Have you fallen victim to the White Van Speaker Scam? I did, when I was 16 years old. It looks like I'm not alone.

Then again, the speakers turned out to be good quality, and were less expensive than comparable speakers at Circuit City, so is it really a scam, or just a pressured sale?

Comments?

Today Casady & Greene closed its doors forever.

Ten years ago, when I started programming for the Apple Newton PDA (can you believe that it was introduced ten years ago?) I looked for a publisher to partner with and, after several months, I found Casady & Greene. They published 'Reflex', my Newton productivity toolkit, and would have published 'Nexus', an amazing addition to the NewtonOS, if Apple hadn't closed the Newton down.

The folks at C&G are an amazing bunch. I'm really sorry to see that they've fallen on hard times. Still, hopefully the individuals that made the company what it was will go on to their own new adventures and find new joys.

Thank you, Casady & Greene!

Comments?

Amazing predictions of what the next 50 years will bring! I meant to post this 53 years ago.. Oops.

Seriously, it's amazing the things that are right on the nose, funny the things that were totally off, and interesting to see what they thought we'd have yet to accomplish, and what they assume would be child's play by now.

Comments?

Reading an article hypothesizing on the source of G W Bush's polar nature, I got to thinking...

When does partisanship give way to objectivity? Or does it ever? It's interesting to me that my own personal historical opinion of past presidents is only clouded by partisanship as far back as I was consciously aware of their term of office. I hold my own opinions of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush the Sequel because I lived through them. Farther back than that though, I gauge a president's effectiveness based on what history thought, and that history, found in the textbooks mostly, usually speaks with one voice, with both the right and left channels mixed into monophonic.

Where does that national consensus come from? Who decides, in the end, whether our children and grandchildren see GWB as a great leader or bully dullard?

At the end of a presidency, do we all take a deep breath and say "okay, now that it's a moot point, yeah, he was really bad. Thank god there's this new guy" or will Republicans stand behind him even after there are more intelligent and worthy leaders at the point of the GOP's blade?

As an example, I'd probably have supported Carter 100% against Reagan in 1980, but now I'd freely admit that his talents didn't particularly lie in his presidential acumen. Is this polarization inherent in a two-party system mirroring the 'with us or against us' polarization we fear so much in our sitting president?

Comments?

Today G. W. Bush announced America's new strike-first military foreign policy ([pdf] linked from the white house home page. Apparently these guys aren't too big on HTML.)

Ending a long-time defensive posture, the mandate of the armed forces now is to stop people who are perceived to be enemies of the United States, before they get the capability to strike.

It amazes me that we can have a government so xenophobic as to have a 'do unto you before you can do unto me' military policy, and still be anti-gun-control within our own borders.

More and more I've been thinking about how the US world power is resembling that of the Roman Empire, for better or worse.

On a slightly related note, in October of 1945, President Truman altered the Seal of the President so that the eagle's head faced the olive branch, not the arrows (incidentally, the eagle has always faced the olive branch on the Seal of the United States, and on the one dollar bill). Truman said the office of the presidency should be devoted to the practice of peace.

Visiting Truman a few months later, Winston Churchill quipped that perhaps the eagle's head should be mounted on a swivel. (thanks snopes)

Comments?

Follow my train of thought for this evening:

1. California may force schools to drop Indian mascots - The move, promoted by Native American tribesmen, is intended to protect the dignity of the American Indian heritage, by forbiding schools to promote it. Braves, Chiefs, Apaches, and Comanches are all among the 'offensive' labels that would be forbidden.
2. I went to Gaspar de Portola Middle School. No, my old school wouldn't be affected by the ban, because our mascots weren't any for of Indians. Our mascot was the Conquistador.
3. Portola-the-school has a strict mandate of nondiscrimination.
4. Gaspar de Portola, as the Spanish Governor of the Californias, in the 1760s, "was responsible for expelling the Jesuits from Baja California, where they had established 14 missions in 72 years."
5. The conquistadores proper, Spanish explorers turned gold-hunting entrepenuers, braving the New World, were acknowledged bringers of torture and genocide, killing literally hundreds of thousands of Native Americans in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

But apparently naming a school's mascot after a Native American tribe is more offensive than naming one after the group of people that committed mass genocide against them.

Just so long as we all have our priorities firmly in place.

Lastly, I leave you with a stunning example of irony. At least somebody has the right perspective.

Comments?

Several years ago I saw a book at Barnes & Noble, "Who Wrote the Bible?" and I was compelled to buy it. Sadly, in the years hence I didn't have the same compellation to actually read the book, and it's sat on my bookcase all that time.

I was still intrigued enough by the subject though, that when I stumbled onto a concise analysis of Bible authorship theories in The Straight Dope, I read it.

Ever the king of the short attention span, I found this to be an excellent synopsis of a highly controvertial topic. If you're at all interested in the subject, this will let you learn in an hour what would otherwise take a semester, or at least many nights with a big fat book, to which you can turn if the article sparks more curiosity than it sates.

Note: The link goes to just the first segment of five, dealing with the authorship of the Five Books of Moses. The others address the Histories in the Old Testament, the Prophetic Books in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a chapter on who decided which books should be included and excluded from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Bibles.

Interesting reading. Oh, and in case anyone's terribly offended, the articles present both the religious and the academic viewpoints, without drawing conclusions.

Comments?

A pair of tidbits: First is the first electronic bulletin board created in the '70s in (of all places) Leopold's Records in Berkeley (later bought by the Wherehouse, and even later closed and replaced by the neighboring Tower Records).

Next is Google's expansion of their Usenet search to posts from over 20 years ago. At over 700 million messages, it's the most comprehensive usenet library ever compiled.

Some notable posts in the new library are the first known use and explanation of emoticons (1982) (raise your hand in pride shame if you remember using 'J/K' to let people know you were 'just kidding' before the emoticon was invented), the first post to alt.religion.kibology (1991), the first thread about AIDS (1982), and a bunch of other pieces of collective net history that I'm so glad were saved after all.

My librarian/teacher friends (of which I recently realized are a staggering percentage) would be (are?) so proud.

Comments?

Driving down to and returning from my second interview at Yahoo!, back in February, I was weighing the merits of employment against those of a Masters education, juxtaposed against the realities of working 50 miles from home and studying 3000 miles from home. Lounging most heavy in my mind were the changes that would manifest transitioning from the 9-4 life of a student living 300 yards from campus and that of a full-time designer working 9 hours bracketed by a combined four-hour commutes

Amidst the downsides, I did see one bright spot that I held to: The Parallax View.

Parallax, the difference between two views of the same scene perceived from slightly seperated points in space, is what gives us stereoscopic vision and a perception of depth. Two simultaneous viewpoints give your brain the information it needs to construct a better picture of the world around it. Similarly, living in Berkeley (northeast SF Bay) and working in Sunnyvale (South Bay) gives me a better perspective on the bay area as a whole.

History: Back in 1994, when Karen and I moved out of our El Cerrito apartment, me to regress back into the dorms (Clark Kerr, building 9 single-in-a-suite) and her to a shared apartment deep in silicon Santa Clara to intern at IBM, the 50 miles between Berkeley and Santa Clara seemed like the voids of the Baja peninsula, ill-defined and forboding. It was a big deal to drive down now and then to see my best friend, or to take BART->bus->lightrail->bus for the same journey. In retrospect it's hard (and a bit depressing) to believe we didn't see each other more often, but from a single-point perspective from a small Berkeley dorm room and a car bearing a moniker of 'deathtrap' and a hood secured with a chain and padlock, the South Bay seemed far, far away.

Later, as more of my friends moved to the South Bay, or at least south of Berkeley, that world started to seem a little closer. For the better part of a year Ammy and I would split the distance for dinner meeting at Hobee's in Fremont. Even then, the measure from Berkeley to Fremont seemed only a bit shorter than the full drive to Santa Clara.

After living with Karen I began a long tradition of getting close to the geographically remote: Liz/Fair Oaks/95 miles/79 minutes, Dana/Davis/63 miles/60 minutes, Crystal/Vallejo/24 miles/30 minutes, Emily/Pleasanton/37 miles/32 minutes. Yet even pushing down the interstate asphalt that lay between the point-source of home and the point-destination of a significant other did little to make the Bay Area seem any closer or more accessable. I'm not sure whether that's because visiting a girlfriend is different than going to a party in The City, or because all of the above lived east of me, and thus represented an exodus from, and not an exploration of, the Bay Area.

Zipping back to the now, driving (or taking the train, as I am at this moment) to and from Sunnyvale on a daily basis has done a lot towards bringing a sense of depth and perspective to my own personal Bay Area geography, consequently bringing the more distant reaches closer to home.

With one foot at each pole of the Bay, suddenly diverting to Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Hayward, or Alameda after work isn't nearly the arduous journey that it once was for the Berkeley-laden student.

