Marc Sidwell, who just happens to be my next Brian’s Last Friday speaker, certainly has a way with words:

Like the space in an Elizabethan court masque that the performers left for the courtiers themselves to step forward and take part, today everyone needs to work out how to create a stage on which the constellation of divas formerly known as the audience will strike their own pose.

That’s to be found under this headline:

The Long View: Bob Dylan and the selfie: The world’s now a stage and we’re all performing

And under this photo:

Are yes, selfies.  Says Sidwell, re this new word:

Even as I cling to my old-fashioned desire to take photographs of the things that I see, “selfie” – the new nickname for a photographic self-portrait – has been declared Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, following a 17,000 per cent increase in usage year-on-year.

I have been long been studying this phenomenon.  We may not have had the word “selfie” in 2007, but there were already many, many people doing selfies:

That being one of my all time favourites from my selfies archive.

LATER: Incoming from Michael Jennings:

Taken, says Michael, on a ferry between Greece and Albania in July.

Anton Howes spoke earlier this evening to Libertarian Home, about what made the Industrial Revolution get started.  I took this photo of Howes, as he relaxed afterwards:

Howes really is a class act, as I already knew from when he addressed my Brian’s Last Friday, in July.  What he has to say about the Industrial Revolution is already fascinating, and full of fascinating detail.  When he has done all his research, then this talk will turn into something very formidable.

Meanwhile, a way to understand where Howes is coming from, and what kind of thesis he is exploring the further biographical and other detail of, is to read a book called Bourgeois Dignity, by Deirdre McCloskey.  Howes recommended this book at the talk he gave in July.  I bought a copy and am reading it now.

McCloskey’s basic thesis is that the thing that made the difference was ideas.  The Industrial Revolution was not merely a bunch of people responding to economic incentives.  It was people doing something they had come to believe in, surrounded by other people who also got the point, enough to let them get on with it.  The Industrial Revolution was an ideology, brought to life by a core community of industrial inventors and creators, and sufficiently bought into by the wider society for those creators not to be suppressed.

The Industrial Revolution had plenty of chances to happen far earlier, in such places as China and Imperial Rome.  That it did not happen earlier in such places is because, although the material conditions seemed to be all present and correct, they just weren’t thinking the right way to make the breakthrough.  So McCloskey says, anyway.

As to what Howes said, well, the good news is that, unlike the talk he gave at my place, tonight’s talk was recorded on video by Simon Gibbs, and will accordingly materialise at Libertarian Home, by and by.

Here.

So, could this also work for cats?

Scroll scroll:

And for all the cat lovers out there, don’t accuse Polimeno of being biased toward pooches. Finding Kitty is in the works.

A lot of the cat stuff I stick up here on Fridays is things I find by googling for “cat” news.  But this I learned about by getting regular google emails that come to me about face recognition.

Face recognition software is, I predict (as do many others I’m sure), going to have all kinds of weird unintended consequences.  This is only the start of it.

For instance, scientists: Which animals have faces that face recognition software can distinguish between, and which not?  What does those answers mean?

What about face recognition errors, joining you up with relatives or long lost twins you never knew you had?

What will face recognition do to the lookalike trade?  “How much like Brad Pitt do I look?  Face recognition couldn’t tell the difference, that’s how much!”

Will face recognition answer the question: Which celebrity do I most look like?

Any more stuff like that that anyone can think of?

Yesterday was a grey and drizzly day, as was today come to that.

This didn’t look as good as it would have on a sunny day.:

That’s Barclays Bank, Kings Cross.  I can’t help thinking that all that razzamatazz reflects rather badly on Barclays Bank, Kings Cross, even though Barclays Bank, Kings Cross, is not itself razzamatazzed.

This, on the other hand, is just what you want on a grey and drizzly day:

However, although you may want it, so (I fear) will tramps, and tramps always win such contests, don’t they?  Whoever smells worse and looks scarier wins.  So, unless you are yourself a tramp, this will be a no go area for you, as for me.

