Monthly Archives: September 2009

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

… 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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →