Author: Rahul

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.

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.

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.

Effects in popular culture. Exhibit One, the Streisand Effect, which is

the widespread dissemination of information caused by an attempt to suppress that information. In 2003, when Barbra Streisand sued a photographer documenting coastal erosion to remove photos of her seaside mansion from his Web site, the pictures ended up plastered all over the Web.

There’s also the lipstick effect, the CNN effect, the NASCAR effect, and (my favourite) the CSI effect.

When a company sends two employees to New Zealand to buy an iPhone and tear it apart, just so that they can report its innards 27 hours before anyone in the US can, it’s worth reading about. Especially when the company specializes in this sort of stuff.

And you know what?

IFixit’s Wiens has been taking apart gadgets for six years, and he said his favorite observation is the inadvertent harmony between rivals such as Apple and Microsoft. The two are fierce competitors, Wiens said, but once you look inside their gadgets, many of them are made by the same people. The Zune HD and the iPhone, for example, were both made by Foxconn, a major manufacturer in China.

“You’ve got these arch nemesis devices, and they’re the culmination of years of effort by Microsoft and Apple,” Wiens said. “But they’re being assembled and shipped out of China by the same company. At the same time you know the product managers at Apple and Microsoft hate each other’s guts.”

Paul Graham makes an intriguing observation about the Segway and offers an explanation:

When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: “Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?”

Why do Segways provoke this reaction? The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug. You don’t seem to be working hard enough.

Someone riding a motorcycle isn’t working any harder. But because he’s sitting astride it, he seems to be making an effort. When you’re riding a Segway you’re just standing there. And someone who’s being whisked along while seeming to do no work—someone in a sedan chair, for example—can’t help but look smug.

One of the members of the group that created Twitter, about the moment when it was born:

I was lucky enough to be in [Twitter’s first CEO Jack Dorsey] @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it.

Also from the article by Dom Sagolla: a screenshot of one of the very first iterations of the Twitter home page, then called twttr.

Note: “just setting up my twttr” was the first tweet on the system, according to a Newsweek article about the first messages on the telegraph, the phone, email, SMS and Twitter.

The BBC has made a collection of episodes from the hugely popular Tomorrow’s World programme available online. Easily my most-watched (non-cartoon) show in the early to mid-90s.

Nat Friedman describes his experience using a student to take dictation for emails and code while recovering from a broken wrist:

He sits at the other end of my desk on a separate computer while I conduct the machine with my left hand, jumping from mail to mail, opening buffers, reading web pages, and generally doing the interactive low-latency low-volume typing tasks myself. He can see everything I’m doing because my desktop is shared over the network. And when I need to enter a large block of text, well, I just start talking, he types, and the words appear on the screen.

If I don’t look up from the screen, I can pretend he’s not there and that I have the world’s most powerful speech recognition engine. So I have a sneak peek into what computers will be like when speech recognition works really well.

Also, it turns out that context is very important for accuracy:

It’s hard to recognize speech.
It’s hard to wreck a nice beach.

Not very, according to this interactive graph on the Wall Street Journal. The accompanying article is about how Governments across the region, even democratic ones, have increased restrictions on access to online content.

India appears to be one of the more free nations, although the article contends that the Government selectively filters access to sites “relating to national unity and state security”, as well as some Internet tools.