Entries for October 2005
Is it strange that every time I go into my bathroom and look at the box of tissues sitting on the shelf, I see Charles Darwin looking back at me?
It does look like Darwin, yes? Or have I been reading far too much about science and evolution lately?
Note: My bathroom Darwin orchid has nothing to do with Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid that Darwin discovered in 1850. At the time, he speculated that in order for the plant to be pollinated, a moth with a 12” proboscis would have to do it, even though no such moth had been shown to exist. This freakish moth was eventually discovered (not in my bathroom) in 1903, 20 years after Darwin’s death.
Photo of Vermont foliage. “Among factors that combine to give Vermont an edge in the U.S.’s foliage sweepstakes are the abundance and density of broad-leaved tree species, each with a contrasting color scheme, and a climate inclined to bring out the best in all of them.”
Gelf Magazine says “a new study uses shoddy stats to hold the movie industry responsible for society’s poor health choice”. “But even if we disregard the fact that people don’t necessarily take their public-health cues from films like Scary Movie and Rambo: First Blood Part II, the study has serious flaws that undermine even its tenuous claim on our attention”.
Edward Jay Epstein on why Pixar should make nice with Disney again. Bottom line: Disney owns the sequel rights to all of Pixar’s films and Pixar can’t afford to do battle against Toy Story 3 or The Incredibles 2 in future summers.
People are printing less photos at home on their inkjet/laser printers because of the high price of ink (and the low price of having them done at Wal-Mart, etc.). Ink costs more than pricey champagne and perfume, which is ridiculous. Printer companies suck…I just changed the ink cartridge in my HP printer and the wrapper said something like “this cartridge not licensed for modification”, like they have some sort of control over what I do with their artificially expensive ink dispenser after I’ve purchased it. (via meg)
From a Washington Post article about google.org, Google’s philanthropic effort:
Shareholder activists said Google’s charitable commitment raises questions about whether this is an appropriate use of company cash or whether company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ought to make donations to their favorite causes personally. The foundation of Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corp. and the nation’s richest person according to Forbes, gave away more than a billion dollars last year to fight poverty, hunger and disease around the world. But Gates donates through a personal foundation, rather than through Microsoft itself.
“The board of directors should make it clear to the company’s founders what should be personal and what should be corporate,” said Patrick S. McGurn, special counsel to Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. “Google is spending shareholders’ money, and it raises questions if there is not a valid corporate purpose.”
Shareholder activists? You’ve got to be kidding me. You’d think that stock shareholders are a bunch of babies that need their noses wiped and hands held to go potty or something. If you don’t want to support Google’s philanthropic efforts and think that they’re throwing your money away by doing so, there’s an easy way to opt out: DON’T BUY GOOGLE STOCK. It’s a free country and open market…vote with your money on what you think is a “valid corporate purpose”. There are thousands of other companies to invest in that are doing other things, many of which operate exactly the same…nice and safe and by the book. The information on what these companies are doing with their shareholders’ money is freely available…get informed about what you’re buying. Given their P/E ratio, unique corporate approach, and incredible rate of growth, Google might just be the riskiest large-cap stock opportunity out there, but the potential upside (as well as the downside) is a lot greater than all of those companies playing it safe. As long as it’s stated (and I believe Google certainly has made their views very clear), risk isn’t something from which shareholders should be warned away.
A relativistic examination of gravity in the galaxy may indicate that the invention of dark matter may not be necessary to solve the not-enough-matter problem. “The motions of stars in galaxies is realized in general relativity’s equations without the need to invoke massive halos of exotic ‘dark matter’ that nobody can explain by current physics.”
Update: mjt has doubts about the paper referenced here and notes that there’s other evidence for dark matter that is not questioned by the above study.
Wonderful interview of Milton Glaser by Chip Kidd from a couple of years ago. Touches on his iconic I [heart] NY logo, the updated version (which the NY Commerce Dept. tried to sue him for), and the economics of design. (via df)
In addition to weblogs.com, Verisign’s acquisition of Moreover was also announced this week. Two of the companies founders, Nick Denton and David Galbraith, have thoughts. Nick reveals that Moreover almost bought Pyra once upon a time, a little tidbit I didn’t reveal in my piece on Moreover from a couple years ago.
