Donald Jenkins

France has historically been a cradle of cutting-edge technology and to this day remains a world leader in the field of mathematics. Yet in recent years it has gradually departed from that stance and has increasingly turned into a sort of cultural but irrelevant Disneyland, while America has gained, as a result of the revolution induced by the PC and the Internet, a dominant, indeed monopolistic position in the field of information technology. Why has the forced diet of mathematics not fuelled the emergence of a string of French Stanfords, MITs and Georgia Techs? Why do clever young French people have zero knowledge of, or interest in, information technology? And, most puzzlingly of all, why is new technology not seriously taught in France’s best engineering schools, whose graduates are mostly ignorant of even basic programming skills?

Regardless of how tech-savvy you are, using a feed reader will save you a lot of time and, despite what Robert Scoble says, Twitter lists are no substitute for using RSS, so long as you remember that, like with a real printed publication, there’s no reason to feel guilty if you don’t read your feed in full. Using Google Reader, despite its clumsy interface, is better than no feed reader at all and should be enough for the moderate user. But Shaun Inman’s Fever now offers an attractively designed, fully customizable and fantastically clever way of digesting a larger-than-average number of feeds efficiently and pleasantly. Although it suffers from the absence of a proper iPhone implementation, I’ve decided to use it as my default feed reader from now on.

Observers today, whether they be politicians, ordinary citizens or even academics, appear to overlook the tragic deterioration that has taken place in France’s once widely-admired political institutions. In the thirty-year period following the institution of a directly-elected presidency in 1962 through until the Maastricht treaty ratification in 1992, the system put in place by de Gaulle was highly successful, regardless of the personality and political leaning of the ElysĂ©e Palace’s incumbent. This has now given way to a period of instability, governmental weakness and disillusionment. Yet the causal link with the destruction, though a constant stream of constitutional revisions often conducted for the most trifling motives, of General de Gaulle’s institutions has curiously gone not only unlamented, but unnoticed.

Google Buzz has one thing going for it: in contrast to Twitter and Facebook, it actually does make it easy to “generate your own buzz” by asking you to simply add services to your pre-existing Google profile, in contrast to Facebook which has been doing exactly the opposite, turning itself into a sort of closed shop.

There are three things I don’t like at all about Buzz:

• first, you need to use Gmail to even be on Buzz; using Gmail for Buzz should have been made optional, not mandatory;
• second, I don’t believe it will take off: I doubt that they will be able to get enough people to follow their Buzz activity to make the service gather momentum, which is another reason why tying Buzz to Gmail is a mistake;
• third, Google hasn’t addressed the issue of user names properly: when anyone uses any Google service, Google creates an account under the slug chosen and from that moment, no one can use a service.

Despite settling the privacy concerns, Google hasn’t clearly positioned its service as a private, friends-only oriented one, like Facebook originally was and should have remained, or a public one, like Twitter; the privacy slip-up shows they obviously didn’t think this one out at all when they designed Buzz, which is a pity; if they’d positioned Buzz from the outset as the social network where you can easily share some content publicly, and some just with your friends, they would have been onto a winner.

My new website, which I coded myself over a couple of days, is a bit of a landmark in my four-year blogging experience: I designed and coded it using the tools I had been dabbling with over the past few months and dispensing with off-the-peg templates altogether. Starting from a stripped-down version of the WordPress template, I designed the theme, wrote the CSS and coded the pages, using Coda, a rather clever little application that has now matured, three years after its launch.

In doing this I have merely been going further along the minimalist road that I had set upon four years ago when I first started blogging: the result is a site that is less of a blog and more of a place where I can share my online presence (meaning, essentially, Flickr and Twitter), while keeping Facebook separate for interaction with people I know in real life.

Formalism in art in no way implies conservatism. In fact, quite the reverse: only by freeing the beholder to like or dislike a work of art on its aesthetic merits alone can he escape the dictates of fashion or, indeed, the dictatorship of censorship or of official art. My innate eclecticism attracts me to abstract art just as much, if not more, as it does to strictly figurative work. Yet I resent attempts by anyone, whether so-called structuralists, art critics or, more likely, society bores, to imprison the works of Picasso, Matisse or Paul Klee in a model conjured up by them for reasons that often have nothing to do either with the artist’s motives or in the reasons for which people enjoy seeing them.

Structuralism, in particular, by implying that the mental processes and social preconceptions an individual brings to art are more important than its so-called “essential” qualities, is a reason that I have always found incomprehensible at best and, at worst, that I have resented. It strikes me, without wanting to provoke anyone, that this as just as sure a road to artistic serfdom as its distant cousin, centralized planning, is a path to economic serfdom.

Social networking, which was in its infancy when I started using it in 2006, has matured. Three years ago, a vast number of start-ups were competing in the field, and few people other than geeks actually bothered to use them. Today the sector is much more concentrated, meaning it makes sense not to use every social network in existence. I believe social networks have now consolidated sufficiently that—outside of this blog, of course— I mainly rely on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for my web presence.

Facebook doesn’t seem to understand, though, what makes it special—the fact it is the only mainstream social network where you can share content with friends that you don’t necessarily want to share with everyone. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using it if the constraints on my privacy and the new closed-shop type approach—both of which, in my opinion, go against Facebook’s own interests by reducing its usefulness, go no further. But now that the consolidation of the social networking sector is finally upon us, I hope the convenience it has brought us isn’t going to be wrecked by misunderstanding of privacy issues and a step back into an oligopolistic closed-shop system.

I woke up on January 1 with my eyes blinking in the Parisian sunlight and the pain from the acute calcific tendinitis in my right shoulder permeating all the way down to my hand and up to the nape of my neck.
This inexplicable ailment had suddenly appeared in the early hours of New Year’s eve [...]

Burke, the soundest reference from an English perspective and, arguably, ceteris paribus, from most others also, would have had this to say about the Swiss practice of referenda:

… It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication [...]

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time [...]