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“Martha Coakley, the Democratic Senate nominee, is the kind of candidate who reminds you that the state that gave birth to John Kennedy also produced Michael Dukakis.”

- in today’s op-ed.

Shashi Tharoor has an incredible opportunity to foster quality debate on public policy, and stay out of trouble while he’s at it.

He should turn off the tweet tap and blog instead.

Pose his opinions as questions and open up comments. Let users reply to, and rate each others’ ideas. And Mr. Tharoor could moderate comments.

From his much-maligned Twitter stream could then flow (benign) personal updates and links to these blog posts.

Mr. Tharoor’s blog could do to public policy debate what Fred Wilson’s blog has done to debate on the consumer web.

It could, at its best, be an oasis of reasoned opinion in a heated desert of endless polarized knee-jerk commentary.

Even at its worst, it could save his fledgeling ministerial career.

“Wouldn’t it be great, then, to start from scratch and design something based on the needs of today’s web applications and today’s users?”

- the Chrome Comic, Sep 08

In other words, if you can’t build it fast enough, we’ll do it ourselves.

Browsers are unstable and slow because of single-threaded javascript? We’ll build a new browser altogether. Windows/Mac OS too bloated for the folks that want to get on the web? We’ll build a new zippy laptop operating system that has just the web. Too hard to get your email, calendar, maps on your phone? We’ll build a mobile device that just works. Attaching docs and quoting from previous email seems inefficient? We’ll invent email all over again today. Website lookups slowing down your browsing? Use our DNS servers.

We can’t believe the web hasn’t changed given all the cheap bandwidth and online data.

No longer will constrain our applications to fit your web. If your web can’t run them, we’ll re-tool the web ourselves.

And strike distribution deals to get these tools in your hands. So you can get to our applications. Faster and more often.

Welcome to our new decade.

the Blackberry (and iPhone and the Treo), a reminder of just how unconnected we were not ten years ago.

(via the Washington Post’s list of the ten worst ideas of the decade.)

is the essence of the difference between Facebook-like and Twitter-like networks.

People want as many people as possible to hear their opinions, and as few to know more about who they are.

Which is why Twitter thrives the more open it is, while every one of Facebook’s privacy-related moves breeds paranoia.

From Nokia’s EVP of services (the guy responsible for Nokia’s push into email, music, apps and the like):

In India, for example, Nokia’s music download service is becoming popular mostly because many people don’t have PCs and are using their phones to download music.

I’m surprised. If these downloads are over GRPS/EDGE, they’ll take forever. How else is this done? And equally importantly, do people really pay for music here?

Compared to Chrome (and F’fox and Safari), Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is embarrassingly slow on modern websites.

If you’re looking to convert your Mom/Dad/other Net newbie to F’fox/Chrome, you don’t need to talk about security and multi-tabbing and standards-compliance anymore. All you need to do is open Gmail or Facebook or the New York Times on both browsers.

Just speed is enough.

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.

Arnold. Whoa.

The ‘follower count’ is the number of politicos who follow that user.

More Republicans than Democrats there.

(via the New York Times).

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).

Because your shareholders think you’re chicken when you’re being sane:

What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than for maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.

(via Matt Mullenweg.)

One that doesn’t require a large, imposing building – or any building at all:

My friend Rony and I were speculating about a true “distributed hotel” that would rent out your apartment when you’re gone, handling keys, cleaning, payment, maintenance, insurance, emergencies, and other details for you. Maybe it could even help you secure your apartment, removing personal papers and storing them offsite in your absence.

Any idea if anyone anywhere’s doing this?

From my experience of the past half-decade, this figure seems exceedingly low:

In a survey of 2,001 information workers, only 10 percent of the people using Microsoft Outlook said they would be happy to have their e-mail switched.

(via @jeanmarsh)

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