Les Misérables et le photographie

A fascinating photo found in today's Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan. He calls it the "The First Human Ever Photographed" and points out "he is getting his shoes cleaned in Paris - sitting still for ten minutes while the Daguerreotype captured him."

Except that there are TWO humans in this photo. The middle class gentleman who counts as the 'first human' and the little boy shining his shoes who evidently doesn't. The year was 1838.

Eh bien, plus ça change ....

though a Paris street corner is still a good spot to kill ten minutes

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Computer tech screws up again

No surprise there. The venue though is a surprise. It seems that the picture used as a backdrop to McCain's speech was of the Walter Reed Middle School of North Hollywood CA (that would be the same Hollywood then where all the elite celebrities hang out). Why would they use a shot of an unknown middle school in California, especially one that looks like it might be one of McCain's mansions?

Josh Marshall is on the case.

I can hear it now: "tell that geek kid with the computers to find us a picture of Walter Reed Hospital ASAP. " Only they left out the "hospital" part. To err is human - it takes a computer to really @#4o things up.

Big Brother OWNS you!

Or at least your content. It isn't always the government you need to watch out for in this Internet day and age. Just check out this clause in Adobe's terms of use document for their new Photoshop Express:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed. [emphasis added-apparently]

Once users started to complain Adobe admitted that yes, on second thought, that is a bit extreme. They promise new, revised, improved, and slightly less frightening terms shortly.

Blogger - VERY annoying

Blogger for some reason has not been letting me into my account. I e-mailed for help, and got an e-mail telling me to click on a link to reset my password. The page at that link told me to follow the instructions on the e-mail I had been sent.

Which I had just done.

Finally resorted to my usual in response to recalcitrant technology. I began pounding every button available muttering curses under my breath and damning Blogger and Google forever and ever.

And it worked. At least, once I quit using IE and went to Firefox. Found another e-mail, or rather six e-mails from blogger, one of which had the magic instructions.

Sometimes I think the Scientific Revolution was a bad idea.


now spellcheck won't work.

Hydrongen cars - here NOW!

Although they are a little small.

But, if they can build a toy hydrogen fuel cell car now, what will they be able to do in ten years?

Probably nothing if it is left up to American car companies. But ... I could be wrong.


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Opus, Technology and the Generation Gap

Last might I went with Murty and Clovis to see "Cloverfield." Clovis is 19 and thought the movie was great - in fact, this was the second time he'd seen it. Murty and I thought it was ... "OK." But even before the movie started I had developed severe qualms about the younger generation from watching all the previews of coming attractions. All vapid, soulless looking fluff designed for and about a generation of 20 somethings raised on instant messaging and screaming laptops. A generation that has truly been 'wired' in the worst possible sense of the word, with cell phones grafted onto their ears.

My latest example of the haplessness of these folks when it comes to anything I can recognize as learning, a literate culture, and a connection with that great mass of humanity that is dead, is my current world civ class. They have 15 weeks to read three books, each selected for being short, and easy to read (I thought). And they complain because I expect too much from them, none of their other classes actually expect them to read, like, books. Maybe I'll just show them videos.

This morning, while basking in the schadenfreude of yesterday's primary in South Carolina, I was brought up short by this little episode of my favorite philosopher and commentator of 21st century society, Opus.

Makes me feel like a grumpy old penguin in need of a good hug.

My new weird little machine, the NEO

It's not really a laptop and its not really a typewriter (remember those?). What is it good for? I have just read two articles that help explain my thinking after the fact - at the time my thinking was more intuitive than rational.

Rob Pegoraro in the technology section of the Washington Post makes the point that "Laptop design has advanced a great deal over the past decade, but a few things still generally hold true: Batteries won't last through a cross-country flight, and affordable laptops weigh too much." This is certainly true - and it's the "affordable" part that hurts the most.

Jon Miller in an odd little blog I found this morning called Gemba Panta Rei makes a slightly different point.

As much as I love the bells and whistles of modern day word processing, there are built-in interruptions and flow-stoppers on my laptop that make me wonder if we wouldn’t be better off going back to our manual typewriters, telephones, and other examples of pre-21st century office productivity tools.

