Новости за 03.08.2016

There is no “nuclear button”, but there is an aluminium briefcase that follows the American president everywhere, containing a manual for conducting nuclear war. The manual is like a takeout menu from which the president can choose cities or military installations in enemy countries to attack. To authorise an attack the president uses a card of verification codes that is, ideally, on his person at all times. The briefcase is referred to as “the football”, the card as “the biscuit”

Kingsley Amis annihilates a 1982 novel by John Gardner reviving James Bond. “Whereas its predecessor was bad enough by any reasonable standard, the present offering is an unrelieved disaster.” Gardner’s Bond is a cipher: “No ridiculous feats are required of him. His personal armament seems plausible, his car seems capable of neither flight nor underwater locomotion, and M calls him 007. Nobody else does, though. The designation is a pure honorific, like Warden of the Cinque Ports”

Grab-bag of insights about the way we use and think about numbers, drawn from Alex Bellos’s Grapes Of Math. “Seven is unique among the first ten numbers because it is the only number that cannot be multiplied or divided within the group. When 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are doubled the answer is less than or equal to ten. The numbers 6, 8 and 10 can be halved and 9 is divisible by three. Of the numbers we can count on our fingers, only 7 stands alone: it neither produces nor is produced”

The charge sheet against Marissa Mayer: “Common decency counts. Showing up on time and giving respect is key when you’re the CEO. The stories of Marissa Mayer’s faux pas superseded her efforts to turn the company around. Kick the tires first, spend later. Mayer spent so much on new hires so early, many of whom washed out, that she looked amateurish and tainted the company. No one likes a downer. Our nation runs on optimism. Sometimes a mercy killing is the best way to go”

“There has never been a painter quite like Jheronimus van Aken, the Flemish master who signed his works as Jheronimus Bosch. His imagination ranged from a place beyond the spheres of Heaven to the uttermost depths of Hell. An implacable logic governs the phantasmagoria. Bosch’s visions of Hell, with their minutely observed flames and slimy, mephitic pools, are more chaotic than Dante’s, but a similarly stern moral sense ensures that every crime receives its own excruciating punishment”

Technology pretends to befriend us, the better to exploit us. “If the function of informality is to erode the distinction between work and leisure, then informal rhetoric is a necessary feature of platforms that want to mediate all aspects of our lives. The great promise — and threat — is that we will have a single casual identity that is recognised in every institution we enter. When platform addresses me as ‘William’, it is offering to support the identity that I carry into work, leisure, family life... Читать дальше...