Category: Uncategorized

Social Media Implications for business: IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger recounts the highlights of a panel discussion. The portion about old media’s reaction to the new media ‘revolution’ is particularly notable.

The death of the URL by Chris Messina: “…a future without URLs and without the infinite organicity of the web frightens me. It’s not that I know what we’ll lose by removing this artifact of one of the most generative periods in history… the ability for anyone to mint a new [URL] and then propagate it is what makes the web so resilient, so empowering, and so interesting”

Open as in water by Paul Buccheit: “The basic pattern of openness is that better access to information and better systems lead to better decisions and better living. This general principal is broadly accepted, but we’re just now discovering that it also applies to the minutiae of our lives.”

After Cheney: NYT Magazine’s profile of Vice President Biden. Conjecture is that with resposibility for cleaning up the US’s Iraq mess, Biden could be the second-most powerful VP after Cheney.

From the New Yorker:

[Rich Roman politician Marcus] Crassus had his own private fire department, and if your house caught fire his representatives would offer to buy it on the spot, at a one-time-only, fire-sale price that would fall rapidly as the flames climbed. If you said yes, you’d get a few sesterces, after which Crassus’ firefighters would do their thing. If you said no, you’d end up with a pile of ashes. (No public option being available, few owners were in a position to quibble.

My comment on a Google Reader shared item in Jan 2009:

“As I said months and months ago – “jiska koi nahin uska Android”. No product line to convince MS to license you WinMo? There’s Android. No cash to pay for licenses? There’s Android. Want to convince market and customers that you have something up your sleeve? There’s Android”.

WIRED Magazine today takes stock of Android today and its future “explosive growth”.

The manufacturers of the 12 Android devices on the market are Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Dell, Huawei and Acer. Except for the first three, none of the manufacturers had a product line with a mainstream mobile OS – they’ve hitched their smartphone fortune to Android. The case with Moto, HTC and Samsung is more dramatic – they’re all developing a strong Android product line (Moto in particular) in spite of their Windows Mobile backgrounds. I cannot find one smartphone manufacturer that is betting on Windows Mobilee, and I strongly suspect that most of Android’s growth will come at WinMo’s expense.

But my comment was to point out that a commitment to Android implies a lack of coherent strategy for manufacturers. That certainly seems true with Moto, HTC, Samsung and LG. In my opinion, Moto has suffered from terrible hardware design. HTC and Samsung have tried without success to hide Windows Mobile’s ugliness under their customizations. LG’s proprietary OS strategy means few, if any, third-party apps.

For the rest, Android *is* their first strategy. That’s brave. But it’s also evidence that Android’s features are exactly what smartphone users want today – touch-screen support, strong integration with Google’s applications, a capable browser and support for other installable applications. This is also true of Mac OS X on iPhone, but what if you want another phone? Android’s looking like a very, very attractive alternative.

Congressman and two-time Presidential candidate Ron Paul on TIME’s ’10 Questions’:

Why do you oppose the income tax?
Because I have a right to the fruits of my labor, and government does not. If you concede the principle of the income tax, you concede the principle that the government owns all your income and permits you to keep a certain percentage of it. (emphasis added) God-given rights to our life and our liberty don’t come from government.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will soon test a bizarre theory:

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Also, this nugget about time:

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true… all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

A few days ago, I asked if any Nobel Peace Prize awardee had turned down the prize. A Wall Street Journal article has the answer:

The committee’s most-controversial prize was probably the 1973 selection of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his counterpart, Le Duc Tho, for their efforts to end the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese negotiator declined the award, the only recipient to do so in the prize’s 108-year history.

Delicious. Then,

Mr. Kissinger, who guided war policy in the Nixon administration, accepted, prompting musical satirist Tom Lehrer to respond: “It was at that moment that satire died. There was nothing more to say after that.”

Update: 14th October 2009 – Al Jazeera has more about this. (Saying ‘No thanks’ to Nobel)

Gruber, again:

There seems to be widespread consensus that Windows 7 has to be a hit because Microsoft needs it to be a hit. I wonder how much this assumption has colored the reviews.

Nina Sankovitch is reading one book a day for one year. Today she is on Day 350.

By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer — Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid primer “The Crying of Lot 49,” for example, rather than the weightier, in all ways, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But on March 1, she made it through all 560 pages of “Revelation,” by C. J. Sansom, a murder mystery set in Tudor England.

She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction, with niche interests including punk rock (“Please Kill Me,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain) and tennis (“A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher).

Shashi Tharoor did this when he was very young, and didn’t get as much publicity for it:

I read eclectically, and I must say, indiscriminately. Remember that reading was my principal activity outside schoolwork. I loved the game of cricket and I played it very badly, but also I wasn’t often well enough to go out and play. And so that and the absence of television, computer games, and all the distractions that my children now enjoy, meant that if I wasn’t writing I was reading. And actually there was one particular year, the year of my thirteenth birthday, that I decided to set myself a challenge of finishing three hundred and sixty-five books in three hundred and sixty-five days. And I did and I kept a list at that point to prove it. So I was a voracious and rapid reader, and with that kind of volume, I obviously read all sorts of stuff.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

Here’s the thing. I didn’t read his (William Safire’s) op-ed column because I agreed with him; I read it because I didn’t agree with him. Though I seldom agreed with his politics (and when I did, it was in favor of individual privacy and liberty), Safire was always thoughtful and his writing always playful. I feel it’s important to read the opinions of those with whom you tend to disagree, politically or otherwise.

But even if your politics and constitution are such that you could not abide his op-ed column, I don’t see how anyone who loves U.S. English didn’t cherish his Sunday ‘On Language’ column as the national treasure that it was. 30 years! And he kicked ass until the very end

(responding to readers’ complaints about how Gruber could say anything positive about the Nixon speech-writer who also supported the Iraq War).

… 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.