Letters Remain

Month: October 2008

  • Top 10 Nobel Snubs

    As the 2008 Nobel Laureates are announced, SciAm looks at the top 10 Nobel snubs – those who undoubtedly deserved the award, but never did: Lise Meitner: left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission Oswald Avery: never won a Nobel for showing that genes are made of…

  • Public Servant Blogs

    Listening to Law in Action this week, I noticed that it’s now being broadcast not on BBC Radio 4, but on BBC null. Really though, I was listening to Clive Coleman’s show this week as he profiled (if swiftly) three of the four public servant bloggers that I subscribe to: PC David Copperfield Bystander of…

  • Oxford and Cambridge Lectures on iTunes

    The universities of Oxford and Cambridge have announced that they are to make lectures by well-known academics available for free through iTunes U. Oxford will publish 150 hours of free video and audio podcasts of lectures and ideas from what it described as “world-leading thinkers”. Meanwhile the University of Cambridge […] is making more than…

  • The Best Personal Library

    I’ve seen many personal libraries: few that—like David—induce jealousy, fewer still that I truly covet, and none that compel me to blog. At least that was until I saw Jay Walker’s library. The photographs of the Internet entrepreneur’s library alone are awe inspiring. Then I started reading. via Kottke

  • Two Stories of Escaping WW2 POW Camps

    The fascinating story of how Waddington’s Monopoly sets were used to help captured Allied soldiers escape from Nazi POW camps: In 1941, the British Secret Service approached Waddington with its master plan, and before long, production of a “special edition” Monopoly set was underway. For the top-secret mission, the factory set aside a small, secure…

  • UK Digital Rights Landscape

    Suw Charman-Anderson, founder and first Executive Director of the wonderful UK-based digital rights organisation, Open Rights Group, has produced an informative ‘mind map’ of the UK digital rights ‘landscape’. As this was created over three years ago, an up-to-date and completed version would be of great interest.

  • Committed to Past Constraints: QWERTY

    Something I’ve never thought of reading before: the history of the QWERTY keyboard: With the assistance of […] Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, [Christopher Sholes] built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867. However, Sholes’ “Type Writer” had many defects, [including] the tendency of the typebars to…

  • The Population Decline

    At Long Bets, a project of The Long Now Foundation where he is a board member, Kevin Kelly has predicted that “by 2060 the total population of humans on earth will be less than it is today“. The biggest driver of the shift from large families to small families is communication technology and education. As…

  • The Cost of Firing: A Comparison of Severance Packages

    With cost-cutting and downsizing on peoples’ minds, The Economist compares the cost of firing people around the world. America, New Zealand and Tonga are among the most company-friendly countries, requiring no penalties or compensation to fire a full-time employee of 20 years. By contrast, a business in Zimbabwe must shell out well over eight years’…

  • The Four Kinds of Free

    In addition to the gift economy, Chris Anderson of The Long Tail describes the three other business models in today’s ‘free’ economy. Paid products subsidizing free products Paying later subsidizing free now Paying people subsidizing free people