The Age appears to have shown their editorial hand on nanotechnology - “Nano could be a huge future health crisis” - an article with almost no mention of the benefits of the technology.

Says the director of lobby group GeneEthics, “Each type of nanoparticle may be as deadly as asbestos so the worker and public health challenge is huge.” “may”. Is this a candidate for possibly the most disingeneous sentence ever?

I spend a lot of time on telecommunications and media policy - an area where the most beneficial regulatory structure may be debatable, but at least most people recognise the benefits of ‘telecommunications’ and ‘media’. Do its a relatively easy debate. But the major innovations of the next 100 years aren’t the television or internet. It’s biotechnology and nanotechnology. Articles like this indicate how big a fight it is really going to be.

Ignore the annoyingly opinionated commentary beside it, but this gallery of Megachurches - modern churchs that have more in common with stadiums than the traditional country church - is fascinating

Napoleon isn’t as poorly acted as most critics seem to make out - of course John Malkovich dominates every scene he enters, but thats the price of putting John Malkovichin a movie. It is dramatically better produced and directed than its sister production Les Miserables, which suffers from an unnecessarily orchestrated soundtrack and a total lack of humanity. Napoleon allows you to get close to the characters, Les Miserables is too conscious of its own epic story to let you in the same room.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It isn’t Michael Jackson that Johnny Depp is channelling, it’s Benicio Del Toro in Basquiat, playing the artist’s drug-riddled best friend. Watch both performances - the key is in the staccato and rhythmic speech. Its all about the pauses.

Exorcism of Emily Rose is a lot more theological than I expected, sort of a combination of the Exorcist (obviously) and the Last Temptation of Christ. Upon reflection, it’s not a simple movie at all - after she sustains a particular injury, there is a shot of her giving it to herself. Until this moment, the film had been clearly telling the audience that the possession was real. This shot, which lasts perhaps 5 seconds, drops the whole movie into a pool of ambiguity.

And I can’t wait to see Shopgirl - Steve Martin’s books are amazingly understated. Hopefully they film The Pleasure of My Company next.

A very funny collection of one star reviews from Amazon of books listed in Time’s top 100 modern english books. For instance, the Grapes of Wrath:

“While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”

I’m sort of ashamed to admit that I have read very few of the books on that list. Link via Marginal Revolution.

I’m delighted to discover this site: Confusing Words, as it comes to me at a particularly vital moment in my work cycle.

Some stunning photos from a German Soldier on the Eastern front in WW1 in this Flickr gallery. (Link via Boing Boing) There are three pages, so keep looking.

UPDATE: Thanks to pollbludger for the correction!

This + This = the stupidity of This.

If the average iTunes user - a program which requires next to no computer skills whatsoever, unlike the relative complexity of bittorrent - can download American cultural imperialism whenever they want, over an unrestricted internet, then what point are gestures to protect native ‘culture’?

I have a piece on internet governance and the United Nations in the Business Age today, under the title “The Net is anarchy: keep it that way” (if the link goes down in the future, its also on the IPA website.)

The North Korean site about the “Korea Computer Center” is fantastic. Spelling errors and odd grammatical choices indicate that it is (obviously) not written by a native speaker, so I shouldn’t be too critical about some parts, but others… it seems like it was written by somebody who has never used a computer, merely grabbed a copy of the latest Time and copied out the big words. Look for gratuitous and irrelevant use of the term ‘blue-chip’. But they sure know that Linux is better than evil Micro$oft.

Also, “IT elites” is a wonderfully evocative phrase, and one which I’m sure a lot of IT elites in this country would like to adopt.