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A graphic novel about, of all things, the quest for logic in the early decades of the 20th century:

The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.

All presented through, it appears, well fleshed-out characters and “presented with real graphic verve”.

(via Vinayak Hegde)

The evidence is that we value immediacy over quality:

We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

WIRED weighs in on why:

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”

Wonderful read – explores examples from your music collection to the military.

… apparently, to track you down.

In 2006, the New York Times tracked down a woman in Georgia using only her search history. AOL, as part of a research project, had placed online a 3-month search history for 650,000 users without user names or any other identifiable information – or so they thought:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ”numb fingers” to ”60 single men” to ”dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for ”landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and ”homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. ”Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter famous for providing Vice President Spiro Agnew with gems such as ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history’, died yesterday. I looked forward to his NYT column “On Language“, links to whose posts I shared on several occasions with friends over email.

If you must read anything by Safire, let it be his last Op-Ed column “How to Read a Column” for the NYT in 2005, full of self-directed jibes:

7. Watch for repayment of favors. Stewart Alsop jocularly advised a novice columnist: “Never compromise your journalistic integrity – except for a revealing anecdote.” Example: a Nixon speechwriter told columnists that the president, at Camp David, boasted “I just shot 120,” to which Henry Kissinger said brightly “Your golf game is improving, Mr. President,” causing Nixon to growl “I was bowling, Henry.” After columnists gobbled that up, the manipulative writer collected in the coin of friendlier treatment.

The central problem? People using the web – whether for “e-mail, accounting, short-selling, browsing porn, buying uranium, getting divorced”" – look the same, how does Hollywood dramatize scenes where the Internet is part of the narrative?

The long-running Fox drama “24″ works otherwise. It features brazen product placement by personal-tech companies like Sprint, Garmin and Nextel. Characters live on phones and at computers; their real-life surroundings are austere, spartan, practically black and white. The rococo action of the series is mental. It takes place in the digital ether.

Though “24″ is bound to look more primitive, as drama that admits the primacy of online life becomes a more sophisticated art, the mise-en-scène is still stunning. The high anxiety it renders so beautifully is the anxiety of ordinary life. Here’s a thriller for everyone: How have we become so intimate with machines that seem by turns so necessary, so enervating, so treacherous and so unpredictable?

Worth a read for more discussion of “24″ as well as the recent movie “State of Play”.

The Economist describes how Indian mobile operators innovated their way to the world’s cheapest services.

Outsourcing network management, ‘lifetime’ prepaid schemes, ‘micro-call-centers’, ‘green’ technologies for base stations, and my favourite – infrastructure sharing, where two or more operators agree to share their network towers in an area just before going at each others’ throats to grab subscriber share:

Network-sharing is not new, says Mr Colao, “but the confidence to do it at scale, and with a fierce competitor, came from India. Once you see how it works in that kind of environment, you become much more confident that you can do it in Barcelona or Venice.”

The Economist’s lucid style makes this a must-read.

From a comment on a blog post about whether a landline is worth it anymore:

Many folks here in San Diego ditched their landlines and it almost cost them their lives back in October of 2007 when we had the firestorm. In San Diego county we have a reverse 911 system and it dialed thousands of people at 4AM to let them know the fire was approaching. Folks without a landline had no idea the fire was coming. When I went to bed at around 10am it was 30 miles away and by morning was I was being evacuated.

Hilarious, eminently readable and ultimately heartbreaking spoof. How Americans would book a flight ticket if airline companies worked like their healthcare counterparts. Hard to pick an excerpt.

From a survey across iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Java-compatible phone users:

… is one particular person whose Gmail account has been deactivated after a court order for absolutely no fault of his/hers.

The ruling stems from a monumental error by the Wilson, Wyo.-based Rocky Mountain Bank. On Aug. 12, the bank mistakenly sent names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a Gmail address. When the bank realized the problem, it sent a message to that same address asking the recipient to contact the bank and destroy the file without opening it. No one responded, so the bank contacted Google to ask for information about the account holder.

Google told the bank to go to court. The bank filed a petition to get Google to disclose information about the user and to deactivate the account.

The court complied.

Elena Filatova bikes through the Dead Zone of Chernobyl, chronicling – and photographing – the devastation left behind:

As I pass through the check point, I feel that I have entered an unreal world. In the dead zone, the silence of the villages, roads, and woods seem to tell something at me….something that I strain to hear….something that attracts and repels me both at the same time. It is divinely eerie – like stepping into that Salvador Dali painting with the dripping clocks.

Spooky and very, very courageous.

British schoolteachers are having a rather hard time grading essays with sentences such as

“i noe u dnt noee mii,i donno huu u r” (I know you do not know me, I do not know who you are) and “ma m8s wnt ova” (my mates went over)

And you have to sympathize when

More than half of staff failed to recognise that “phat” meant “great”, almost 50 per cent did not understand that “klingon” was used for a younger brother or sister and a quarter did not know “vanilla checks” was slang for “boring clothes”.

(by the way, I think those percentages are encouragingly high.)

In the context of the Formula 1 driver deliberately crashing his car at 300+ kmph, some other examples of fraud – with guts:

On April 21, 1980, a 26-year-old New Yorker named Rosie Ruiz crossed the finish line in the Boston Marathon in a zippy 2 hours, 31 minutes and 56 seconds. Then people began to wonder, “Hmm, why isn’t she that sweaty?” Could it be that she joined the race a mere two miles from the finish line? Ms. Ruiz denied wrongdoing, but her medal was awarded to the second-place finisher. Later, evidence surfaced that her time at the 1979 New York marathon was apparently a hoax—she’d spent 17 of the 26.2 miles on the subway.

Five more examples, from rugby, fencing, baseball, basketball and horse-racing.

Recipe for thousands of awkward situations:

There are certain misconceptions regarding the jargon people use in drafting such ads. Many are still unaware that a “homely” girl doesn’t mean she happily does the household chores. ‘Homely’ means ‘unattractive’. Look up the dictionary.

Sure enough, Dictionary.com defines ‘homely’ as:

lacking in physical attractiveness; not beautiful; unattractive: a homely child.

The steel city of Pittsburgh, where G20 leaders are meeting, ironically, to talk climate change, has a Past:

Its air heavy with smoke and smog from hundreds of factories, Pittsburgh used to be once described by a local writer as “hell with the lid off”. And that was in 1860. Eighty years later, the situation had actually become worse. The local university library has an excellent archive of photographs of the city the way it was in 1940, its economic heyday. Consider the following exhibit, a street level photograph of the corner of Liberty and Fifth Avenues in downtown, not far from the David Lawrence Convention Center where world leaders will meet on September 25 to discuss the world financial crisis and the need to fight climate change. A street clock tells us the time is 10:55 a.m. but the image reminds us of night time film noir, the city’s smoky darkness punctuated by bright lights from the street and its surrounding buildings.

Microsoft’s new promotional video encouraging people to throw their own Windows 7 launch house party:

From a blog on the Washington Post:

As you can see below, our four implausibly perky, demographically balanced hosts — standing in a spotless kitchen decorated with red, blue and orange balloons — talk about how “great it is to host a launch party!” that’s really just another social gathering (“in a lot of ways, you’re just throwing a party with Windows 7 as an honored guest!”). They suggest watching some of the other 100 or so YouTube clips for ideas about showing off Windows 7, while one wisely reminds hosts to make sure that the new operating system’s set up a couple of days early: “play with Windows 7 before the party,” he emphasizes. In addition, they recommend … oh, good grief, I can’t keep describing this with a straight face.

Anyone with a portfolio of “3 or more stocks, ETFs, or mutual funds” is eligible to apply. The worst performers over the past 2 years will receive:

1st Place: All expenses paid dream vacation for 2 to Rome, Italy, “the last great empire to collapse under a mountain of debt, a devalued currency, and out of control spending.”

2nd Place: Trip for 2 to beautiful Iceland, “the world’s worst performing stock market.”

3rd Place: Trip for 2 to Las Vegas, “the foreclosure capital of America.”

Business schools have changed little over the past year, in spite of the contribution of their philosophy of business, risk and finance to the 2008 bubble. What must they do?

More history classes would help. Would-be business titans need to learn that economic history is punctuated with crises and disasters, that booms inevitably give way to busts, and that the business cycle, having survived many predictions of extinction, continues to prey on the modern economy. The 2008 debacle might have come as less of a surprise if all those MBAs had been taught that there have been at least 124 bank-centred crises around the world since 1970, most of which were preceded by booms in house prices and stockmarkets, large capital inflows and rising public debt.

History courses aside, business schools need to change their tone more than their syllabuses. In particular, they should foster the twin virtues of scepticism and cynicism. Graduates in recent years, for example, seem to have accepted far too readily the notion that clever financial engineering could somehow abolish risk and uncertainty, when it probably made things worse.

Back home, it’d help if the IIMs taught from something apart from cyclostyle copies of HBR cases.

Warning: Only for New York Times junkies.

George Packer, writing in the New Yorker in March upon the appointment of Ross Douthat to the Op-Ed list, on the existing panel of columnists:

With the whole world undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime upheaval, the stars of the Op-Ed page have almost without exception fallen back on the comfort of well-worn stances and personality tics, which are the habitual danger of publishing one’s thoughts every week for years. Friedman, who knows a lot about economics but has too much faith in elites, calls for a summit of “the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate,” as if these very individuals are not the main agents of the catastrophe. Dowd publishes a column of inadvertent self-parody whose subject is Michelle Obama’s arms, and whose sum total of reporting is a conversation in a Washington taxi with her fellow columnist David Brooks. Kristof continues to call necessary attention to chronic, less-noticed disasters, but he does it more and more by making himself the hero of a moral drama and, in a recent series of columns from Darfur, insulting his readers with the suggestion that they’re too shallow to read on unless he bribes them with celebrity gossip. Rich never challenges his own side, and the result is a weekly display of rhetorical bravura and cheap shots. Bob Herbert has one tone of voice, and as often as outrage is called for, it’s also tiresome. Only Brooks and Krugman seem to be registering the earthquake in a meaningful way, asking themselves difficult questions on a regular basis and struggling out in the open with the answers, which is why the page is at its best on Friday.

(via the Wall Street Journal)

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