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.
… 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.