Of course, all this space comes at the expense of time. As it is when I take the train I leave home at 7 am and get back at around 7:30 pm, so any extra-vehicular activity seriously cuts in to the four personal hours before my own self-mandated bedtime, but as long as I have waystations closer to work where I can bide the night and shortcut the sixthday transit, the Bay has come into my grasp. Like the sojourner gunning down Baja with a second tank of gas in the back to bridge the gap, so I now have both the perspective and the pit-stop to fully explore my decade-home, a palace with too many rooms that I rarely think of and never visit. (Do you get the gist of the post now?)

Comments?

A frequent correspondant of mine from the site, 'AA' asked me yesterday about my opinions on using paper versus digital tools for notetaking, writing, and other creative tasks. While I intend to write a pretty full answer to that question, and post it here, I thought you might be interested in a story printed (heh, posted) in SFGate this morning, on the longevity of digital versus paper media, and the tradeoffs archivists are struggling with right now to cement current data for future generations. It's a good read.

An interesting example of overlap between this topic and the paper on education I'm writing is a site offering digitized archives of 19th century schoolbooks, complete with a full text search. One of my favorite examples, from McGuffey's 1879 Fifth Grade Reader, is "How to Tell Bad News."

Comments?

I'm finishing up my last paper at Berkeley, a report on the origins and evolution of elementary education in California from 1850-1900, with an emphasis on state-standardized textbooks and their effect on minority populations.

It's just amazing to me that Berkeley has so much original source material for this kind of thing and that, for the most part, most papers and books on the subject were all written right around 1930.

Even more amazing is that I can walk out of the library with peoples 70 year old theses. It's amazing touching the actual typewritten pages people poured their educational blood, sweat, and tears into.

I have a few old books, some from the 19th century, but there's something different about reading the actualpages they wrote on, had their roommates proof, and that witnessed them sitting timidly before a board of experts as they defended it.

An excerpt from the foreward of Ruth Flemming's 1932 paper on Public Education Materials from 1850 to 1930:

To my family, for discouraging me.
To my enemies, for challenging me.
To my friends, for upholding me.
To all these - my gratitude.
        (signed) Ruth Flemming

I don't know, it all just seems so close...

Comments?

Fresh from Memepool and Slashdot comes Color photography from the 1910s. Turns out this guy did what several current photographers (links escape me at the moment) are doing, which is to take three b/w pictures with a red, green, or blue gel in front of the lens. While current practitioners will combine the three images digitally or on color print paper Sergei, not having that luxury, would project each image with a light projector and a color bulb. Some of the photos, reconstructed by the Library of Congress, are absolutely stunning, and are powerful reminders that just because we look at that era through a monochromatic lens, we shouldn't forget that it was just as vibrant (in some cases more so) than our present day. Makes the past seem that much more real...

Comments?

It's kind of scary (to me, at least) that 31 years ago was 1970, but 1939 was just 31 years before that...

I have no idea what it's like for other people, especially people older or younger than I am (27), but to me decades go something like this:

