The keys and navpad are unfit for grown-up human use. The phone’s clunky headphone connector has all the charm of a tumor. The awkward flip panel makes for clumsy, fumbling answers.
Once again proving that form should always follow function (excepting Apple, usually).
Before the iPhone (and before that horrid little Blackberry Pearl I used for all of 6 months) I’d used three different Sony Ericsson candybar phones, and loved every one of them. It’s sort of sad to see them missing the mark these days.
I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me.
Hitchens took two brave dunks into the tank before quickly succumbing to sheer panic.
As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
The entire article is thoughtful and not at all a typical vitriolic Hitchens piece, and is worth reading in its entirety.
One of my favorite supergeniuses, Brian Cox, has a great piece today at The Guardian about the final months before the LHC activation. Money quote:
Without exploration there is no progress, and without progress our civilisation decays. It takes machines like the LHC to journey to the edge of our understanding because, quite simply, the easy stuff has all been done.
It’s a strange time in a man’s life when his contemporary heroes and objects of inspiration and admiration begin to die out en masse. Reflection is not my strong suit.
I have half a mind to call Bill Moyers and James Burke just to say, “Hey, are you guys feeling alright today? Take care of yourselves, please. I can’t afford to lose another one of you just yet.”
I was digging through a box of stuff from my youth the other day1, and among some bits of junk, lo and behold, I found the first issue of Moon Knight. Wow.
I found it to be in surprisingly good shape. I say surprisingly because I had tons of comics when I was a kid2, but I wasn’t one of the kids who kept their issues in nice mylar sleeves. No, I read them and folded them and stuffed them in my bag when I went to grandma’s and dog-eared the pages and lent them to friends and kept them in untidy stacks in my drawers and closet. The box or two of comics that still survive from that time are yellowed and worn and torn. ”Heresy!” I hear the comic snobs cry. And don’t even get me started on what kind of shape my Star Wars toys are in; there’s not a single figure or vehicle still in an original box. I’d scorch and paint X-Wings to make them look battle-worn. Armies of Stormtroopers would be caked with the dirt and detritus of wars fought on some godforsaken swamp planet (i.e. my backyard).
And all things considered, I like rediscovering things that way. They may have been abused, but they were used. They were the fuel of my imagination, and when I come across them again after so many years, they help remind my why I do what I do, and how I became the person I am. I don’t want to see an old comic of mine in a sleeve - I’d much rather see it bent and softened and remember the family camping trip that it accompanied me on. I don’t want old toys in a box on a shelf, untouched - I want to find a carton of defeated plastic Imperial villains, worn and dirty from some epic battle fought with all the action figures of all the kids on my block, out in the big field behind the school.
When my mom moved out of her house a few years ago and moved to Florida, she made me take home a few boxes of old crap from the attic. I don’t know what’s in most of them - just little things that escaped the Great Purge (for some reason during my college years, I threw out tons of stuff from my childhood I wish I had kept). ↩
and when I was an older kid. And a teenager. And, um, an adult.. ↩
The First Law of Twitter (the “Law of Word Proximity”) states that any instance of one of the following words: [ cry, vomit, tears, masturbate, whale, Velveeta, blame, jerk, @hotdogsladies ] that appears in your tweetstream will always occur within 280 characters of an instance of at least one of the other words in that group.
This is but one of the many conflicts that is going to arise between old a new media, whose rules and customs are dictated by differing economic and technological factors.
The AP will probably be slow to learn the lesson, because it will see no immediate impact if people like me won’t link to them any more because we don’t want to be sued. I mean in our world, how crazy is that? Like I’m going to sue Atrios for linking to me? That’s just insane.
[snip]
If I were running a major metropolitan daily, and I saw my advertising revenues shrinking and my newsroom personnel diminishing as the dead tree business died, and I knew how important it was to generate online traffic to keep the doors open, I’d be thinking … Reuters. McClatchy. Bloomberg. Anything but AP.
What goes largely unspoken is that for the major media, as a principle, Fair Use has been dead since roughly the time the DMCA was passed.
The AP has been demanding the removal of AP quotes from websites, most less than 100 words, and some as few as 39 words. ↩
