & General Trust. Owning the Evening Standard, he correctly surmises, will be “a good way to waste money”. If he hopes the trophy asset, which could lose £17.5m this year, will confer compensating non-cash benefits, in the form of influence and prestige, he may be disappointed. That type of money can buy lobbyists-a-dozen and acres of rolling advertorial. Either way, such determination to bankroll a zombie paper bodes ill for profit-oriented rivals hoping to eke some small change out of their own titles.

The FT is missing the point, I suspect. It’s over-optimistic to believe that a quasi-national, quasi-quality newspaper like the Standard can be dragged back into profit by vigourous cost-cutting. The effects of penny-pinching on a newsgathering operation - and its quick, detrimental effect on sales - can be seen at the Mirror. The truth is that this kind of trophy ownership, however problematic, is the only way serious news operations are likely to be sustained in the decades to come.

On this logic, there is little reason for DMGT, which regrets having failed to sell its regional newspaper titles, to stop there. It makes no sense, for example, for it to continue to prop up London Lite, its probably marginally loss-making free evening paper. Associated Newspapers, the DMGT subsidiary that also publishes morning freesheet Metro in the capital, launched London Lite in 2006 as part of a defensive move to protect the Standard from the London Paper, a News Corp-owned rival. Now that it will soon be largely shot of the Standard, DMGT can safely jettison all this other baggage. Shame Mr Lebedev won’t take that too.

Again, the point entirely missed. London Lite is not just dependent on the Standard for its raison d’etre, but for almost all of its content. It will go to Lebedev, and if it closes it won’t be for a few months I’m sure.

Beware the Kennedy analogy… The differences between Kennedy and Obama are far more striking than the parallels. Kennedy was the arrogant and spoilt brat of a politically ambitious male chauvinist multi-millionaire father, who gave his four sons a patrician sense that they had a right to rule, and screw around when they felt like it. Admittedly, Jack Kennedy had to struggle against poor health throughout his life, but his personal battle cannot be compared to Obama’s ability through merit and determination to surmount a peripatetic upbringing in an impoverished single-parent household for much of the time. Kennedy may have broken a glass ceiling as the first practising Roman Catholic to become president, but he did not see himself as a standard bearer for other Catholics. His breakthrough is as nothing compared to Obama’s triumph in winning the White House as a black man, and a proud representative of all of America’s non-Anglo minorities. In depth and scope his life experience far exceeds Kennedy’s pampered youth…

…the books the two men have written show that the only genuine intellectual, as well a writer of great sensitivity, is Obama. Kennedy was intelligent but in spite of all the Camelot trimmings he did not have the curiosity about ideas or the ability to view issues critically which define an intellectual.

In one of his final actions in the White House, President Bush on Thursday declared Jan. 18 to be “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.” 

“All human life is a gift from our creator that is sacred, unique and worthy of protection. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our country recognizes that each person, including every person waiting to be born, has a special place and purpose in this world,” reads the presidential proclamation.

The Economist’s spoken word edition has no truck with any of this “bleeping” nonsense. (Skip to 1:30)

“He hasn’t called him a crook!”

We’re now supposed to believe that Obama is at best insufficiently appalled at Blagoyevich’s behaviour - which, let’s not forget, is still legally unproven - and at worst implicated in it, because he uses calm language. And talk-show guests talk openly about Obama’s camp “admitting whatever it’s done”, apparently without feeling the need to admit that so far there’s not a shred of evidence Obama’s camp were involved with Blagojevich in anything other than entirely standard ways.

I can’t think of a more perfect example of how the desperate need to fill 24 hours of news a day has maddened America’s political culture. Not exactly news, I know, but I’m still frequently shocked.

“This is nothing to do with Obama. But some people are going to try to make people think this has something to do with Obama. So this is bad news for Obama. What is the Obama camp going to do about this bad news?”

US Media FAIL.

September 2008: David Foster Wallace commits suicide. Mere weeks later, Axl Rose reappears from relative obscurity with the long-awaited Chinese Democracy.

Coincidence?

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals.

 Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value” …the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus. [emphasis added]

Robert Nozick, “Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?”

Now, look. Like much that comes out of the Cato Institute, this twenty-two-year-old essay contains its fair share of gleeful left-baiting. But this is a salient point. Bloggers, journalists and authors declares the intellectual* the new aristocrat, with over-educated millennials able to work the way they want, in fascinating fields, achieve social status and wealth, and still have time left over for surfing. But is this borne out by the evidence, or is it - as I suspect - mostly clever kids’ wish-fulfilment?

The brilliant PhD candidate who struggles to get funding; the intelligent, thoughtful young journalist who chafes at the tabloid leanings of his paper; the idealistic young lawyer who rails against his profession’s less ethical habits, or its disinterest in work/life balance. All the stuff of alientated twentysomething cliche. Can’t all of this be summed up, quite neatly, in the realisation Nozick describes above?

*Also known by the handy new phrase “knowledge worker,” which is essentially an attempt to replace “intellectual” with something that doesn’t scare off employers.

Washington Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders has admitted that he was the one who stood up and yelled “tyrant!” at U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey during a speech in which Mukasey later fainted. At a black-tie dinner on Nov. 20, the AG defended the Bush administration’s war on terror. Sanders, who said he felt compelled to voice his disagreement with those policies, said he had already left the event before Mukasey’s collapse, and did not learn of it until the next day. 

Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job. The fantasies of perfection of replaced by the fantasies of utter failure. So I finally get to work on it. Now it would have been simpler for me, and for the publisher, and for the author, if I had sat down and spent four or five hours on the manuscript right off the bat. If only I had been able to give myself permission to do an imperfect job right at the outset. Is there anyway we can bring that about?

You have to get in the habit of forcing yourself to analyze, at the time you accept a task, to consider the costs and befits of doing a less than perfect job. You need to ask the questions: how useful would a perfect job be here? How much more useful than a merely adequate job? Or even a half-assed job? And you need to ask the questions: what is the probability that I will really do anything like a remotely perfect job on this? And you need to ask: what difference will it make to me, whether I do or not?

John Perry, “Procrastination as Perfectionism”

There’s surely some truth in this. The slow descent from great intentions to panicked cobbling-together is a depressingly regular hallmark of my life. But I’m not constantly getting into trouble. Actually, the results are usually pretty good. So why not aim to do an adequate job, get it out of the way, and get out of there, right from the start?

Those frightening people who tend to have half a task done, halfway through the alloted time; who never seem to have that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they think about things they have to do; they’re not superhuman. They just understand that, for most things, good enough is just that - good enough. But millions of us - particularly, I’ll wager, over-educated knowledge-worker types - create a vision of genius that haunts us until we’re unable to actually get anything done.

"US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama points on his way to board his campaign plane in Columbia, Missouri, October 31, 2008"

Well, yes. He clearly is pointing. This superb photo series of Obama’s campaign is only slightly impaired by the ponderous captions.

I don’t remember many people singing “God Save the Queen” in May 1997.