• '00s: Livin' it right now, though it still doesn't feel like a new decade, well, it's just starting to, but not a new century or millenium. I've no idea how those should feel, though I bet hovercars would soften the blow.
• '90s: Went by so fast. I keep thinking things that actually happened in the early '90s happened in the late '80s, especially movies and political movements. A good litmus test is where I was living. I moved to Berkeley and started college in '91, so I don't think of it so much as the '90s as the 'Berkeley decade'.
• '80s: The heyday. This is my archetypical decade. It felt like it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It doesn't seem that long ago, though it frightens me when I realize some friends of mine and people in my classes didn't even exist at the beginning of this decade, and even worse, they can already buy cigarettes and alcohol...
• '70s: Something to laugh at. It seems real, I lived through most of it, though I wasn't really aware of it as a place in time, not realizing how much things would change, or how much they'd changed in teh 10 years previous. Nixon? Never knew the guy but he probably was a crook, victory-fingers and wobbly jowels or no.
• '60s: They seem a little real to me, mostly because I've seen pictures of a slightly younger version my mom with long black hair, and I can match that to all the things I hear and read about the 60s. Of course, living in Berkeley I'm barraged with the anti-war, free-speech, hippy tie-dye picture of the 60s all the time, perpetuated not only by the t-shirt street vendors and Peoples Park, but by the annual batallion of new students who chose Berkeley because they were activists in high school, and see the school as the mother ship calling them home. The irony is that Berkeley in the 60s was a much more conservative campus than it is now, and it was a media lens on a relative few, and those who joined them from outside the campus, which built the picture of Berkeley as a hotbed for activism, a picture that has consequently come true after the fact.
• '50s: This is where things start moving into fantasy for me. Most of my impressions of the 50s are from Norman Rockwell paintings, episodes of Leave it to Beaver, Back to the Future, and themed restaurants like Johnny Rocket's and Mel's Diner. Flat greyscale tones and important-looking bald people in double-breasted suits.
• '40s: Another media explosion, the '40s means World War II. A history lesson about who did what where, and how the nation came together to fight a common enemy in a just war. we were good, very good. They were evil, very evil. Though you were terrified, you were righteous because you knew your cause was just. My parents were born in the '40s about the same time I was born inthe '70s. I should probably ask them...
• '30s: The Great Depression. No concept of what it was like. I mean, literally yes, but I don't know how it would feel to be thrust into a world where suddenly nearly everyone is poor, living through hardship so soon after such good times. Even with our own recent Nasdaq crash, I'm having trouble visualizing exactly how the transformation takes place. Probably because of the media I watch and read, it's far easier for me to imagine a post-cataclysmic US (ala Dark Angel) than it is to see one where everyone is poor, but things are intact, like some giant economic neutron bomb went off.
• '20s: A cultural period, taking a breath from the changes in the preceeding decades, people are starting to be at ease with cars, airplanes, and the like, and just want to have fun. World War I is over, and swing dancing is in its heyday. I'm pretty sure someone from that time would read this and laugh, yet this is the image I come away with.
• '00-'10s: Airplanes, cars, and World War I. It just seems so early for these people to have airplanes. I can't believe they've been around for nearly a century. When I think of what the world was like when Edison invented the light bulb, or Morse created the telegraph, airplanes, cars, computers, what have you, I'm usually amazed at the world they were invented in, and that that world could give rise to such an invention. It amazes me that people could go to the Moon in the '60s, after only 7 years of intense planning. If we had to go back to the Moon today, it would take at least 15 years and 10 times as much money. You don't have to look much further than the Internatioal Space Station to see that. We've built space stations before, yet now everything seems harder to do and far more expensive. Anyhow, the point of this misplaced soliloquy is that the inventions of today will almost no doubt be seen by future people as ahead of their time, and how could a society as primitive as ours possibly have given rise to (insert next big thing here). I feel like the Net was really a product of our time. Will our grandkids wonder how we could have done it when computers were so primitive? Will it be because the Net will have evolved into something so much more fantastic by that time (like biplanes to jet fighters), or because they'll see us as being more primitive than we actually are?
• 1800s: Pure history. the Civil War, slavery, manifest destiny and the gold rush are just historical accounts, and as much as I can visualize the places, people, and circumstance, I can't connect it to what I see around me now (unless I visit a cemetary, or other historical site). It's not even that far back, yet things change so much.

Well, as usual, much longer winded than I expected or intended. It's just weird to finally have a nicely wrapped package I can call a century. A century I participated in (well, for the last fourth, anyhow), yet one so completely different than the one before it. not to get all trite, but I really do wonder what the next century will hold... This entry is exactly the kind of thing that someone in 2101 will look up, read, and smile at.

Comments?

No other object of extra-terrestrial attention has been linked to so much failure as Mars.

We look at the last two probes to Mars and think how poorly we're doing, but in the seventeen years (1975-1992) between US Mars probes we've forgotten that Mars missions have always been plagued with failure.

My personal favorite, aside from the numerous Soviet missions that blew up on launch, and missions on both sides that mysteriously stopped working midway to Mars (or seconds after landing) is Cosmos 419, launched in 1971, which failed because the timer to start the Earth-deorbit burn shortly after launch was supposed to be set for 1.5 hours but was mistakenly set for 1.5 years.

Suddenly a metric mismatch doesn't seem as bad...

If I had time, I'd love to put together a list of small errors with big consequences, like the hyphen that caused a Venus probe to self-destruct on launch. Wacky stuff...

Comments?

An interesting observation from Slashdot: With the launch of one astronaut and two cosmonauts to be the first crew on the new Space Station, it's entirely possible that yesterday was the last time that every member of the human race will be on Planet Earth.

Current schedules plan for continuous occupation of the space station for the next 10 years, and by that time, it's entirely possible, even probable, that the space station will continue to be used, or something will take its place. Eventually there will be manned missions to Mars and other destinations (Moon base in 50 years?).

Anyhow, though space exploration has slowed dramatically since the 60's, today it is steady, with regular, small steps forward (think the turtle, not the hare). In short, there may never again be another day without someone in space.

Centuries from now, when colonies exist on other planets, in space, or even other systems, mankind may mark yesterday, October 31st, 2000, as the day mankind truly left the cradle for good.

Spooky, but cool.

Comments?