Lone Gunman

We’ve all heard of them: Boyle’s Law, Keynes’ Law, Metcalfe’s and Murphy’s.

Wikipedia’s list of epony­mous laws is your one-stop resource for those obser­va­tions and pre­dic­tions that are named after a person.

For oth­ers that don’t make the cut, see the ‘adages’ cat­e­gory.

I’m slowly los­ing inter­est­ing in the U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion now that the result seems inevitable (get on with the inau­gu­ra­tion already). How­ever, the Obama–McCain dance-off video (via Kot­tke) com­bined with a fea­ture in the lat­est The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive, has tem­porar­ily piqued my inter­est again.

In said fea­ture, The Right Choice?, 18 promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tives were asked to dis­cuss “how they are vot­ing, whether they see their vote as advanc­ing a par­tic­u­lar issue or fit­ting into a larger strat­egy, and what con­flicts their choice might entail”. This from Fran­cis Fukuyama:

Amer­ica has been liv­ing in a dream world for the past few years, los­ing its basic val­ues of thrift and pru­dence and liv­ing far beyond its means, even as it has lec­tured the rest of the world to fol­low its model. At a time when the U.S. gov­ern­ment has just nation­al­ized a good part of the bank­ing sec­tor, we need to rethink a lot of the Rea­gan­ite ver­i­ties of the past gen­er­a­tion regard­ing taxes and reg­u­la­tion. Impor­tant as they were back in the 1980s and ‘90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now enter­ing. Obama is much bet­ter posi­tioned to rein­vent the Amer­i­can model and will cer­tainly present a very dif­fer­ent and more pos­i­tive face of Amer­ica to the rest of the world.

The split between those polled is over­whelm­ingly pro-third party, closely fol­lowed by Obama. McCain brings up the rear, draw­ing level with ‘no vote’.

More Fukuyama? I implore you to read The End of His­tory and the Last Man.

Ear­lier this week I started read­ing a Man Booker win­ner for the first time: Ver­non God Lit­tle. I’ve heard on good author­ity that it’s a great book and so far it’s liv­ing up to its reputation.

As chair­man of the 2008 Man Booker panel, Michael Por­tillo has been inter­viewed by The Econ­o­mist and reflects on “what it feels like to read 50,000 pages of non-fiction in one go”. He dis­cusses “the fine state of con­tem­po­rary fic­tion, the impor­tance of plau­si­ble end­ings (steer­ing clear of implau­si­ble coin­ci­dences) and the value of good read­ing glasses.”

via Intel­li­gent Life

With a lengthy US road trip in the pipeline (’09 or ’10, hope­fully), I was pleased to read Char­lie Brooker’s com­men­tary on his recent excur­sion to “the King­dom of Road Trips”.

My ideal hol­i­day is a road trip. All that vari­ety! And sit­ting down! It’s like watch­ing tele­vi­sion, but bet­ter, because every so often you get to step out into the land­scape you’re watch­ing and inter­act with it. And it’s in 3D! Perfect.

Apart from one tiny prob­lem. I can’t drive.

We arrived in San Fran­cisco and picked up our car: an unsexy peo­ple car­rier the size and shape of an indus­trial refrig­er­a­tor. A sports con­vert­ible may sound fun, but just try dri­ving through the desert in one: within the hour you’d be hal­lu­ci­nat­ing with sun­stroke so badly, you’d swerve off the road, think­ing you were tra­vers­ing the rings of Sat­urn or dri­ving inside Joan Collins’s face.

Chris­t­ian Bok’s Eunoia sounds like an inter­est­ing read. The BBC has a review of the book, com­plete with some (inter­est­ing) excerpts:

Eunoia is the short­est word in Eng­lish con­tain­ing all five vow­els — and it means “beau­ti­ful think­ing”. It is also the title of Cana­dian poet Chris­t­ian Bok’s book of fic­tion in which each chap­ter uses only one vowel.

Mr Bok believes his book proves that each vowel has its own per­son­al­ity, and demon­strates the flex­i­bil­ity of the Eng­lish language.