The current estimated size of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years. Given that light travels at a speed of 186,282 miles per second, how big is that?
Answer, according to WolframAlpha: 8.054×10^22 miles or 1.296×10^23 km.
Just thought you’d like to know.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting piece on the coffee+WiFi culture.
Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables — nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours — and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.
Given that free WiFi has been more of a US than a British tradition, the change bites harder over there. (In fact in the UK the only restaurant chain that consistently offers free WiFi is — amazingly — McDonalds, which is why I can sometimes be found under the golden arches with one of their — surprisingly good — black coffees while I connect to down- or up-load something urgent.)
The WSJ piece sparked a thoughful post by Joey Devilla entitled “The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop” in which he puts the coffee-shop phenomenon in a wider context. He points out that the coffee-house has played a venerable role in the evolution of democracy in many European countries.
Then, as now, they functioned as what sociologists like to call “Third Places”: places that are neither home (the “First Place”) nor work (the “Second Place”), but a place that functions a community gathering place where broader, and often more creative social interactions happen. Cafes, community centres, churches, pubs in the U.K., town squares, open-air basketball courts, the parking lots of 7-11s and hackerspaces like Toronto’s HacklabTO are all third places.
In the last decade, the WiFi-enabled coffee shop has played a small but honourable role in the evolution of computer code. The guys who wrote Delicious Library in 2006, for example, did most if not all of their software development in a Seattle cafe — but did so with the permisson of the owner.
Interesting idea in the NYTimes which allows readers to listen to a snatch of the big numbers from the first Woodstock festival and vote for their favourite. When I looked, Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner was way ahead.
Astonishing story, if true.
President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.
Hmmm… Maybe he was pulling Chirac’s leg?
En passant At a dinner party a couple of years ago, a retired (very) senior British civil servant (who had served in Downing Street during the Blair years), told me about Chirac’s visit to Number Ten before the decision to go to war in Iraq. On his way out Chirac said to Blair something along the lines of: “Tony, you’ve never seen warfare or military action. I have; and it’s not something you ever embark upon except as a last resort”. After the President’s entourage had departed, Blair turned to my fellow-diner and said: “Poor old Jacques. He just doesn’t get it, does he?”
“We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.”
Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the US Central Command.
[Source]
On our walk, we passed a large field entirely covered in luxuriant weeds. The farmer is probably getting a ‘set-aside’ grant from the EU for growing them.
There’s a thoughtful comment by James Harkin in today’s Guardian about Rupert Murdoch’s decision to charge for online news.
The cheerleaders of a free, digital utopia want to resurrect the mass market for news by having us chat to each other and our newspapers all day long. But between the fusty old newspapermen who refuse to tweet and the gadgeteers who do little else, there is little evidence that the rest of us have the time to be cogs in an all-purpose electronic machine. Long before the net tore apart its business model, the truth is that many newspapers were looking bloated and fat, as if lifestyle supplements and the advertising which went along with them was all readers wanted.
What they wanted, it turns out, was focused content, written by journalists who know what they’re talking about. The freshest news outlets springing up in the US, for instance, are Politico, the magazine aimed at political junkies which broke the scandal of the Washington Post charging companies for access to its reporters, or TMZ, the well-connected celebrity mag which broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death.
News organisations will, as a consequence, divide into populist monoliths which try to be all things to all people – witness the growth of news aggregators, for example – or, more promisingly, slim down and concentrate on what they know about.
He’s right. As someone who’s written for print newspapers for nearly four decades, I remember well the glory days of print: of national publications that were prestigious, politically influential and indulgently managed — when they were managed at all. There’s a lovely story in a biography of Roy Thomson, the Canadian press baron who bought the Times and the Sunday Times (and whose family later sold the titles to Murdoch). When he was being shown round the ST he and the CEO ran into a blue-overalled chap on the stairs going down to the print room. He was the Father [shop steward] of the NGA Chapel [local branch of the printers’ union]. The CEO introduced Thomson as the new owner of the paper”. “Well”, said the chap, “you may own it but I run it.” And, in a sense, he spoke the truth: as the shop-steward of the print union, he was in many respects the most powerful figure on the paper — because he could determine whether it got printed on a particular evening or not. Management proposed, but the NGA disposed. Journalists of my generation can all remember nights when the print run would stall until Management agreed to some union demand or other.)
Rupert Murdoch changed all that, because he broke the stranglehold of the print union with a breathtaking combination of ingenuity and ruthlessness. He secretly built a new publishing system in Wapping, negotiated a secret deal with another union — the electricians — to run it, moved his entire operation overnight to the new location and changed his distribution system from union-dominated railways to trucks run by his Australian chums at TNT. When the print union tried to shut down the Wapping plant by picketing and blocading it, they found themselves up against the new Thatcherite labour laws (which outlawed ‘secondary’ picketing) and a government determined to crush the unions using the police as a battering ram.
Wapping changed everything for British national newspapers, and for a time it became possible to run them as rational businesses. In the process, they also became profitable — in Murdoch’s case, highly so.
But in fact it was a temporary reprieve. That profitability could only have endured in the information ecosystem of the print era. The print newspaper is a value-chain which links an expensive activity (journalism) to a profitable one (display and classified advertising). If the journalism was suitably sensational, then it brought in lots of low-grade readers, and with them high sales and advertising revenues; if the journalism was of higher quality, it brought in a better class of reader, and with him higher advertising rates. Either way, for nearly a century, the proceeds from advertising greatly exceeded the costs of journalism and newspapers were profitable.