In other words, the laptop has so much stuff crammed into it that it is a distraction all by itself. While you are typing, you can also check your e-mail, play solitaire, cruise the web, get instant messages, and watch a cartoon on You Tube. He concludes

Economist use statistics to tell us that information technology has vastly improved productivity. Perhaps. There are times like this week when I wonder if a single-function machine wouldn’t serve me better.

My solution to this was to buy a Neo by Alpha Smart. This is what it looks like. It only does one thing - type. It has a full featured word processor in its little brain and can produce text files that are then transferred to your computer in whatever application you wish.

I've just gotten it and will keep you posted on how useful it is, but it sure solves the problems listed above. It is cheap (not even $225). It is as light and as small as a notebook. I mean a real notebook, not a computer. It is rugged, since it was originally designed for children. Also very simple to use. And you won't be distracted by anything else emanating from your own machine. It doesn't do anything except produce text. And perhaps best of all, its three AA batteries will keep it going for about 700 hours.

It will be perfect for on the bus, in a bar or coffee shop, and above all, in a library doing research. I can type up my notes, take the little machine home and dump the files into my WordPerfect files on my computer.

The High Tech book reader

High tech and high priced. Probably too high priced but still interesting as a possible way to the future. Mike Musgrove reviews the new Sony Reader for the Washington Post. Here's the core of what he says:

Click a button with your left thumb to hop to the next page on the device's screen, which is about the size of the average paperback. After some extensive ocean-side research, I can report that it does a fine job of withstanding sand, suntan lotion and light rain. The battery lasts longer than you'd think; I made it through a Stephen King thriller and the bestseller "Freakonomics" with hardly a dent on the meter.

Getting books onto the Reader works pretty much the way an iPod works for music. Connect the device to your computer, fire up Sony's online bookstore and download away. Instead of carrying just one book on the plane you can now lug about 80, stashed in the Reader's memory.

Sounds great until you realize that you have to buy the books from Sony which has only 15,000 titles (a typical Barnes and Noble stocks ca 200,000), you can't read newspapers or magazines on it, you don't have the satisfaction of watching your books accumulate (Ian?), and it costs $300.

Musgrove also seems to think that it is also a negative point that you can't lend your books to a friend, but considering how many books I've lost over the years that might be a plus.

At any rate I am interested in such devices, especially for traveling. I can never pack all the books I want. But then, I suspect the books I want won't be found on Sony's play list either. Still, the technology is intriguing. Anybody else have any thoughts about this?

An addendum to transportation in San Fran

I was pretty well convinced that the Segway Scooters were simply toys - great for a tour while on vacation but not for much else. Then on our way through downtown San Francisco to get to the airport for our flight home, I saw a distinguished man with gray hair and beard (looked a bit like me) wearing a business suit calmly riding his Segway up the street in front of us.

Clemen's comedy break

Check this site for a take off on the iPhone ad campaign and see if you think it's as funny as I do.

Predictions and hindsight: 1900s view on the year 2000

One of the great fascinations of Science Fiction is its mandate to explore the future. This is also true of this 1900 prediction for the year 2000 published in Ladies Home Journal in 1900. When you go back that far to examine predictions the fascination runs both ways: examining the accuracy of the predictions and looking back at the expectations of our ancestors.

In 1900 my grandfather was about 16 years old and, like most people, got around by walking, animal power, or steam driven locomotive, though automobiles were just then becoming a regular sight. The horrors of World War I were still unimaginable. Electric lights were a new and exciting prospect as were electric driven trolleys. It would be a few years yet before my grandfather and his brothers would build the first house in Loudoun County Virginia with indoor plumbing.

So how did the experts in Ladies Home Journal do? Here's one that is pretty much on the money:

The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only [if only this last point were true!]

Some are a little less prescient, to our loss:

There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Some are just a little odd:

There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second [notice how they don't consider the language spoken by the greatest number, Chinese, to be worth mentioning].

Some are highly accurate, though the terminology sounds strange to us:

Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of the bath. Central plants will supply this cool air and heat to city houses in the same way as now our gas or electricity is furnished. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. Homes will have no chimneys, because no smoke will be created within their walls.

Read the rest - it's great fun. Also notice one interesting thing. This was long before Women's Lib, or any of the more modern ideas of a woman's role outside the home. Yet these predictions are serious and intelligent and the editors of Ladies' Home Journal expected their readers to appreciate this piece.