VGMap is a library developed at Eyebeam that lets you overlay arbitrary data and graphics onto Google Maps with Flash. Since you can dump anything you want into a Flash movie, you’re free to annotate Google Maps with anything you want, from audio clips to banner ads of businesses. As an example, they’ve overlayed the NYC subway onto a map of Manhattan.
Hugms connects to your mobile phone via Bluetooth and then when you squeeze it, is sends a “hug” text message to the person of your choosing. See also sweethearting. (thx mike)
Malcolm Gladwell’s description of how Harvard decides on who to admit strikes me as similar to how many companies in the tech/web industry hire employees. “Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want. The strategy of discretion that Yale had once used to exclude Jews was soon being used to include people like Levi Jackson.”
The Onion: Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation. “We all got Ron’s message loud and clear when that JPEG of his wife wipe-transitioned to a photo of her tombstone”. (via mathowie)
Nimble companies like FedEx have helped stabilize the US economy by becoming more flexible. FedEx keeps 5 empty planes flying over the US each night to help fill in surprise delivery gaps as needed.
Andre Torrez: “Webloggers of 1999 don’t equal bloggers in 2005”. Agreed, but I also think the webloggers of 1999 are different too…the game has changed but so have the people.
Solution for those scratches on your easily-damaged iPod nano: polish with Brasso liquid abrasive and seal with invisibleShield.
NYC’s Bryant Park is getting an ice skating rink this winter. Admission is free. I can’t imagine how long that line is going to be to get in.
I posted a link on Friday to an article discussing neat words in non-English languages (taken from the new book, The Meaning of Tingo) and cited the Dutch word “plimpplampplettere” as my favorite. The article says:
But it’s those fun-loving people in the Netherlands who should have the last word — the phrase for skimming stones is as light-hearted as the action: plimpplampplettere.
Several Dutch have emailed to say that there’s no such word in their language. Language Log says we should take the book with a huge grain of salt:
De Boinod is no linguist (he’s a researcher for the BBC comedy quiz show QI), but he claims to have read “over 280 dictionaries” and “140 websites” (or, according to his publisher’s site, “approximately 220 dictionaries” and “150 websites” — take your pick). It’s safe to assume that the fact-checking for such books is rather minimal — if a website says it, it must be true, right?
The lesson here is don’t believe everything you read on the web about books based on what someone read on the web.
IT Conversations will be streaming presentations from PopTech 2005 live…Windows Media Player required. :( From Etech to the AIGA Design Conference to Web Essentials 05, more and more conferences letting those of us who can’t attend listen in anyway.
Google Reader is Google’s RSS/Atom reader.
Neil is compiling a list of notable musicians who blog…help him out in the comments. So far, he’s got Franz, Radiohead, Shatner (!), Ted Leo, M Doughty, etc.
Joel Kotkin rebutts Richard Florida’s argument that what cities need to thrive are “gays, twentysomethings, and young creatives”. Florida’s ideas, which are laid down in The Rise of the Creative Class and Cities and the Creative Class, have been adopted in cities around the world with, Kotkin says, little success. Kotkin stresses that “great cities need schools for families, transport that works, jobs for the middle and the aspiring working classes”.
Bumvertising. More here. I don’t object to the idea if this idiot were paying them more. Hire them to wear a sandwich board and pay them $6 an hour.
Scientists want to build an array of submillimeter telescopes across the whole earth to peer “inside” the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Update: Many people wrote in to correct me in saying that “submillimeter” referred to the size of the telescopes…it of course referred to the EM wavelength. Me brain not working right.
Freakonomists Dubner and Levitt propose a solution for people who don’t clean up after their dogs in NYC: a mandatory doggie DNA database against which sidewalk dookies are compared and fines mailed out for offenders.
