Ansel Adams has a lot to answer for.
Flickr version here.
The speed of information travel, 1798 – 2009
From Kottke.
Michael Stillwell pulled an interesting chart out of a book called A Farewell to Alms. It’s a table of the speed of important news reaching London. For instance, in 1805 the news of the Battle of Trafalgar took 17 days to travel the 1100 miles to London; that’s a speed of 2.7 mph. By 1891 when the Nobi earthquake occurred in Japan, it only took the news one day to travel 5916 miles, a speed of 246 mph.
Nowadays an email or a Twitter update can travel halfway around the world nearly instantaneously. The 2008 Sichaun earthquake occurred 5100 miles from London with the first Twitter update in English occurring about 7 minutes after the quake started. Assuming the message was read a minute later by someone in London, that’s 38,250 mph. Had the Twitter updater been right at the epicenter and able to send a Twitter message 30 seconds after the quake started and was read a minute later in London, that’s 204,000 mph. Five orders of magnitude improvement in 200 years…not too shabby.
The pastry crescent
In Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s entrancing book
Martial spoils apart, the great contest has left little trace. It was the beginning of coffee-drinking in the West, or so the Viennese maintain. The earliest coffee-houses, they insist, were kept by some of the Sultan’s Greek and Serbian subjects who had sought sanctuary in Vienna. But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moon of the Sultan’s flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They lark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.
Truly, you learn something new every day. I had always assumed that the croissant was the product of unaided Gallic inspiration.
Serendipity
Way back in 2006, William McKeen, chairman of the Department of Journalism at Florida State University, penned a nostalgic paen to serendipity — a phenomenon that he seemed to think was threatened by digital technology. Sample:
Serendipity is defined as the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally. There’s so much of modern life that makes it preferable to the vaunted good old days – better hygiene products and power steering leap to mind – but in these disposable days of now and the future, the concept of serendipity is endangered.
Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find – with an irritating hit or miss here and there – exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn’t know was there. Same thing goes with bookstores.
Steven Johnson isn’t having any of it. Here’s an excerpt from his spirited riposte.
I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the “binding.”) Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere’s exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books. With music blogs and iTunes, I’ve discovered more interesting new bands and albums in the past year than I did in all of my college years. I know radio has gotten a lot worse, but really — does anyone actually believe that radio was ever more diverse and surprising in its recommendations than surfing through the iTunes catalog or the music sites? It’s no accident that BoingBoing is the most popular blog online — it’s popular because it’s an incredible randomizer, sending you off on all these crazy and unpredictable paths.
I mean, look at what’s on the front door of Kottke this morning: soccer jersey fonts, debate over travel time to JFK, best American fiction poll, funny t-shirt joke, new Google software, Richard Feynman video, Tufte design riff, etc. What’s the organizing principle? There is none — other than Jason’s quirky taste — and that’s precisely why so many of us visit his site every day. It takes me thirty seconds to make all those connections by reading Jason’s blog. I defy McKeen to walk into a library and find so many weird and diverse and interesting things in an hour of staring at bindings.
I’m with Johnson all the way on this one. And thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link to the discussion.
LATER: I should have known that Bill Thompson would have had something to say about this. And indeed he did — in May 2006 he wrote an excellent column about McKeen’s argument.
My Apple Tablet
Enraged by Quentin stealing a march on me in the gadget wars with his Mac Mini 9, I resolved to restore my shattered dignity. I bought a Dell Mini 9 on eBay (the cheap one with 8GB SSD and 1G Ram), a 2GB RAM chip and a RunCore 64GB SSD. This is more expensive than a standard SSD, but one’s paying extra for its killer feature — a USB interface.
And now I have an absolutely delicious little machine which runs Leopard like a native.
It’s an eerie experience running an Apple OS on non-Apple hardware. As Leopard launched on the Dell I was suddenly reminded that I’ve owned a version of virtually every Apple machine there has ever been — starting with an Apple II in the late 1970s. But this is the first time I’ve seen the apple logo launch on a machine that the company hasn’t made.
In terms of performance, the Dell is pretty good. The screen is ok. Anything that requires disk access tends to run faster than on my MacBook Air, but processes that are compute-intensive run slower. So this is not a machine for video editing, say. But then, neither is the Air.
The great thing about the Dell, apart from the psychic satisfaction it offers, is the form factor. It’s a nicely made piece of kit. And it fits easily into a camera bag, so it will go more places with me.
I’ve used a lot of NetBooks since the ASUS 701 first launched, and I love the concept. But until now, using a NetBook meant that one always had to accept some compromises either in terms of functionality or ergonomics. The Dell Mini 9 running Leopard means much fewer compromises.
Agony, British style
Just listened to a terrific radio interview with my former Observer colleague, the wonderful Katherine Whitehorn, who has long retired from the paper but is now the ‘agony aunt’ of Saga Magazine. The conversation had moved on to the way readers respond to newspaper/magazine columnists. Katherine recounted how she had once had a letter from a man who lived with his wife in a largish house but the two of them nowadays hardly exchanged a word in the course of an entitre day. How could this dire situation be improved. Katharine suggested that the get a dog “because at least then they’d have to talk about who would take the bloody animal for a walk every day” — and was deluged with angry letters from readers saying “how dare you suggest introducing an innocent dog into such a dysfunctional family”.
And I thought: only in Britain could this happen.
Shoeshine
If you get mugged, make sure you have an iWitness
Lovely story from Good Morning Silicon Valley.
In deference to the tradition of local TV newscasts, a crime report leads this edition of the iWitness roundup, but it’s a crime report with a happy ending … except for the perps. The unnamed victim in the case was strolling through Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood around 1 a.m. Saturday when two gentlemen approached and asked for his wallet, credit card PIN numbers and iPhone, emphasizing their request with what appeared to be a handgun. After handing over the goods and notifying authorities and his banks, the man turned to his computer and fired up the Find My iPhone GPS-location feature of Apple’s MobileMe service. Sure enough, there was his phone, faithfully tracking its abductors on a shopping trip at a North Versailles Wal-Mart, then a snack stop at Eat’n Park, and finally to a gas station, where police caught up and took three men into custody, along with the stolen items and a pellet gun. With luck, the iPhone will take down a few more bad guys before word of this defense measure spreads down to street-thug level.
A la recherche du temps perdu
The Census of Ireland for 1911 has just gone online. I’ve been trying to locate my grandfathers on it. So far I’ve found my paternal grandpa. Still looking for my mother’s father. But I’ve been struck by one column on the form:
Brutal, eh? At least by the standards of our politically-correct age.
Why elephants can’t dance (or do social networking)
This morning’s Observer column.
Patience really is a virtue in this context, but it’s the one thing large corporations don’t seem to have. In part, this is a structural problem: public companies are driven by stockmarket expectations – which effectively means short-term exigencies. But corporate impatience to extract revenue juice from the online world in the short term is also a psychological problem. It’s the product of a mindset that has failed to take on board the scale of the changes now under way.
What’s happening is that one of Joseph Schumpeter’s waves of “creative destruction” is sweeping through our economies, laying waste to lots of established businesses and industries, and enabling the rise of hitherto unprecedented ones. And it’s doing so on a timescale of maybe 25 years, which means that the broad outlines of the new economic system won’t be clearly visible for at least a decade. But everywhere one looks, we find corporate moguls wanting answers Right Now. The most spectacular example is Rupert Murdoch, who is on his third demand for an immediate answer to the online question, but virtually every large organisation in the world is driven by the same panicky impatience…