Just for now, however, no tramps, and here is how it looks when I point my camera upwards:

Very seventies.  Very trashy.  But, it keeps the drizzle off.  I guess what’s happening here is that middle-aged architects, who were tiny tots in super-trendy seventies households with all the trappings of the time, are now powerful enough to be doing it again, in a vain attempt to recapture their lost youths.

This roof is between Westminster City Hall and that new office block with the crazy angled walls, in Victoria Street.

Prominent opinionators don’t need to alert the world to the fact that some opinion they said or wrote is being attended to, a bit more than the world might otherwise have assumed.  It’s rather like how heads of state don’t have to dress up in fancy uniforms with lots of medals attached to prove how important they are.  Everyone already knows.  Lesser persons, whose upward social motions either happen through their own continuing social climbing efforts or do not happen at all, cannot afford to be so tasteful and fastidious.

The Samizdata posting that the Quotulator quotulates from, which says that, in the Quotulator’s words, Obama is doing quite well at the things he cares about, was partly the result of something that my friend Alastair James said to me recently, to the effect that rather too many recent Samizdata postings consisted of someone saying something that everyone who reads and writes for or comments at Samizdata agrees with, and then lots of commenters saying: I agree.  I agree.

England are now facing the distinct possibility of having to follow on in the third test, having won the first two.  Because there was a pause after the second, which England won by a huge margin of 347 runs, there was a small torrent of commentary to the effect that Australian cricket is doomed, doomed, and will take years to recover, if it indeed ever recovers.  Titles to savour include: A tale of two depths - While England plan, Australia dream - Australia: hubris, despair, panic - What can Australia learn from English cricket? - Ashes 2013: Sheffield Shield decline lies behind Australia’s demise - There is no easy way back for these Aussies - Australia’s darkest hour shows no sign of dawn.

My favourite Australian Cricket is Doomed piece has been, I think, A schoolboy curse, which is about why posh Australian schools don’t produce top cricketers, apart from Warne.  The problem is that promising posh boys don’t play against men, only against other less good posh boys.  Boys from scuzzy government schools, on the other hand, play for local clubs on Saturdays, against tough bastard older blokes, and thereby get better and better.

Yes, I know.  Warne is posh?

In England the problem is that only posh boys ever seem to get good at cricket.  You’d think this would make England worse.

Incoming from Craig Willy, of whom I did not know until now:

Hello Brian,

I see you’ve written a great deal on Emmanuel Todd. I have just written a summary of his big history book, L’invention de l’Europe. I thought you might find it interesting.

I also see you have the impression he mainly criticizes the U.S. for being a “hollowed out,” financialized “fake” economy. In fact he is incredibly critical of the eurozone, for that very reason, which he argues is responsible for the hollowing out, dysfunction and financialism of the French and peripheral European economies.

All the best, and feel free to share if you write anything new on Todd. My Twitter.

Craig

In response to my email thanking him for the above email, and asking if he has written anything else about Todd, Willy writes:

I discuss him a fair bit on my Twitter feed as he offends many with his criticism of Germany and euroskepticism. Otherwise I just wrote this short piece on Todd and the euro from a while back.

This I have now read.  Very interesting, and I think very right.  Interesting parallel between the Euro and the Algerian War.

Things appear to be really motoring on the Todd-stuff-in-English front.  At last.

Yesterday I was out and about, in the Kings Road.  But I forgot my proper camera and Sod’s Law went swinging into action and put a great big old Wedding Celebration under my nose just after I got off of the bus, right outside Chelsea Town Hall, with guests clogging the pavement and everything, getting in the way of people trying to just go along the pavement.  They were dressed to show off.  They were showing off.  On the pavement.  Fair photographic game, I decided.  If you shove your wedding under the noses of the world, on one of the world’s pavements, the world is allowed to take photos.  But then I discovered the ghastly truth: no proper camera.

But, I had my Google Nexus 4.  And it was a sunny day and it did okay:

I noticed a couple of really old cameras in the throng, but none of my pictures featured any of those, or not close up so you could see the oldness.  Shame.

Weddings, it occurs to me, are where old cameras are likely to appear, in the hands of people who have such cameras, but seldom use them (maybe because they used to use them a lot but then stopped) and hence felt no need to replace them.  But then, when there’s a wedding, they dig them out and hope for the best.