Dave Winer comments on the weblogs.com/Verisign deal…odd omission of a link to my post even though he references it several times. Bad luck that I caught him traveling; if I’d realized that beforehand, I would have held off. Dave seems to trust Verisign to do the job; I think Verisign has shown itself to be an untrustworthy, terrible company.
Franz Ferdinand** has a blog and you don’t probably do too.
** The band, not the archduke.
The origins and common usage of British swear words. “Both Oxford and London boasted districts called ‘Gropecunte Lane’, in reference to the prostitutes that worked there. The Oxford lane was later renamed the slightly less-contentious Magpie Lane, while London’s version retained a sense of euphemism when it was changed to ‘Threadneedle Street’. Records do not show whether it was a decision of intentional irony that eventually placed the Bank of England there.”
20 unusual non-English words sent in by readers of the BBC Magazine (in response to this article about a new book on unusual words). Plimpplampplettere, the Dutch word for skipping stones, is sublime.
What the hell? Almost 500 pounds of Legos up for auction on eBay. “This is my collection for the past 25 years, it’s time to go.” Bid stands at ~$6800. (thx, karl)
Boy, the scent of money is in the air these days. The latest report is that Dave Winer has sold weblogs.com to Verisign (~$5 million is the figure being bandied about for $2.3 million). This is an interesting one because it seemed crazy (see below) when I first heard about it, but now that I’ve heard it from multiple sources, who knows?
Verisign is interested in blogs and RSS (another of their acquisitions in this space will be announced soon) and it’s not hard to see why Dave would sell weblogs.com (the site needs some firm financial backing to keep from buckling under the ever-increasing strain of all those pings), but to Verisign? To me, Verisign embodies the idiocy and ineptitude of the BigCos Dave often rails against…the BigCo to end all BigCos. If true, those are some odd bedfellows indeed.
Update: Silicon Beat says they have confirmation that Verisign bought weblogs.com:
We’re getting confirmation that the rumors about Verisign buying Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com are true. The price is $2 million. What Verisign wants with Weblogs is another matter. Weblogs was one of the first, if not the first, centralized ping servers that blogs could use to alert the world to new content.
I like how when a weblog has two independent sources on something, it’s a “rumor”…
Update #2: Verisign confirms the purchase.
Back when I wrote about how a WebOS might work (basically XHTML/JS web apps that run on the desktop as well), I got a lot of responses along the lines of: with internet access becoming more ubiquitous (broadband, wifi, wireless broadband, WiMax, etc.), there will be less and less need for applications that don’t need a connection to the network to function. When you can literally get a fast, cheap internet connection anywhere, you don’t need a version of Gmail that works offline and so that’s not going to drive the development of this WebOS thing you’re talking about.
I’ve been thinking for several weeks about why I think that’s wrong and I’ve come up with a couple ideas.
1. Fast, cheap internet everywhere? Hoo boy, wake me when that happens…you’ll likely find me driving my hydrogen-powered hovercar with ESP to my paperless office.
2. For many people, the more you get used to having access to your applications/data/etc., the more important that access becomes. Let’s say 98% of the applications you use are entirely on the web (with no offline capabilities) and you’re online almost all the time wherever you go. Then the network winks out for 1/2 an hour. Or Salesforce.com is down for a couple hours. That last little inch is going to be painful. And no use telling me that sounds insane because I’ve seen the madness and fear in people’s eyes while they clutch their Crackberries, furiously reading email mere minutes away from the office and the full-speed, full-screen experience.
3. The offline thing is a good way for companies to bootstrap the WebOS. I think most people have a sense that the apps they use in their browser are more alive, more social, more connected, even if they can’t articulate that feeling. And whether it’s true or not (Gmail isn’t actually more “connected” than Outlook), companies can market the “aliveness” of their web apps (even when they run offline) versus the “deadness” of desktop apps.
Scott Rosenberg on the Web 2.0 conference and the new bubble: “it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced”.
What’s the funniest word ever? I don’t know about funny, but I’ve always enjoyed saying “Goethe”.
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