When the Net arrived, most newspaper people misunderstood its significance. They thought that the threat it posed involved online news. What they failed to spot was that the main impact of the Net is to dissolve value-chains. In the old days, the only way to do classified ads was via a newspaper. But the Web is intrinsically better for classifieds because it adds the power of search, so that instead of having to wade through pages of small print looking for that 1963 Mercedes 380SL you’ve always craved, you just enter the text in a search box and — bingo! — there it is, a snip at £15k. So the real threat to the newspaper business was that the Net would dissolve the value chain which made them profitable. And that’s what has happened. Of course newspapers still had display advertising — which doesn’t work on the Web — but that’s a business that comes and goes with the business cycle, and at the moment it’s way down, which is why the crisis for papers is even worse at the moment than it might otherwise have been.
In the post-Wapping era, British newspapers tried to broaden their appeal by expanding their offerings via an explosion in lifestyle and other ‘supplements’, business sections etc. Saturday papers expanded from being the slimmest of the week to being the most bloated. The Sunday Times led the charge to turn itself into the literary equivalent of a shopping mall with a TV advertising campaign which described the paper as “the Sunday papers”. And for a time, it appeared to work — at least in the sense that the new supplements boosted advertising revenues.
But even then, it was obvious to the perceptive eye that there was something wrong. I found it fascinating to watch how people dealt with these new shopping-mall newspapers. First they would tear open the cellophane wrapping and cursorily inspect the contents. Then they would pick out one item after another and dispose of it — until they were left with the one or two sections of the paper that they really wanted. Of course for any individual the retained sections might be different; but the pattern was always the same — people were choosing only what they wanted, and throwing away the rest.
In a bricks-and-mortar world, this kind of carpet-bombing of the consumer may make some sense — it’s a way of ensuring that the advertising message gets through. But it’s incredibly wasteful and inefficient in the same way that manufacturing, burning and shipping plastic disks is an incredibly wasteful way of getting bitstreams from a recording studio to an iPod. Once the Net was invented, there was no going back for the record companies to the business model that had served them so well in the old days. So it is for the newspaper business.
My hunch is that the game is up for the carpet-bombing approach. The era of the all-things-to-all-readers newspaper is ending. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that there isn’t a future for some kinds of print newspaper/periodical. Just looking at my own behaviour, I’m happy to pay for certain kinds of high-quality, generalist, content: it’s why I subscribe to the Economist, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, for example. And why I buy the Guardian. (Full disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is owned by the Guardian.) I’d also pay to read a select number of columnists and reporters — names that come to mind are Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Vic Keegan, Charles Arthur, Andrew Brown, Martin Kettle, George Monbiot, Robert Peston, Nick Robinson, Rory Cellan-Jones, Bill Thompson, John Kelly. But I wouldn’t pay for any generalist, middle-of-the-road newspaper, online or off.
I said in my Oxford seminar that I welcomed the Digger’s experiment because until someone seriously tries to charge for content we won’t know what its real price is. I meant what I said. Roll on the Autumn!
… in 1974, Richard Nixon announced he would resign in order to avoid impeachment as a result of the Watergate scandal.
My esteemed colleague Doug Clow has just posted a very thoughtful blog post about the glib terminology we use to describe different degrees of familiarity with technology.
I think we should stop talking about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” altogether. It’s unhelpful and unclear. A better distinction might be between “digital residents” and “digital tourists”.
I’ve never liked the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, as introduced/popularised by Prensky, and the “born digital” idea as applied to people (rather than, say, media artefacts) is profoundly problematic. I’m not the first or only person to raise this – lots of people have criticised it. (And with very flaky Internet access at the moment, I can’t link to or cite to them … which is a bit annoying but saves me the bother – good job this isn’t a proper academic paper.)
He cites four reasons for disliking the ‘native/immigrant’ dichotomy:
1. Moral issues in “appropriating language about indigenous people and human migration”.
2. The fact that the categories are not fixed in generational terms: “as is widely attested, there are plenty of retired-age people who have great facility with digital technologies, and spent large amounts of time online, and plenty of teenagers who struggle with them and find them overwhelming and alienating”.
3. The fact that the ‘native/immigrant’ terminology “attributes inherent, unchangability to one’s approach and use of technology. One cannot aspire or attempt to become a digital native: one either is or one isn’t. There are plenty of people who come to digital fluency at a later stage in life than infancy.”
4. It sets up “an insurmountable barrier of incomprehension between teachers (by definition digital immigrants) and learners (by definition digital natives)”.
I’m with him on #2 through #4. #1 seems a bit, well, wet somehow.
Doug suggests that we think in terms of ‘digital residents’ and ‘digital tourists’. I think that’s much more insightful and productive. In fact, having just come back from Provence, a part of the world I love but in which I never participate fully because of my limited linguistic and cultural knowledge, I can see exactly why some people feel uncertain and unsure of themselves in cyberspace. They’re tourists in that space, whereas I’m a resident.
LATER: A comment on Doug’s post points out that the same distinction was made by Dave White on the Oxford Online Education Blog about a year ago.
Interesting NYT piece today:
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.
Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”
The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.
Hmmm…. Must tell my statistician colleagues. They’ve been rather depressed lately.