Jonathan Franzen stumbles on a parallel between ‘sexy’ as applied to humans and to gadgets: it’s inherently one-sided:

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets

…

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

[mainly for the benefit of google]

Something I was surprised not to be able to find online: a list of UK parliamentary constituencies, and the party currently in power there. Something I needed, and I imagine a lot of people have put together for themselves over the years.

Anyway,

here’s a CSV file

, pulled from the They Work For You API today (18/6/2011).

code will go up on github soonish, along with a bunch of related things.

To make a screen multiuser:

-a : multiuser on

You can also include _multiuser on_ in .screenrc to make all screens start multiuser

Then you connect to it with screen -x

Large donations to prestigious universities, so goes the common belief, will help your offspring get places there.

The universities deny this with varying amounts of vigor.

The rumour, though, probably does them no harm at all. If the rumour were mostly baseless, they would be in the best possible position. They can whip up donations with the belief, and not be constrained to live up to their not-quite-promises.

Such is the benefit of being a powerful player in an illegal market, where most of the other participants will only play once, have poor information and jdugment often clouded by emotions.

[vaguely in rsponse to Tyler Cowen, and more indirectly to the New College of the Humanities]

The Mongols, famously, were not much interested in religious conformity. People who managed to avoid being massacred during the Mongol invasions were at least unlikely, subsequently, to be persecuted for their religious beliefs. What interested the Mongols was that holy men of all religions should both pray for the Khan (for there was no knowing who might have the best hotline to heaven), and, at least as important, provide the regime with access to their specialist skills. The Mongols were nothing if not pragmatists.

— David Morgan (?) in the TLS

[you hear this a lot. I do wonder how psychologically true it ever was]

This is fantastic, and fantastical. It’s something like the origin myth of k-punk, in a self-consciously edgy philosophy sub-faculty over-exposed by Simon Reynolds:

Still nominally affiliated to the famously poststructuralist Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It’s the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.

Governments have got into the habit of offering massive amounts of foreign aid, then quietly abandoning their promises once public attention has moved on. It’s nice to see them being called on it:

The Group of Eight (G8) countries will pledge $20bn in aid to post-autocratic Arab countries that have toppled heads of state and moved towards democracy, according to European officials.

…

While the $20bn would add a strong boost to the countries’ economies, Al Jazeera’s Jackie Rowland pointed out that the G8 had failed in the past to fulfill aid commitments.

She said that by the end of the conference, leaders were expected to publicly admit that neglect.

“We’re expecting them to admit that there’s been a shortfall in the aid that was promised… and the aid that was actually delivered,” our correspondent said.

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The Libyan ambassador in Berlin has finally defected. Sort of.

This is months after many of his counterparts in other countries, and at the UN quit. It was the defecting Libyan ambassador who persuaded the UN to meet on Libya, and to pass UN Resolution 1970 to impose an arms embargo. The Security Council at the time wanted to postpone meeting on Libya, but the diplomatic defections forced their hand.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the Libyan diplomats remained loyal. I remember one occasion where our protest at the embassy was even greeted by a counter-protest inside its gates, the staff feverishly waving pictures of their Brother Leader — and, presumably trying to ignore the loathing of their countrymen opposite.

Anyway, better late than never. The ambassador, Jamal al-Barag, defends the delay:

Spiegel

how could you have remained in your position?

Barag

Because Schalgham [the Libyan UN ambassador, some kind of mentor/boss to the German ambassador] advised it. Since the UN passed Resolution 1973 [the no-fly zone resolution, on 17 March], I have done no more political work. I only come sporadically into the office. But we have more than 700 Libyan students in Germany. I ensure that they receive their €1800 each month, that their health insurance and tuition fees are paid.

Barag, who comes from Misrata, reports that he receives news of friends and acquaintances being killed on a daily basis. That he’s spent 2 months watching this without criticising it is, to put it in the best line, testimony to the power of blind loyalty.

stdout.be argues that shortage of metadata is specifically an internet problem:

It’s kind of humbling to see that even a quarter of a century ago, news formatted in International Press Telecommunications Council standards like IPTC 7901 , NITF or NewsML had more metadata associated with it than a lot of websites of today.

The “big blob of text” phenomenon we’re stuck with now wasn’t caused by newspapers sticking to their old, wary ways, but by the transition to a new medium, the internet.

via the mojo list